An Immodest Proposal

(with apologies to Dean Swift.)

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The power to tax may well be the power to destroy, but the power to tax unfairly is the power to do worse--it's the power to enslave. With the increasing concentration of the majority of the country's wealth into fewer and fewer hands (2% of the population of this country now holds over 50% of its total wealth, and is moving to amass ever more), America is being turned into a fundamentally unfair economic oligarchy, not the government "of the people, by the people, and for the people" which the Founders envisioned.

Yet we seem paralyzed to do anything about it. Republicans want to keep cutting taxes for the wealthiest Americans, claiming that that's what will spur job creation and get the economy moving again, and that spending cuts will balance the budged. Democrats say that continuing to cut vital social programs will place the majority of the burden of government costs on the backs of those who can afford it the least, and that if we're going to cut spending, we must cut in areas like huge contracts to defense contractors, not areas like Head Start.

It is axiomatic that spending cuts alone will not balance the budget. The cuts the GOP wants merely nibble around the edges and are not big enough monetarily to dent the burgeoning interest obligations we have on the debt we've already incurred. Those cuts will, however, cause a great deal of misery for a great number of Americans, who are not looking for a handout, but for a hand, given that while income for the richest 2% of Americans has increased at least 20-fold in the past 15 years or so, income for the other 98% of us has remained stagnant (or even declined, in real terms, once inflation has been adjusted for) for the past 40 years.

Revenues must be considered. Revenues must be increased. But the current US tax code is a virtually impossible labyrinth of exemptions here and deductions there--in short, social engineering run amok. We seem to be at a stand-off. We've been at a stand-off for decades now, and positions are only hardening. People seem less and less willing to give a little to get a little. I include myself in that group, because, frankly, I do believe that "if you give a mouse a cookie, he'll want a glass of milk."

I honor the notion of compromise. I do believe it is the genius of our system and that it is what has made America work for as long as it has. But the problem with compromise is that everyone has to play with the same understanding. If you define "compromise" as "getting 100% of my own way," well, that's not compromise. And alas for us, President Obama has been "compromising" with a GOP which does define "compromise" as "my way or the highway." Yet even he has his limits, and he has shown rather more backbone of late. The GOP, of course, calls that partisanship. Face it: it is impossible to reason with anyone who thinks they should have things 100% of their own way and the rest of us can go hang.

Yet if we don't want the country to collapse into anarchy, we urgently need to move the discussion into productive channels instead of continuing to hash and rehash and re-rehash the same stale, non-productive rhetoric. Hence the following immodest proposal:

Median annual income in this country is now $35,000 per person. Under the new system I propose, that first $35,000 will be entirely exempt from taxes. Every penny above that will be subject to tax at the rate of 1% [or 1/2% even--whatever will increase net revenue without being so high as to be seen by any rational observer as objectionable. Look: we have to have some taxes, just as we have to have some government. Justice Holmes was right. Taxes ARE the price we pay for civilization--Ed.]. No exemptions. No deductions. No subsidies. No exceptions. Corporations would pay the same. They were so insistent on being treated as "people" for purposes of campaign financing, and a bare-bones majority of the US Supreme Court was so accommodating to them in its Citizens United decision, that they have no valid grounds on which to complain. Fifteen to 20 percent of all such revenues will be set aside to fund Social Security and Medicare and will be untouchable by anybody in government for any other reason.

The net result will ripple throughout the government. Without all the subsidy programs, the Dept. of Agriculture can shrink, thus greatly reducing its long-term operating costs. The Internal Revenue Service can shrink, too, as it will no longer need such an extensive enforcement arm as it now maintains. Even the Social Security Administration can reduce its size, as it will no longer need so many people to work in conjunction with the IRS to get and process its revenues in the first place. Individuals and corporations both would still have more than enough income to go about their daily "lives."

There is no downside to this proposal. The only reason for opposition would be greed, plain and simple. But it has the proverbial snowball's chance of getting enacted. For every exemption, deduction, subsidy, or perk in the present system [except for those few still remaining for real, individual people of modest means--Ed.], there's an army of lobbyists in Congress ready and rich enough to defend it to eternity. That's sad, and more than a bit frightening. Why are people so willing to be against their own government but totally pro-big corporate power? With government, at least in our system, you have recourse if you are done wrong. But with a corporation, if it does you wrong, you are essentially SOL . . . unless you have access to a governmental entity with enough teeth to protect you. I surmise that greed rules here, too. Everyone seems to think he's going to become the owner bee and not be a worker bee. Ain't gonna happen, folks. The 2% of the people in this country who hold more than 50% of the total wealth of this country will make sure of that--but they'll dangle the hope of its happening in front of you until you are mesmerized by it and stop paying attention to what they're really up to, which is amassing ever more money and power unto themselves and taking it all away from you.

I am inspired to this day by John F. Kennedy's call to "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country." THAT is what America is, and should be, about. And by my "country," I mean my fellow citizens. And if that means "Social Security," great! I'm all for helping the vast majority of us, the 98% of us who wield increasing less power and influence as real money is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. I'm not alone, either. Tom Toles had an editorial cartoon in Friday's Washington Post wherein a 6-lane interstate, under a highway sign saying "what you can do for your country" was totally devoid of cars--while a two-lane exit ramp, labelled "ask not," was jammed to a standstill with cars overfilling both lanes. I'm not the only one who "gets it," as it were. But we seem to be in an infinitesimal minority. Nonetheless, we have to keep trying. For unless we can change the terms of the debate and start offering new solutions, workable solutions--unless everyone is willing, for the sake of the country, to give a little--we are too soon going to be pledging allegiance to the Corporate States of America. And that will mean the end of the American Dream.

Never Teach A Pig To Sing. It Wastes Your Time And Annoys The Pig.

-----Mark Twain

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I have been reminded repeatedly of Mr. Twain's great wisdom of late. I've been perusing the posts of a group of people who have banded together on Facebook, allegedly to study the Federalist Papers and other writings by the Founding Fathers. I say "allegedly" because after reading these posts for several months, I have no choice but to come to the conclusion that their real purpose is to cherry-pick quotes, take them out of context (or otherwise misinterpret them), and to bludgeon them into unrecognizable form so that they can justify their own prejudices instead of really learning anything about America's history.

Example the first. While I do not have the exact quote in front of me, one posting from Alexander Hamilton unequivocally stated that the system will work only when everyone realizes that if they are willing to give up a little in some areas, they can get a lot in others. In other words, that compromise is the heart and soul of the system. Yet people posting to this Facebook site deny that that's what Hamilton meant, because for them, "compromise" is a dirty word. This, even though they could not explain to me what Hamilton's words meant if they did not mean that the system was set up to function when everyone involved worked to compromise, or find solutions everyone could live with, even though those solutions may not give anyone 100% of what he wants. They insisted on their "interpretation" in utter contradiction to Hamilton's words, which were plain on their face. And then they denied that that's what they were doing. But they never could or did offer any explanations for their stand--and that's a textbook illustration of prejudice.

Example he second. While they claim that the Founders didn't believe in compromise, they have no explanation for the existence, let alone the significance, of things such as the 3/5ths Clause in the Constitution. That's the clause that agrees, for purposes of determining how many Representatives each state could send to Congress, to count each slave as 3/5 of a person--for purposes of representation only. Southern states wanted to count slaves as entire persons, again for purposes of representation only, which would give them disproportionate representation (and thus power) in Congress; non-slave-holding states didn't want slaves to be counted at all, for purposes of representation or otherwise. The 3/5ths Clause was [oh, horrors!--Ed.] A COMPROMISE. Since the document itself got adopted only after including compromises such as this, it is impossible for the Founders to have been against compromise per se. To claim anything else is to deny fact.

Example the third. The most frequent posters to this Facebook page are all quite fond of quoting Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall's admonition that "the power to tax is the power to destroy." They tend to use it to justify not taxing them, at all, for anything. Ever. Marshall may have been correct, but taking that quote by itself is to take it out of context and also to refuse to recognize that while it may be true as a generality, it does not and cannot justify their unwillingness to pay any taxes. If the Founders did not want taxes at all, they'd not have given Congress the power to tax in the first place. Taxes are necessary. Indeed, as Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes noted about a hundred years after Marshall's dictum, "Taxes are the price we pay for civilization."

The people who ignore this are also fond of saying the federal government must be small, limited, and weak, and that that was the Founders' intent. They are forgetting or ignoring the Founders' collective experience under the Articles of Confederation, which was the Founders' first attempt at setting up America's national government. The Founders quickly realized that that government was too weak. It didn't succeed. Thus the impetus for creating the Constitution in the first place. Those same people also do not recognize that the same weaknesses, present in the Confederacy's Constitution, contributed mightily to the Confederacy's having lost the Civil War. Jefferson Davis's government could not compel the individual Confederate states to contribute specific funds to defray the costs of the war, to finance its own operations--in other words, to exist and to be able to defend its existence. Hence, Union victory; hence, "the Second American Revolution," designed to implement what the Founders wanted in the first place but which took a Civil War wherein over 600,000 Americans were killed, to realize.

Also note that the Founders stated the goal of creating a "more perfect Union," which phrase suggests two things: (1) perfection had not been obtained yet; (2) maybe 100% perfection would not be obtainable, but the point was, and is, to keep moving toward that "more perfect" Union. The operative idea being "movement." The Founders plainly did not want some static, stultified, one-size-fits-all-forever structure for the federal government. If they had, they'd never have said "more perfect." They'd have said "perfect." If they had, they'd never have created the process by which the Constitution can be amended. Yet the Constitution may be, and often has been, amended. The notion of "original intent" is important, but it does not slam the door against change, for the provisions for amendment, plus the compromises that were enshrined in the original document (such as the 3/5ths Clause), plus the Founders' behavior in tossing the Articles of Confederation once that document proved ineffectual, all add up to the total that life is what happens, that history changes things, and that the Founders were wise enough to build flexibility into the system so that we could cope several hundred years later.

Further, most of the people who claim they want to "restore" the federal government to what the Founders "intended" are not thinking through the consequences of doing that (allowing, hypothetically, that that presumption were correct, which we've already seen is not), which would be largely to destroy America's primacy and security in the world. It would turn the United States into the Balkans. Yet the people who insist that they want to "restore" America are always claiming America is the best, most powerful, most prosperous, most freedom-embracing place on Earth -- "rah-rah, we're Number One!" They always want America to be first in everything they think is good, but they won't recognize the fact that infant mortality rates in this nation are disgraceful, that high school graduation rates in this country are abysmal, that we are falling behind in the creation of new technology and in the education of our future generations . . . I could go on and on, but in short, that we are increasingly ill-prepared to meet the challenges of the future and thus are at grave risk of losing our presently privileged place on this planet. If they get their way, America will become the ultimate example of The Law of Unintended Consequences, because none of them seem to be able to see what the end result of what they say they want actually will be. [A perfect illustration of my contention that we have to stop trying to teach our children WHAT to think and that we must start teaching them HOW to think, but that topic deserves full exploration in its own post.--Ed.]

The saddest thing of all is that the people who advocate these positions do not seem to realize that if they get their way, they're still going to pay. It may be paying into a different pot, and it may even be more than they are paying now. But they'll be paying, because one way or another, the services their taxes now support will still be in demand, will still be needed for the country to function. Consider this: President Reagan's budget "cuts" were not so much cuts as they were redirecting whence the tax money would come. Infrastructure maintenance comes immediately to mind. The federal government used to provide assistance to the states to maintain our roads, bridges, and other transportation channels. Once Reagan's budget eliminated that assistance, the needs didn't magically go away. Their burden shifted to the states, which varied widely in their ability to take on that burden unassisted. The long-term result? Our bridges and roads are now falling apart, and we're going to have to pay far more to fix them than we would have had we just kept maintaining them with small but regular infusions of federal assistance in the first place. Yet instead of recognizing this and implementing a simple, straightforward plan to do that fixing, we're all pointing fingers and laying blame . . . and the repairs and upgrades we desperately need are not getting done. Maybe the Second Law of Thermodynamics really does apply to human behavior and governmental systems as much as it does to gaseous bodies [you may thank me for that straight line as soon as you use it to make some editorial comment about the Congress.--Ed.]

Unfortunately, recognizing all this does not solve the larger problem. If you consider what many Tea Partiers say about ending government hand-outs to Wall St. banks and protecting Medicare, you'd think those people would be making common cause with Democrats, not Republicans. But the GOP has managed to tie conservatism on social issues so tightly to its financial agenda that there's a knee-jerk reaction in the Tea Party: Democrats = liberalism, liberalism = bad. They are so locked into this way of thinking that they do not see the real facts, which contradict such presumptions. And as long as we're locked into that filtration of facts, we are living in a world much more like George Orwell's 1984 than in the America the Founding Fathers envisioned.

Egypt and the Lessons of History

The resignation on Friday of Egypt's President Hosni Mubarek confirms at least three of the great lessons of history--and human behavior. Lesson the first: the forces of reaction are often at their most virulent and loudest insistence immediately before they collapse in the face of true popular sentiment. Less than a day before Mubarek officially resigned, he said he wasn't going to go--at least, not before the scheduled elections in September.

This leads directly to point the second: people in the know should keep their mouths shut. CIA Director Leon Panetta told a Congressional committee on Thursday that Mubarek would be leaving on Thursday night. In his speech Thursday night, as has been noted, Mubarek said he was not going. I suspect Mubarek's original plan was to announce his resignation on Thursday night, but once the word got out about Panetta's testimony, Mubarek decided he did not want to leave with even a whiff of a hint that he was going at the behest of the United States. I'm willing to bet (and I do not gamble) that Mubarek would confirm, if asked, that if Panetta had kept his mouth shut, Mubarek would in fact have announced his resignation on Thursday night, instead of denying it Thursday and waiting until Friday to make it. The man held a lot of power for a long time; he has his pride. I do not have to agree with him or with his policies to understand why he'd not want to be seen as jumping instantly on the heels of some American governmental official saying "jump."

Point the third: supporting dictators who are friendly to American foreign policy objectives, just because they are friendly to American foreign policy objectives, is NOT a wise idea. That the "Egyptian Revolution" has so far been mostly peaceful is more a matter of luck than design, for we weren't so much supportive of Mubarek as we were of Egypt's peaceful coexistence with Israel. We've been giving Egypt a lot of foreign and military aid and training (as has much of western Europe) in exchange for Egypt's maintaining the peace treaty with Israel--which came in under Anwar Sadat. Mubarek, of course, took power upon Sadat's assassination, and it's lucky for us that he saw the wisdom in Sadat's having signed the peace treaty in the first place.

To say that this change in Egypt is bad for America is to make many unwarranted assumptions, and even to fly in the face of America's long-term and oft-stated foreign policy goal of making real representative democracy the world-wide norm for governments. One of the things the radical right never seems to grasp is that genuine representative democracy is not ONLY for "people who think like we do and who agree with us." The radical right usually expresses itself on this score by telling capital-D Democrats to "love it or leave it" (or whatever the 21st century equivalent of that sentiment is). What the radial right doesn't seem to understand is that true representative democracy is risky--because it means that there's a real chance that people who DON'T think "just like us" can come to power. The beauty of real, American-style representative democracy is that EVERYBODY involved, even those who don't "think just like us" agrees that the system works, and that even when out of power, those who don't "think like us" still participate, that elections are held regularly, and that transitions of power are peaceful . . . and that the pendulum will swing in both directions as long as we all agree that the system works and that we ALL have a vital interest in maintaining the system. After all, "We the People" ARE the government in this system, and if a genuine majority says it wants something, it should have it.

I wish Egypt well. Recent events there and in Tunisia may mark the beginning of something wonderful for the entire world.

Yet Another Modest Proposal

(and with still more apologies to Dean Jonathan Swift)

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Mr. Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, D.C. 20500

Dear President Obama,

You are correct in asserting both that compromise is the heart of our system and that your job as president is to do what's best for all the American people. However, this deal you brokered with Republican leaders in Congress is neither a compromise nor in the best interests of the American people.

It may look like a compromise when people at both ends of the political spectrum in this country are angry about what's been done, but detailed analysis demonstrates that in this case, looks are deceiving. A compromise is typically defined as a "meeting in the middle," but this deal started out so far to the right of center that what in reality is the middle has been moved so far to the left as to seem dangerously radical. Look: the far right is going to be angry at you no matter how much you give, because they are not angry about the substance of the issues--they are angry that YOU, as a black man, are the president. Nothing you can do will change their anger, so you might as well stop trying to appease them. They deny that they are racists or bigots, but if what they say they want about fiscally responsible political leadership is true, they would have voted all the Republicans OUT off office this past November, not voted more of them in. The disconnect between their proclaimed beliefs and their behavior should be telling you something.

Many on the left, however, are angry at you because you are starting to the right of center, which makes an agreement truly embodying the center, by definition, impossible. We all know that progress is slow, that we can't always get what we want, and that real progress in this country typically happens incrementally. Your behavior since you took office has been to start at the true center and move to the right, however, unlike your soaring rhetoric of hope and change promised during your 2008 campaign. By starting where you've been starting in every discussion so far with the GOP, you aren't giving even incremental progress a chance. I know you're in a tough position, and I know you have an eye to history, but as a fellow academician, I also know that your instinct is to expect people to respond to reasonable behavior by behaving reasonably themselves. In politics, however, that doesn't happen.

Your assertion that you got the GOP to concede several benefits to ordinary Americans that the GOP wouldn't otherwise approve may be true, but is meaningless. A "compromise" that gives 13 months of bare-bones sustenance to the millions of Americans who are the long-term unemployed while bestowing additional billions on the already ultra-rich in this country for 24 months (if not longer--it seems clear that in 2012 we're going to have deja vu all over again about what's happened during the past few months)--billions that will be added to the entire nation's fiscal deficit--is emphatically NOT in the best interests of the American people as a whole. Several analyses of the other terms of this "compromise" say that it will actually increase the burdens on the already-strained middle class instead of helping them. And adding nearly a trillion dollars to the long-term deficit by extending the tax cuts to the ultra-rich does not help the 98% of the American people who have seen their true earning power and purchasing power stagnate (if not downright erode) over the past 40 years.

The ultra-rich seem to have forgotten (if they ever knew) that people without secure, well-paying jobs do not spend money, and since spending money is what drives our overall economic growth, you'd do better by giving no more than a pittance (at the most) to the ultra-rich and bestowing the bulk of your fiscal largesse on us "regular" people. When the economic crisis began, back in 2008, I said that a real economic stimulus plan would devote itself 100% to putting people to work on improving our infrastructure and putting money in our pockets, not to giving money to those who did not need it and who would not spend it. History has borne me out--the rich are even richer than they were when the crisis started, the big ("too big to fail") Wall Street firms are even bigger than they were before 2008, infrastructure improvements are not being done on a big enough or fast enough scale, and the rest of us have become in a real way invisible. Indeed, in 2008, if you simply would have handed a million dollars to every single American, you'd have done more to help the vast majority of us than the stimulus plan as passed ever could, while increasing the long-term deficit only about half as must as the actual stimulus plan did. But the GOP would never have stood for that. (Millionaires and billionaires must be kept a small, elite group. The vast majority of Americans need not apply.) And no, I am not saying by this that you should engage in a short-term, unwinnable political fight. I am calling on you to do in fact what you claim you were doing in the first place, to wit: looking out for the best interests of the American people as a whole.

Listen to and study everything Sen. Bernie Sanders said in his most powerful and fact-laden oratory of December 10th. He is exactly right about it all, but the oligarchic few with most of the money have the power to thwart the will of the real majority of Americans at every turn. You said yourself, correctly, that the vast majority of the American people were aligned with you about not extending tax breaks to the millionaires and billionaires. Yet you still gave in to GOP intransigence and signed off on this "compromise" that gives way more to the ultra-rich 2% than it does to the 98% rest of us. The ultra-rich and their allies were playing a cosmic game of "chicken" with you, Mr. President. You blinked first. There is still time, however, to undo the damage this "compromise" has done.

Before I make my "modest proposal," however, let me tell you a little bit about myself, so that you'll understand the strength of my conviction about my idea. I am a life-long non-smoker who got a lung disease; I now must have, around the clock, 6 liters per minute of supplemental oxygen just to function. At that rate, a portable oxygen tank lasts maybe 2-3 hours, so I am effectively prevented from working outside my home. My sole sources of income for the past several years have been approximately 1/3 of my ex-husband's military retirement pay and Social Security disability payments (note that my 3 highest years of earnings were when I lived outside the U.S. to be with my now ex-husband in connection with his military duties, and so my income from those years does not count toward my benefit, leaving me getting less than half the average disability payment). Because of the austerity measures you've already implemented, this will be the second year in a row that I have not had any COLA at all. However, my cost of living has increased measurably over that period, so in real terms, my income is declining, not staying steady.

Nevertheless, I think you should scuttle this "compromise" you made with the GOP and let ALL the Bush era tax cuts expire at the end of the year. Not only will that fulfill the promises that were made at the time those tax cuts were first enacted, it will restore some modicum of fiscal responsibility to the ultra-rich in this country. The Reagan/Clinton era tax rates (which are the ones that will return once the Bush era cuts expire) did not demand from them a true "fair share" of the burdens all Americans bear for their country. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes himself noted that "taxes are the price we pay for civilization." Thus, letting the Bush era cuts expire would be better than extending them for another 2 years (or more). And if letting the tax cuts for the middle class expire at the same time is the price we must pay, so be it. The cuts never made a huge difference to most of us, anyway, so ending them isn't going to make a noticeable difference in the other direction, either. The only thing that this "compromise" has done is to let us stall getting our fiscal house in order--again. Letting all the cuts expire in 20 days will be the wake-up call we need to start dealing with our real problems now, instead of sniping at each other while the problem gets bigger and bigger and bigger.

Extending unemployment benefits can be brought up as a stand-alone bill. House Speaker-elect John Boehner is on the record as having said--tellingly, before the deal you brokered with the GOP--that not even the GOP would fail to extend unemployment benefits at Christmastime. What would really do this nation good is to scuttle the "compromise," force a vote before the end of the lame-duck session on extending unemployment benefits alone, and talking to the American people about what the true costs to all of us will be of continuing to give in to the GOP's notion of "fiscal responsibility." If you don't, Dean Swift's "modest proposal" about solving the Irish problem may become applicable here.

Sincerely,

A Very Concerned Citizen

What's Wrong With This Picture?

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Let me get this straight. Americans are very unhappy with the state of the economy, the level of federal debt, and fiscal irresponsibility in general. The GOP has spent much of the past two years doing 3 things: (1) blocking the Obama administration's attempts to address these issues: (2) diluting to virtual ineffectiveness that which it could not block; (3) lying about the results when the dilutions didn't work and administration initiatives actually did a lot of good. Yet voters yesterday overwhelmingly gave the reins back to the GOP, largely on the grounds that "the country was moving in the wrong direction." Huh?!?!

I take no comfort in the fact that most of the craziest of the crazies (Carly Fiorina, Meg Whitman, Sharon Angle, Christine O'Donnell, Carl Palladino, and Joe Miller--though that last is not yet official) went down to sound defeats. A full third of the voters yesterday still voted for those textbook examples of nuttiness.

And the official pronouncements of those GOP members poised to take over say with one voice that their first goal is to repeal the health care bill, the one they derisively have named "Obamacare." A bill which, admittedly, most people hate when asked about it as a whole, but which, when asked about it feature by feature, an overwhelming majority of people like.

The financial bailouts (which people say they hated and also cite as a reason for the way they voted yesterday) happened under President George W. Bush, REPUBLICAN, but voters yesterday also cited bailouts as one of the reasons they voted for the GOP to retake control of the US House of Representatives. Said voters also hated the alleged governmental take-overs of the US auto industry, but Ford didn't participate, and both GM and Chrysler have roared back to health, and the interest the government bought in those companies is already being sold, the companies having paid off their debts--ahead of schedule.

The level of federal debt owes at least a trillion dollars of its total to President Bush's (and a GOP-controlled Congress's) war spending, which the GOP kept off the books. It pre-existed the Obama administration, but because President Obama kept one of his promises by putting that debt back on the books--where it belonged in the first place--Obama is being blamed for excessive spending.

We are in the worst economic crisis we've seen since the days of the Great Depression, yet the stimulus package, as watered down and weak as the GOP could make it, has kept things from being much, much worse . . . and yet the perception is that the stimulus "failed." Or so the GOP keeps saying. If a lie is repeated long enough, it seems no longer to be a lie, I guess. So I say again, "Huh?!?!"

Wherever H.L. Mencken is, he's laughing his head off. I'm not laughing, however. I'm crying. We've just given the car keys back to the idiots who drove us into the ditch in the first place. The late 19th century has been dubbed "The Gilded Age." I suspect our current time may go down in history as "The Stupid Age."

What This Country Needs Is A Good Civics 101 Course

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While certain aspects of the right-wing political yowling in this country have made perfect sense to me, other aspects didn't--until I realized something, that is. What I realized is that social studies, or civics [as opposed to straight "history"--Ed.] education seems to have disappeared from our educational system.

When the Tea Partiers, for example, yammer about their rights and freedoms being taken away by an oppressive government, and when idiots like Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich pontificate about the current administration being "the most radical" secular, socialist government in US history, and people take them seriously, what other conclusion can be drawn?

The Tea Partiers have taken the name for their movement in honor of the Boston Tea Party, which I hope even people with virtually no knowledge of American history recognize was a protest against a British imperial tax on tea imposed upon its then-colonies in North America. Fair enough. Empires, almost by definition, are despotic and largely opposed to the will of their subjects. But the Tea Partiers in fact are more like the governments in southern states before and during the US Civil War

The distinction the Tea Partiers have failed to recognize or even acknowledge is that the British government imposed its taxes on its American colonies without the colonials [more precisely, the colonials' representatives--Ed.] being able to vote on the imposition of those taxes in Parliament. The secessionists, on the other hand, were (as they well knew) a minority population in the country as a whole. They HAD representation in the national government. They HAD legal recourse and access to get their opinions known and their voices heard. They HAD a place within that very government they railed against. They just didn't like being on the losing end of the votes.

I remember social studies in junior high and high school. One of its most fundamental teachings was that when people come together to form a government and participate in an attempt to form "a more perfect Union," their obligation under that social contract or social compact is that everyone agrees to accept, peacefully, the outcomes of the votes that go against them, and that their recourse is to work within the system to win enough votes to change the outcome in the future--and unless and until they regain that majority, that they abide by the results they do not like, and peacefully comply with the law. WE all ARE the government. It is not some alien thing being imposed upon us by some distant, evil, nefarious "them" which wants to destroy us and take away "our freedom."

This teaching seems largely to have been lost on members of the Tea Parties and the GOP toadies who further incite them. This teaching is so basic, so fundamental to what being a responsible American citizen is all about, that its failing to have taken hold in the minds and hearts of the Tea Partiers mystifies me. I conclude, therefore, that this teaching is no longer offered in our school systems, and I for one mourn its passing. In the long run, it means the end of what the American dream really constitutes.

And I know that rhetoric often gets heated in the course of the discussion. But I'm not talking about heated rhetoric. I'm talking about people threatening to "take back" what they feel has been "taken away" from them by force of arms or even revolution. I'd have said "or secession," given the proclivity of numbskulls like Texas Governor Rick Perry to resort to that language, but anyone who knows the outcome of the US Civil War should know that secession as an idea is dead. The Confederacy lost. Get over it, already.

What scares me at this point is the increasingly violent stridency with which these allegedly disenfranchised people are pushing their agenda. America, it seems, is for everyone--only so long as everyone is just exactly like them [which is the unstated but essential linchpin of their equation--Ed.]. And they are willing to say they'll shoot people who disagree. Watch very carefully all the pro-gun, pro-Tea Party rallies that have been scheduled to take place near Washington, D.C., on April 19th. The tone of our political discourse is changing in some fundamental--and I use that term deliberately--way. Threats of violence should not be a part of everyday politics, but of late, such threats have become all too common. Two quick examples: I remember a sign at one of the Tea Party rallies. It said "We left our guns at home. This time." Second, a recent political cartoon in the Washington Post may be about to come more literally true than anyone with even half a brain should want. The cartoon depicts the exterior of the US Supreme Court building, with bullets whizzing everywhere all around it, and a speech balloon coming from inside the building [probably from Justice Scalia--Ed.] saying in a self-satisfied tone, "Ah, a robust Second Amendment in action!"

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Cough, Choke, Wheeze, HACK!

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The US Representative for the 2nd District of Nebraska, Lee Terry (R), announced last week that he's running for re-election--again. This will be his seventh campaign, so he's held the seat for 12 years and wants to keep it for at least two more. I make special note of the length of time he's been in Congress for two reasons:

(1) When he ran the first time, and in his first two (or so) re-election bids, he flat-out promised that he would "serve" no longer than he'd be able to under a term-limits law, which he said at the time was a maximum of three or four terms at the most. He said he'd not keep running even if no term-limits law were ever actually passed. No term-limits law ever was passed . . . but he's still there. You do the math.

(2) The article in the Omaha World-Herald announcing the opening of Terry's most recent re-election bid headlined the puff piece by saying Terry was going to continue to work to accomplish "core issues." Well, if he hasn't gotten anything accomplished toward implementing his core issues in the last 12 years, why in the world should he be given another two?

My problem with him is that he's a total party hack. He spouts the GOP line chapter and verse, and just ignores facts that contradict the lies he's spreading. I can live with "my" Representative in the House being of a different political party--hell, I have lived with it, for far too long, frankly. But whomever "my" Representative is, I wish fervently that he or she would have a brain and USE it instead of being a corporate ventriloquist's dummy.

As The Stomach Churns

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I have had a lot to say about a lot of subjects, but the real world has kept me from being able to take the time to say it . . . at least, so far this year. But I do have to make a few quick observations about subjects I'd normally like to cover in depth.

(1) I don't know why everyone is reporting with such sturm und drang about how terrible it is that the Democratic Party has lost its "60-vote, filibuster-proof" majority in the US Senate. If the current debacle surrounding the proposed health care legislation has shown us anything, it has shown us that while the Democrats may have had 60 votes in name, they NEVER had them in actual fact. So get over it, already! A change that makes no difference is really no change at all.

(2) Let's hope the Democrats learn the correct lesson from this, however, and start acting like Democrats again, instead of trying to be the GOP-lite. The minority Republicans who have been crowing that the results of the Massachusetts special election Tuesday show that the country wants the Democrats to practice "more inclusive" politics are full of W%R^&%^**&&^$%. The real Democrats, the true progressives in the party, according to all the post-election polls I've seen, largely stayed home. They want Democrats to be Democrats, not start from the center and move right to try to accommodate a minority that thinks it's still the majority.

(3) Nonetheless, I am not surprised by Martha Coakley's loss in that Massachusetts special election to fill the seat formerly occupied by the late US Senator Ted Kennedy. Rule Number One in politics is: NEVER take anything for granted. The Democrats, at both state and national levels, forgot that. Senator-elect Scott Brown did not. While I find him and his views on the issues of the day odious [let's just say that Keith Olbermann is right and leave it at that.--Ed.], I have to give Brown credit for his political savvy. So far.

(4) My disappointment in former US Senator (and erstwhile Vice Presidential nominee and Presidential candidate) John Edwards is now at 100%. I heard on the news this morning that he finally 'fessed up to being the father of the child that his videographer had in 2008. Way too late and several billion dollars too short, sir. You had an eloquent, effective, and persuasive voice on the twin issues of health care reform and poverty in this nation, and you squandered all of it for the sake of your ego and what you couldn't keep in your own pants. Now that voice has been silenced, and the good you could have done, especially in the wake of Ted Kennedy's death, is squelched. Not to mention the fact that your newly-acknowledged daughter is going to have to grow up knowing her own father denied her for the first two years of her life. Way to go, Daddy-o, she said, sarcasm spewing from her lips.

(5) I'm all for Rush Limbaugh continuing to rant his rabies-froth-tinged rants against all relief efforts to Haiti and against the Haitian people. Maybe he's finally stepped over a line even the tea-baggers and ditto-heads won't cross, and made his racism and selfishness and inhumanity so blatant that even those idiots will no longer follow him. So if his ravings on this subject finally break his apparent stranglehold on the GOP, all to the good. Anything that will contribute to a return to the politics of "we can agree to disagree, but we are going to work together to move the country forward" is a wonderful thing. This petulant, childish, and immature "if I can't have it 100% my own way, I'm picking up my ball and going home" approach to the nation's business must stop, before we find America relegated to irrelevance--or worse--by the rest of the world.

Is This What Obama Is Really Up To?

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I have struggled, mightily (for the past several weeks especially), to figure out why the heck President Obama is being so passive about his stated goal of passing real health care reform to fulfill a promise he made to the late Sen. Ted Kennedy.

Even more, I've tried to figure out why the heck the president has backpedalled so much on all the other major promises we thought he made during last year's election campaign. The Justice Department is going to investigate not the people who violated our Constitution and laws by authorizing the use of torture and other crimes--it's going to investigate ONLY those who violated even the illegally-relaxed standards the Bush Administration put in place to begin with.

Even though he got the total dollar amount he said he wanted in the economic stimulus bill, Obama allowed 40% of that total to be calculated by tax cuts--cuts that are much more responsible for the truly horrific deficit numbers we're facing than would be anything engendered by passing health care reform which includes the public option.

Obama said he was going to get us out of Iraq and close the Guantanamo Bay detention facilities by the end of this year--and he's trying, but the process has been slower and less comprehensive than expected. He said he was going to undo the previous administration's excessive claims of executive power, but his administration has been, to date, just as secretive and arrogant as his predecessor's in terms of not releasing White House visitors' lists, using executive signing statements, and arguing FOR Bush administration positions in legal suits brought against the government for violations of the Constitution and laws of this land.

The president is maintaining his stand that the Afghanistan war is the necessary one, which he will prosecute to a successful conclusion . . . even though many experts are now saying that our initial reasons for that war [getting Osama bin Laden and Al Qaida, for example--Ed.], while correct at the time, have been rendered moot by events, and that maybe it's time to pull out . . . instead of doing an Afghan version of the Iraq War surge, which seems to be his current intention.

None of it has made sense to me, especially given my impression that President Obama has a tremendous grasp of politics as "the art of the possible." In every instance I've cited, he's settling for much less than what's possible. He has tried to hang this on the desire to change the way things work in Washington, to promote real bipartisanship. The problem with that notion, however, is that the other side has to be willing to play--and so far, the GOP has not only been not willing to play, it's decided that naked political advantage is more important than what's really in the best interests of the country, which is paralyzing the process even more than it had been before Obama was inaugurated.

But I think I finally figured it out. Now that Ted Kennedy has been laid to rest along side his brothers Bobby and John, Obama's policy backpedalling and missteps have got all three of them rolling over in their graves--at so many RPMs that all Obama has to do is hook up 3 sets of jumper cables from Arlington National Cemetery to the nation's power grid, and: Lo! Behold! Our nation's energy crisis has been solved . . . for free!

I usually agree that any bill or other governmental action that disappoints the extremists on both ends will, as a rule, succeed. By definition, it has found the middle ground, that vast, blessed area wherein most of us live. However, the preceding 8 years tilted things so far to the far right that just getting back to the center is going to keep things tilted too far over to the right. [You want proof? GOP legislators are trying to undo Reagan-era laws and regulations because even they are "too restrictive"--Ed.]

Count me among the incredibly disappointed in the behavior of the Obama administration to date. I still think it's a far sight better than anything the GOP has to offer, but that, too, will be rendered moot if the GOP manages to prove that outright lies, when shouted often and loud enough, still control the terms of the debate. It's time for this administration to start fighting fire with fire. Obama so far has been acting like most of us are educated and intelligent and will do the right thing . . . but the ones with their hands on the real money in this country, the ones who don't want to give up even one penny for the greater good, have discovered that they can exploit the fears and hatreds of just enough of us to stymie the rest of us.

Unless, of course, the president starts showing some real leadership. Bill Maher was right--as much as he hates Dubya's policies, he admires Dubya's backbone and single-minded purpose in sticking with his plans no matter what anyone else said. Obama needs to show some more of that to be the leader those of us who voted for him hoped for and expected that he would be.

Gross. Simply Gross.

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South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, who was missing for about 5 days, finally reappeared yesterday and admitted he was in Argentina, seeing the woman with whom he has been having an affair. His wife was not at his side as he held his confessional press conference. Indeed, it turns out that she had known about the affair and had asked him two weeks ago to move out of their home.

Bad enough that he, a conservative Republican, trashed his marriage vows. Bad enough that he was away from his four sons over Father's Day weekend. Bad enough that he didn't tell anyone on his staff how to reach him. [And worse, that his staff felt compelled to make up a story that he was hiking in the Appalachians to cover.--Ed.]

Worse, that he was so cavalier about his official duties and responsibilities as governor. Worst of all, that he used public resources to travel to his tryst.

Failing to turn executive power over to his lieutenant governor while he was not just out of the state, not just out of the country, but on a different continent, amounts to gross dereliction of official duty. His use of a state police escort vehicle to get to Atlanta's Hart International Airport so he could fly off to satisfy his ____________________--you fill in the blank: lust, emotional vacuum, ego, whatever--amounts to misappropriation of public funds. It also raises the question of how his plane tickets and the other incidental expenses of his travel were paid for. And not just on this occasion, but on prior trips he apparently made to be with his lady-love.

Not to mention the several questions his leaked email love letters raise: did he send them while he was supposed to be in his office, seeing to South Carolina's business? From which computer(s)? On a public account or a personal one?

In short: who was minding the store?

Sanford has resigned his chairmanship of the Republican National Governors' Association [apologies if I did not get the name of that august body exactly right--Ed.]. He has not expressed any intent to resign the governorship, however. Indeed, he's implied he won't, saying that now that the truth is out, "let the chips fall where they may."

Well, if he does not resign, he ought to be impeached, convicted, and removed from office. Not for the affair per se, as disgusting as it is. After all, Sanford belongs to the party that claims to be THE defender of family values and morality in this country. [The hypocrisy of that stand is a topic for another day.--Ed]

No, not for the affair per se. But for the gross dereliction of his official duties, and his cavalier use of publicly-paid for, government-owned resources to do it--YES, absolutely.

One wonders what the next instance of governmental self-destruction will be. Lord knows, there's more than enough to go around for members of both major parties.

Political Calculus

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Has anyone codified a set of Laws of Political Dynamics? I have a suggestion for one law that must be included on such a list: the level of brilliance of a President Obama decision is directly proportional to the level of hysteria amongst the far right in reaction to it . . . the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to become an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court being the quintessential illustration thereof.

There are absolutely NO principled reasons on which to oppose her nomination, so the lies, distortions, and outright nastiness of the über-right have gone way beyond hysteria and into out-and-out incomprehensibility. Consider just a few of the smears and mud being flung: (1) She is from a historically underrepresented minority ethnic background; therefore, she is a racist. (2) Her remarkable achievements in rising from the poverty that is the South Bronx to attend an Ivy League university and Yale Law (with summa cum laude graduation and editorship of the Yale Law Review being only two of her accomplishments while doing so) mean she is not at all smart and therefore must be "an affirmative action" beneficiary. [I will not even get into the side issue, which is that even if that's true, it doesn't mean she's unqualified per se--it means only that her merits would have been totally ignored and undeveloped without a little institutional assistance; in other words, a recognition of the fact that the playing field is not in fact level for all of us.--Ed.] (3) Her ability and willingness to speak her mind and argue cogently for her point of view means she's a bully. (4) Her years of experience as a prosecutor, an attorney in private practice, and as a federal judge (both at the trial and the circuit court levels), the most any nominee has brought to the Supreme Court in over a century, mean she is totally unqualified.

To anyone out there who believes the tripe: want to buy a bridge? I can get one for you wholesale!

The far right of the GOP is so caught up in talking to itself to reaffirm its own prejudices that it's losing sight of reality. [You know, if this weren't so pathetic, it would be amusing. The GOP is so out-of-touch that it cannot even see how out-of-touch it is.--Ed.} The rest of the world is NOT going to come beating down its doors to join it. We've moved way beyond its limited ideas and ideology. If the GOP wants to stay a viable, credible, nationwide influence, the GOP must stop contemplating its collective navel and start bridging the gap between its rigid ideology and where most of us actually live.

That bridge is still for sale, guys. But a deal like this won't sit around forever. You have to act now!

Ask Not For Whom The Bell Tolls

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It tolls for thee, GOP.

I just heard that US Senator Arlen Spector, long-time (and many-term) Republican from Pennsylvania, has decided to switch parties and become a Democrat. Knock me over with a feather!

I suspect he did it because as a Republican, he'd be facing a nasty primary fight next spring against a really far right nut job, which he could well lose. That's the problem with "vote by party" primaries--the extremists and uber-zealots wield power way out of proportion to their lack of clout in the general election.

There's almost no doubt Spector would win the general election in the fall--if he were on the ballot. So his switching party affiliations must be designed to maximize his chances of making it onto that ballot in the first place.

Still, I shouldn't sell him short. In many ways, and for many years, he's been a relatively centrist, moderate, and sensible voice within the GOP. My biggest problem with him is the way he savaged Anita Hill during Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas's confirmation hearings. Spector's behavior and tone were totally uncalled for and were, frankly, disgusting. It's obvious to me that Hill was telling the truth, because she had absolutely NOTHING to gain from doing so--while Thomas had a lot to gain by lying. But Spector did his GOP-mandated trashing and bashing, and Thomas was confirmed, despite the fact that he was totally unqualified. He's just a "me-too"er, a right-wing ditto head, taking his lead from Antonin Scalia. Creepy!

So I am not overjoyed that Spector has "seen the light." Nor do I see him making a world of difference to the Democrats in the Senate, even though with him and Al Franken (once former Minnesota Senator Coleman gives up his idiotic challenge to Franken's election), the Democrats will have a 60-vote majority. Spector will be a blue-dog Democrat, or as some like to describe the phenomenon, a DINO (Democrat-In-Name-Only).

But the psychological impact of Spector's defection cannot be overstated. The rats are leaving the sinking ship, boys. The GOP as a national party is sinking. USS Titanic redux!

Poor Marksmanship

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The objections to and complaints about President Obama's decision to release the Bush Administration Department of Justice torture memos fall into one of two categories: (1) our enemies will know exactly what we will and will not do to gather intelligence; and (2) our own intelligence agents will not carry out their intelligence gathering to maximum extent, for fear of adverse consequences later, at home.

Both objections are the results of very poor marksmanship, indeed. For the only reasoned response to either or both of them is "So what?"

One of the things that has made America unique is our willingness to live by our principles--and not torturing is one of those principles. We've survived for well over 200 years without torturing. The shape of the threats against us may have changed, but we must not. Once we do, we give up who we are, and that will kill America once and for all faster than any terrorists ever could.

[I keep thinking of the original Star Trek episode Mirror, Mirror.In the alternative universe in that episode, the peaceful Halkon race will let the Empire (the evil incarnation of the Federation) obliterate them rather than give up their planet's resources for the purposes of waging war. "We will die as a race, to preserve who we are." Of course, the Halkons weren't exterminated. If it's good enough for them, it's good enough for me.--Ed.]

And why do we presume that it's a BAD thing if our intelligence officers have to consider the consequences of their actions? After all, they swore to uphold, protect, and defend our Constitution. Why should they be exempt from its strictures? Personally, I much prefer intelligent intelligence officers--ones who think about what they are doing, and why--and not just mechanical automatons who brutally wreak havoc all over the world in alleged defense of something they cannot be bothered to obey.

As long as the debate is allowed to be cast in terms of either or both of those two objections/complaints, however, we're never going to come to a real solution. The issue must be rephrased to put the emphasis where it belongs--not on "anything to stay safe" but on "anything to uphold our principles." As Benjamin Franklin so cogently noted, "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." (1759, from the Historical Review of Pennsylvania)

Calling All Luddites!

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Count me among those appalled by the plethora of "social networking" and instant communication sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. It's not that I am uncomfortable with the technology per se--after all, I do post to this blog on an increasingly regular basis. I am uncomfortable with the implications "resources" like Facebook et al. have for the most fundamental American values.

It took decades and decades and decades for the US Supreme Court to recognize that the Bill of Rights enumerates specific instances of what is every American's most fundamental right: the right to privacy. The reason the Founding Fathers didn't just call it that is because such terminology was not part of the governmental vocabulary of the time. Just because they didn't call it "the right to privacy" doesn't mean they didn't intend to define or describe that right. It's not unlike an indigenous society calling a railroad an "iron horse" or an airplane "a metal bird." Things are described as accurately as possible within the limited framework of the existing vocabulary.

[I still say Justice Scalia missed the biggest implication of his majority opinion in last term's gun rights case--by hanging his interpretation of the Second Amendment on an American's unfettered right to have guns in his own home, he relied on the right to privacy, whether he called it that or not, and despite his oft-stated opposition to any such "right to privacy."--Ed.]

But how in the world are we to preserve the right to privacy and to call on it to defend ourselves from unwarranted governmental intrusion into our lives if all our behavior abrogates it? Whether it's because people posting to Facebook et al. are giddy from the relative anonymity they have, if they are just so desperate for contact with others that they'll say anything, or if it's for some other reason--analysis after analysis has found that people who participate regularly on such sites reveal a lot more than they perhaps intend. So much so that the line between what is public and what is private has become quite blurred.

If our collective behavior demonstrates that we no longer consider anything private, it becomes impossible for the government to violate our right to privacy. No matter how unwarranted the wiretap, the search of the house, the confiscation of papers, the government can do whatever it wants and take whatever it wants . . . and we have no legal grounds to complain. By our own behavior, we've already given up our rights.

In my more paranoid moments, I wonder whether this hasn't been the intended outcome all along. A poorly educated populace doesn't know what its rights AND responsibilities really are; therefore, it can neither define nor defend them. It doesn't matter a whit what the Constitution commands if there exist no means to enforce same. So we continue to base school funding on property taxes, guaranteeing that the residents of the poorer districts will never climb out of the traps of poverty and poor education.

Worse, that those residents will become the objects of ridicule and scorn. Look at the general reaction to the woman who called 911 three times because her local McDonald's was out of Chicken McNuggets yet took her money and wouldn't give it back. The scorn and outrage were directed at her, not at the McDonald's staff who wouldn't give her the refund she was totally entitled to get. Yes, she was wrong to use 911 to register her complaint--but she didn't seem to know better. She kept telling the 911 operators that it WAS an emergency. [Poor education, remember?--Ed.] But what the McDonald's employees did approached extortion--they wouldn't give her back her money when they couldn't fill her order. They tried to make her take and eat something she did not want. I am as much offended by the cruel stupidity of that as I am by the woman's repeated calls to 911.

The richest of the rich thus keep their riches and preserve a poorly educated (thus mostly complaint) laboring class. Once we lose enough of a sense of "self" to give up any sense of individual decorum or restraint, there will be no valid legal argument to keep the government out of our homes and even our thoughts--no matter what we say on paper about the limits on our government's power over us.

The most dire threat to any free society is in fact its freedoms. Within them they hold the seeds of their own destruction. More personal freedom is nonetheless preferable to any other system. But with rights DO come responsibilities. We must be diligent in protecting our freedoms. We cannot let them atrophy by apathy, ignorance, or carelessness.

Theater Of The Absurd

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Have you been watching impeached Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich's media blitz this week? I confess that I have worked actively to avoid most of it--it reminds me of a car-train wreck. You don't want to look because of all the blood and gore, but somehow can't seem to turn away. But I did watch his one-on-one interview with MSNBC's Rachel Maddow last night.

I'll give Gov. B-Rod this: he's a very clever politician. He managed to stay on message (his message, which often had precisely nothing to do with addressing the questions actually asked) through most of the interview. In an odd way, it's amusing to see him, a Democrat, excoriate the Democrats in the Illinois legislature as being "out to get him" for his "legal" political moves with which they disagree. Amusing in a "through the looking glass" sort of way, that is. He wants people to think the legislature is out to get him because he wants to reduce seniors' health care costs by reimporting drugs from Canada, thus reducing seniors' prescription medication costs.

Note that the real issue in that case is whether how he did what he did was "legal" in the first place, not whether his stated goal was a good thing--but he won't address the issue in its true form, for he knows he'll lose.

Nor does the man have self-esteem problems. He's already compared himself favorably to the martyred Dr. King and to Gandhi. Who's next? Jesus Christ?

He also says he's the "anti-Nixon," because he wants ALL the tapes played, not just the ones he says the prosecution cherry-picked to make him look bad. This last is downright ironic, as B-Rod has made no secret of the fact that when he was growing up, Nixon was one of his first political heroes.

He also seems to think that by boycotting his impeachment trial in the Illinois Senate, he's somehow establishing that it's a witch hunt and not a legitimate proceeding. He keeps saying "the fix is in," knowing he'll be convicted. What else can he do? He knows he's guilty, but as long as he swears he isn't and that the trial is illegitimate, he preserves his image.

But he's guilty as sin, and he knows it. Not only does he know it, he made some mistakes in his interview with Maddow that prove it. When she asked him whether he tried to get the Chicago Tribune to fire its editors who were regularly attacking him as a "tit-for-tat" for help with financing to (as the governor put it) "keep Wrigley Field in Chicago," he said no one directly said so to the Tribune's owners. But he couldn't deny he'd wanted the Tribune's editors to lay off. And his mush-mouthed attempts to explain it away only confirmed that he knew he'd screwed up and was doing lame damage control.

I don't know that I agree with Madow that the governor's admission that he'd hoped for help from the Obama administration with getting certain legislation passed in exchange for a say-so on whom he'd appoint to take Obama's vacated US Senate seat was an admission of guilt. As ham-handed as the governor's answer was, I understand that he was trying to say "this is the normal give-and-take of politics." Since there was no PERSONAL gain in it for the governor, it could not be considered illegal extortion.

I do agree with Madow that Blagojevich's admission that he made the taped calls from his home phone because he didn't want to be seen as doing anything "political on a government phone" is a clear admission of guilt. "Doing politics on a government phone" is the essence of his job, for heaven's sake! He really botched that answer.

Two even more telling indications of his guilt: (1) his lead attorney quit, and (2) when he couldn't talk around a question any longer, he still never gave a straightforward answer. He reminded Maddow that the attorney who quit was "just one" of his attorneys, and claimed that their difference was one of tactics, not substance. I beg to differ. No ethical attorney quits on the eve of a trial (even if it is an impeachment and not a criminal trial) unless he/she has a really good reason to do so. Tactical differences alone are not sufficient.

Besides, if the governor has nothing to hide, why not give straight answers to straight questions, and why not give them during the impeachment trial instead of waiting until criminal charges are brought against him? Why not do everything he can to be vindicated as soon as possible? So what if "the fix is in" and he's going to be convicted in the Illinois Senate no matter what he does? He'll have proven the Illinois Senate to be a bunch of crass politicians, and his honor and martyrdom will remain intact.

I'll tell you "so what." As long as he stays away from official proceedings of any sort, there's no penalty for less-than-forthright answers to the questions he's asked. He's not under oath. He can claim whatever he wants with no fear of retribution. But he's only delaying his day of reckoning, not stopping it.

He's a clever man--too clever by half, as my great grandmother would have said. His cleverness isn't helping him, however. It's only dragging out the inevitable--not because "the fix is in," but because he's guilty as charged.

See? I Told You I Can Disagree With Obama, Too

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Yesterday's New York Times included an article by David Johnston and Charlie Savage detailing President-elect Obama's stated reluctance to investigate Dubya administration policies, like implementing waterboarding--excuse me, torture. Obama gave a reasonable explanation for his reluctance: he does not want career intelligence officers to be looking over their shoulders, in fear of their own government, as that would severely hamper their ability to do their jobs.

Fair enough. But going after the operatives who carried out the Dubya administration policies is NOT what those of us demanding accountability are asking for. That would be no different from limiting prosecutions for the My Lai massacre to Lt. William Calley [which was all that was done during Vietnam, if you'll recall--Ed.]. Those of us demanding accountability are asking Obama to go after the real sources of the problem, to wit: President Bush and Vice President Cheney.

Oddly enough, Dubya's self-indulgent and yet myopic view of his presidency as expressed yesterday during his final press conference establishes my point. Bush himself admitted to being in on the process and of approving the use of torture techniques like waterboarding. Cheney already admitted to his role. This is high crime, people! It is war crime. We used to prosecute people who committed these atrocities on Americans. We should not be doing such inexcusable things to others.

To let Dubya and Cheney totally off the hook would set a very, very dangerous precedent. It would give ANY future American president the power to break the law virtually at will. No one person should have so much power. That's the ultimate reason we broke from England in 1776 in the first place.

Nobody--especially NOT the President--is above the law. Nobody has the authority to decide which laws s/he will and will not obey--not without accepting the consequences of being caught breaking them.

To say he doesn't want to rattle career intelligence officers is to obfuscate the issue. To say he wants to look forward, not backwards (even if it is for the sake of the country), is to avoid the consequences of ignoring the issue. It is imperative that the Obama administration take steps to ensure that justice is done and that war criminals, no matter who they be, answer for their crimes.

Otherwise the change that Obama has promised for America is NOT change that's good for America.

Rachel Maddow Missed The Point

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On her eponymous MSNBC show last night, Rachel Maddow called President-elect Barack Obama's choice of fundamentalist pastor Rick Warren to give the invocation at Obama's inauguration a "lose-lose" proposition. Warren used his California church to campaign vigorously in favor of Proposition 8, which revoked the legality of same-sex marriage in that state; he has equated same-sex relationships with pedophilia and incest.

Obama, for his part, has a strong record promoting equal rights for gays, but himself is opposed to same-sex "marriage."

Warren and Obama do seem to agree on certain other issues, such as the need for caring human stewards to protect the environment and to look after the less fortunate and homeless among us.

Maddow thinks Obama's choice is a "lose-lose" proposition because it has offended a great number of Obama's erstwhile supporters yet will not gain Obama any measurable support among fundamentalist Christians.

Maddow missed the point. Obama himself acknowledged that he and Warren disagree vehemently on many issues, but that doesn't mean they must be disagreeable about doing so. In this regard, Obama is implementing two of his most important stands during the campaign: (1) it's never wrong to have dialog with those with whom you disagree; and (2) it's important to "reach across the aisle" and to take actions proving that he's the president of all Americans, not just those who voted for him.

Furthermore, Obama is accomplishing two other goals that Maddow [and all the other talking heads I've heard complaining about this decision so far--Ed.] has forgotten: (1) "Hold your friends close, but hold your enemies closer." (2) He's not so beholden to anyone or any group for his election that he's going to adopt 100% of any group's agenda just because that group voted for him.

This man is incredibly secure in his own skin. I already know I'm not going to agree with him about everything--indeed, we've already disagreed on at least one issue of great importance to me [he voted for giving immunity to the telecoms who illegally eavesdropped on US citizens because enacting other provisions in the legislation mattered more to him than opposing telecom immunity did--Ed.]. Still, I have great respect for his sense of his internal integrity and his confidence in his own judgments. He thinks through his decisions before he makes them. He knows it's impossible to please all of the people all of the time. He's the embodiment of Harry Truman's Oval Office desk sign: The Buck Stops Here.

So while I find Rick Warren's stand on same-sex marriage odious, I am not as upset about Obama's choosing him to give the inaugural invocation as are Maddow and the other talking heads with public pulpits [yes, a lot of conservatives are not happy about it, either--they disagree with Warren's stand on environmental issues or they think Obama is trying to co-opt their cause--Ed.]. Unlike them, I get the point.

What Will We Call The Past Eight Years?

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Arianna Huffington says we should call the past eight years the "How Could We Know?" era--because it's the excuse everyone from those who were supposed to be regulating Wall Street Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff to Dubya himself cited in denying responsibility for the atrocities (fiscal and otherwise) inflicted during their watch.

She makes an excellent argument. In today's Huffington Post, every case she cites (from Iraq to Fannie Mae to Citibank to Madoff) reveals the identical pattern. Those responsible create a plan; they then diminish, dispute, and destroy anyone (in a position to know) who questions said plan; they then carry out said plan with no regard for reality nor any transparency or accountability; they then look askance and say "how could we know?" when it all falls apart . . . as it inevitably does. The ambiguities deliberately created by the planners themselves become the planners' refuge from their responsibilities for making and carrying out those plans in the first place.

She's correct. But after watching clips of two interviews, one with Dubya and one with Darth Cheney, both of which aired Monday night, I have another nominee: let's call it the "So?" or "So What?" era.

For the very first time, as far as I can tell, the president acknowledged that Al Qaida was not a presence in Iraq until AFTER we invaded. He was oblivious to the consequences of his admission, however. He didn't seem to grasp that Al Qaida wouldn't have gone into Iraq at all if we had not already have been there. Dubya was indifferent to the fact that the US invasion caused the problem in the first place. His understanding was limited to the idea that "we" are fighting the "war on terror" where Al Qaida "chose to fight." It is irrelevant to him that Al Qaida made that choice solely in response to what it saw as US provocation. His exact words to the interviewer were "So what?"

Cheney's response to a similar question which focused on the terrible loss of American lives was ever shorter: "So?"

This is beyond appalling. Its callousness and willful disregard for the sacrifices ordinary Americans have been forced to make are almost incomprehensible to me.

I am willing in Dubya's case to chalk it up to his willful indifference to learning anything or even acknowledging anything that contradicts his pre-conceived world view. But Cheney? He simply doesn't care, so long as Halliburton gets its millions and billions of profits at OUR expense. In response to a question I have long and often raised in this blog is this: being stupid is bad, but being evil is worse.

What worries me the most, however, is that President-elect Obama doesn't think that bringing the malefactors to justice should be one of his highest priorities. He seems to be leaning to the Gerald Ford approach: in pardoning Richard Nixon before any charges were officially brought against him, Ford said "Our long national nightmare is over." I hope I am wrong about that. Not only is justice delayed "justice denied." Justice denied sets extremely dangerous precedents for the future--indeed, they mean the end of our entire system of checks and balances.

Consider this: the most frightening thing about Richard Nixon's take on executive power, as is so ably exploited in commercials currently airing for the film Frost/Nixon, is his assertion that "when the President does it, it's not illegal."

That statement is so wrong on its face that I scarcely know where to begin pointing out its flaws. First, it says the president is above everything, even the US Constitution. Second, and as a direct result, it says there's no such thing as a "government of laws and not of men." Third, it says that the president never can be held accountable for anything done under his ægis. Fourth, it's just as stupid a doctrine when someone more liberal is in power as it is when someone more conservative is in power. It's equal-opportunity absolute monarchy masquerading as representative democracy.

It's just flat-out wrong. It's the essence of un-American. And it makes me want to puke. America deserves so much better!

Surely I'm Not The Only One Who Figured This Out

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Sometimes, I think the transition period between the election in November and the swearing-in of the President-elect in January is worse than the campaign season itself. At least during campaign season, the media have plenty of news to discuss. But during the transition phase, especially when the incoming President is keeping a lid on the decisions he's making about Cabinet posts and whatnot, the media have nothing to do but speculate, and this year they have descended quickly into a frenzy of speculation, gossip, and criticism of decisions that haven't even been announced yet.

It's getting old, people. Calm down, already!

The issue that's bugging me the most is the collective focus on "what to do about Joe Lieberman." Other members of the Senate, reporters, and commentators alike seem to be taking great umbrage that President-Elect Obama is said to favor letting Sen. Lieberman, who holds office as an Independent but who caucuses with the Democrats--but who campaigned more than vigorously for Sen. John McCain this year--keep his chairmanship of the Senate Homeland Security Committee. The collective attitude is that such a turncoat has no business holding such an important post.

In the next breath, everyone goes on to rabid speculation about this year's three Senate races that have yet to be concluded, in Minnesota, Alaska, and Georgia--without connecting the two stories.

Surely I'm not the only one [but I seem to be--Ed.] who has figured out that President-elect Obama is biding his time. His grasp of politics as "the art of the possible" is vast. He's simply not borrowing more trouble than he must at the moment. Keep the status quo until there's a need to change it. Wait until we all know how these last three Senate races end--wait until we know whether the Democrats in the Senate get their 60-seat, filibuster-proof majority, until announcing whether Lieberman will in fact keep his chairmanship. Don't jettison him until everyone knows for sure he's no longer needed.

What's so hard to grasp about that? And stop calling me Shirley!

On Connecting The Dots

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Does John McCain realize that his own excessively misleading rhetoric is at least partly to blame for the frightening ideas his campaign-appearance crowds seem to have embraced? If he does, his chastising those crowds (to boos, no less) yesterday was not only too little, too late, but hypocritical. So much for the integrity we ought to expect in our leaders. If he does not realize it, he lacks the clear perception and judgment to be president. Either way, he has no business becoming the so-called leader of the free world.

He has boxed himself quite neatly into a no win situation--in his attempts to curry favor with the rabid right wing of the GOP, he's unleashed the truly wild-eyed fringe elements. Even so, he has not succeeded in placating the rabid right wing, talk-radio crowd of his own party.

Worse, he's now damaged what little credibility he might have gained with them by telling them yesterday to rein it in and be respectful, and that not only is Barack Obama no Arab, he IS a good and decent family man, someone who we need not fear occupying the Oval Office.

And he's lost whatever good will might have remained among the more center-to-left voters who'd at least have tolerated his election and tried to work with him should he in fact win the presidency.

I really do welcome his decency in trying to tamp down the more excessive untruths his crowds have embraced--that's the John McCain I remember from 2000. That's the man I could accept in the Oval Office should Obama lose, except for Sarah Palin's then being only one heartbeat away from the presidency. She is not only not ready, she lacks the temperament to get ready. She's another one of those "don't confuse me with the facts; I've made up my mind" people. They are dangerous, as the incomprehensibly stupid "leadership" we've had for the last 8 years has demonstrated. [It's the only thing at which they've excelled.--Ed.] The real world has absolutely NO interest in conforming to our expectations. The sooner the people we have in our highest offices realize that, the sooner we can rehabilitate our standing as the leader of the world community.

The problem is this: McCain's behavior during this entire campaign has been so erratic and self-contradictory that there are no guarantees that the decent McCain would be the one in charge, should he win the election. I, for one, cannot live with that uncertainty.

I think the vast majority of Americans who take the time to think about things would overwhelmingly vote for Obama . . . except for the "race thing." I heard one of Obama's advisers on NPR earlier this week claiming there was no racial issue or problem at all affecting the campaign, but let's get real. What else could he say? At this point in the campaign, the goal is to persuade the undecided not just to vote, but to vote for "your guy." The minute anyone connected to Obama suggests that race might play an issue in people NOT supporting Obama, all the people who have been hurt enough by the economic meltdown to consider voting for Obama, but who hesitate because of their own racially-related preconceptions, will abandon the idea of voting for Obama. Why? Because even hinting that race is an issue or a problem is tantamount, in those people's minds, to calling them racists. Even if they are, they're going to resent it to the point that no matter how bad the economy gets, Obama will have lost their votes.

This is not unlike those who have already been hurt badly (and for years) by GOP economic policies, but who will never vote for Democrats because those voters are "pro-life," unlike those nasty, baby-killing liberals. They vote against their own best interests because they nobly, although naively, think other issues matter more. The one thing they've not grasped is that for the first 6 years of the Dubya administration, the GOP could have legislated Roe v. Wade out of existence if it had wanted to do so. Doing that, however, would cost the GOP a wedge issue that has proved to be magic in getting them into and thus keeping power. That's what the GOP cares about, not the rights of the unborn. Or else Roe v. Wade would already be legislated out of existence.

One of the worst failures of our educational system is that all too often, it does not teach students HOW to think. No school should be responsible for teaching students WHAT to think--that's the job of parents and churches. Knowing HOW to think, however, is essential to survival in the real world, and that is an ideal task for educators. Alas for us, it's virtually impossible to do that while being overwhelmed by wildfires such as coping with students who come to class not ready to learn.

It's not just our physical infrastructure that's falling apart. Our educational system is coming apart at the seams, our health care system is broken, and a stable (financially and emotionally) middle class, the bulwark of every successful society in history, is being squeezed out of existence. America, as I know, love, and understand her, is disappearing before our eyes. Something has to give . . . and for the sake of both America and the world, I hope that what retreats is all the old and untrue racially-based canards that have infected our country for centuries. We need to vote for hope, not for fear, if we are to reclaim America's position as the real moral authority and voice of freedom for the whole world.