The Two Most Basic Errors Of Libertarian Thought

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US Senate candidate Rand Paul has been saying in public since at least 2002 that his Libertarian beliefs mean that while he personally would abhor anyone who ran his/her business by discriminating against others on the basis of race or skin color, the government should not be able to stop them from doing so, all for the sake of the sanctity of private property rights. So even though he says he supports the aims, goals, and passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, if it had been up to him, the title in that act which ended the ability of businesses engaged in interstate commerce to discriminate would never even have come up for a vote, let alone get passed.

And this perfectly illustrates the first basic error in Libertarian thinking [and I use the term "thinking" loosely--Ed.]--for what it does is elevate the rights inherent in property ownership above and ahead of the rights of individuals. That is exactly backwards. Since the earliest days of the English common law, the rights of people have trumped the rights of property. While you are allowed to use deadly force to protect yourself [or someone else--Ed.] against the use or threat of deadly force against you, you most assuredly are NOT allowed to use deadly force to protect your property from someone posing a threat to it. And if you should choose to use deadly force to protect your property, you will be held responsible for the consequences of your actions, be it under criminal OR civil law. People matter the most under the law. Period.

It is also tempting to go into a long diatribe about how that's in essence the same objection to the entirety of "states' rights" claims, but I'll leave those details for another post. And even if my assertion technically were not true, the outcome of the US Civil War decided it contrary to the Libertarian/states'-righters position anyway. I raise the same argument to those who cite carefully selected excerpts from the Federalist Papers to support such views, by the way. Maybe some of the Founders did intend such topsy-turvy interpretations to be the law of the land. Nonetheless, the outcome of the Civil War [including the passage and ratification of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments--Ed.] changed everything. We no longer live in an eighteenth-century, rural, locality-based world and economy. While the intent of the Founders is important to discern, it is literally impossible to implement 100% of that intent in the 21st century. I, for one, think the Founders would recognize that, were we able to ask them.

Thus the second basic error in Libertarian thinking: they have taken the adage, "the government that governs best, governs least" as their own, but too often have used it to force the government not so much to "govern least" as to "govern not at all." If they were pressed, I think most Libertarians would admit that at least SOME government is necessary. But they seem to have an abiding faith in either the notion that individuals will do the right thing or the notion that whatever anyone does is no one else's affair. The whole of human history illustrates the folly of both those notions.

I confess to having some sympathies favoring the Libertarians' position, at least in regard to an individual's right to privacy, but the absolutest stand most libertarians take against the role of government is impossible to implement in the real world. It would be anarchy. Let's face some facts: governments exist to do the things that people want or need to have done but which they cannot do by or for themselves. Setting out that framework is what the Founders intended in creating the Constitution in the first place. They had tried the much weaker Articles of Confederation, and scrapped that experiment as soon as practical experience with it showed that it was too weak to do what America needed to survive as an independent country.

No one will be in 100% agreement with anyone else 100% of the time. But without some framework that's sturdy enough to say what is to be done when disagreements arise, and to enforce that procedure on those who disagree issue by issue, there is no government but chaos. And chaos is no government. If you doubt this, consider the essential IN-action of the US Senate during most of the past year-and-a-third. Yes, some things, some important things, have been accomplished, but at what cost? In the US Senate, a minority of ONE can hold the will of the vast majority of American voters hostage . . . and for what? To protect British Petroleum from having to pay for the immense damage its own reckless behavior has caused? T'ain't right, Magee.

I confess to fearing I am on the losing, even though correct, side of this issue, the philosophy of governmental power. When I see US Supreme Court decisions such as the one in Citizens United, the campaign financing case, and I see people on all bands of the political spectrum nodding seriously and giving more than due consideration to the concept of "states' rights," I marvel at how such things could have come to pass in America. Have we learned nothing from the Civil War, the Great Depression, the paroxysms of the Sixties, and the other traumas we have suffered throughout our history? America today, with all its emphasis on corporate welfare and the rights of artificial "persons," evokes the melody of "The World Turned Upside Down" and the sarcastic observation in Animal Farm that "some are more equal than others." Yes, George Orwell was railing against communism, but his words are equally applicable to modern corporate power. Control and repression of the individual are the same whether the one doing the controlling is Stalin or Goldman Sachs.

Tom Lehrer Would Have Loved This . . .

. . . a/k/a Talk About Your Freudian Slip!

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US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton again spoke very strongly of the need for the world to unite in holding North Korea accountable for the unjustifiable act of sinking a South Korean warship and killing its crew of 46. In reporting this during the 7:00 a.m. CDT broadcast of NPR's "Morning Edition," NPR newsman Paul Brown at one point started to say "North Caro--" before correcting himself and saying "North Korea."

I, of course, immediately thought of Tom Lehrer's "Who's Next?", his early Sixties' commentary on both nuclear proliferation and civil rights. Its tag line? "We'll try to stay serene and calm, when Alabama gets the bomb--Who's next?"

Once I stopped laughing, I marveled at how what goes around, comes around. Who'd have thought, nearly half a century later, with Rand Paul's case of foot-in-mouth and North Korea's eternal petulance, that both civil rights and nuclear proliferation would still be in the headlines?

One Quick Question

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Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal has raised a loud voice decrying the lack of federal involvement and initiative in cleaning up the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the oil spill that is now fouling Louisiana's precious and fragile coastal marshlands. Governor Jindal is a Republican. Governor Jindal delivered the GOP response to President Obama's first address to Congress after Obama's election (the non-State-of-the-Union State of the Union speech). Governor Jindal in that response decried the overreaching scope of federal government and said we need less government in our lives, not more.

What's wrong with this picture?

That's a Fifteen-Yard Penalty for Unnecessary Bias

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I renew my objections to the biased content of the History Channel's "America: The Story of Us" project, sponsored by the Bank of America, and indeed, make my objections even more strenuously than I have before. I admit that I have not watched every single second of every single segment that has aired so far, but I've watched more than enough to realize that the problems I had with what I'd seen as of a couple of weeks ago have not only not gone away, but have gotten worse.

Objection the first: the B of A ads have been deliberately designed to be very difficult for a casual viewer to tell from the content of the actual program. Historical narrative (timed to coordinate with the period being discussed at that moment in the program itself) intercut with comments by various "experts" extolling the B of A . . . someone who didn't know much about American history or who wasn't paying really close attention would be left with the impression that the B of A has actually been THE central player in all of US History. One almost expects to see painted portraits of B of A executives at the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitutional Convention, the Gettysburg Address, and so on.

Give me a break!

Objection the second: the program itself is designed to exalt the role of business and banking in US history at the expense of actual fact. For an example from what aired last night, one need consider only the segments "explaining" the Dust Bowl, Great Depression, and the lead-up to America's participation in World War II.

(1) More time was given to explaining how the dust storms of 30s affected urban centers such as New York City and Washington, D.C., than was given to explaining how the farming practices of rural America contributed to their creation, and how the rural American economy had been in shambles for years before the technical start of the Great Depression, namely the stock market crash of October, 1929.

(2) I never heard FDR mentioned by name regarding the bank holiday called after he was inaugurated in 1933, to stop the runs on all American banks that threatened to plunge the country into a crisis so deep there would be no digging out from under, ever. One sentence--ONE SENTENCE--was devoted to the fact that economic deregulation had produced excessively risky economic speculation which led to the crisis in the first place . . . while several verbal paragraphs were devoted to the admittedly anonymous single investor who entered a bank in 1933 and demanded ALL his deposited funds back, which triggered the nationwide run on all banks. The result? An impression that this one anonymous individual with his one self-preservative act was responsible for the downfall of our entire economic system, and not the decade-plus of irresponsible behavior by the baking industry that was the hallmark of the Roaring Twenties.

(3) The assertion that FDR's [again, he was never mentioned by name, which makes me wonder whether this was done to avoid a more direct protest against the program's contents by those who know what FDR did for this country--Ed.] public works programs didn't end the Depression; it was our being dragged into World War II that ended the Depression. The writers and producers of this biased interpretation omitted or ignored several salient facts.

--The Republicans, then as now, objected to spending directly to help the American people, and never gave FDR sufficient funding even for his programs that were put into law and effect.

--FDR himself erred in early 1937 when he listened to some of his more conservative economic advisers and pulled back on even the relatively paltry amount of money he had been given to use for his "great economic experiment." This had the effect of shutting down a proto-recovery that had, in fact, begun by 1936, once his public works programs had been in effect long enough to have had real effect on the overall economy.

--The assertion that it was WWII and not FDR's programs that ended the Depression is totally specious. What was it about the war that ended the Depression? Here's a clue: GOVERNMENT SPENDING. It's just that what the money was being spent on had changed from domestic programs designed to help people survive, to armaments production and the entire panoply of what has become the modern military-industrial complex. The source of the spending didn't change. The purpose of the spending did. The amount of the spending increased, dramatically. Had FDR been able to spend on domestic initiatives what he was given to spend on the war effort, the Great Depression would never have been so deep nor long-lasting is it actually proved to be.

(4) The program's continued emphasis on recounting individual anecdotes and what amounts to winning info for the trivia-mad [of which I confess to being one--Ed.] as opposed to focusing on the greater significance of many of the events it describes. Indeed, some of the anecdotes chosen seem to contradict whatever larger point they are cited to "support." A traditional and valid sub-narrative of the Great Depression story is how people, desperate for work, gladly took on any jobs they could find no matter the working conditions, just to be able to bring home even the most paltry pay. The building of Hoover Dam and the sculpting of Mount Rushmore are two of the most commonly cited illustrations, and "America: the Story of Us" does not surprise by choosing them.

However, its telling of the story of Hoover Dam has as its upshot that the money the men earned went to a nearby little, dusty, gambling town of Las Vegas. So the great work of constructing Hoover Dam ahead of schedule and under budget has by implication been reduced to the spark that ignited the boom of decadence in the desert. Talk about your damnation with faint praise!

The story of Mount Rushmore's creation likewise has been trivialized by what the program's writers and producers chose to emphasize. They didn't explain that there was no incentive to implement real safety measures at the site because there were far more men willing to do the work than there were openings available, even allowing for the number of deaths and disfigurements that made new openings available on a regular basis. No, the program implicitly pooh-poohed the dangers by telling the story of one worker who was in the wrong place at the wrong time when a nearby lightning storm hit some power lines, thus ultimately igniting almost 100 dynamite charges 30 minutes early . . . only to suffer naught but a broken ear drum and the loss of his shoes, which had literally been blown off his feet.

One is left with the impression that the work wasn't so much dangerous as quirkily amusing. Truth would have been better served had the actual death and disfigurement totals been cited . . . but oh, yeah! Numbers and statistics are so BORING! We can't have that, now, can we? Well, numbers and statistics may be boring, but they are facts. And it's facts, not anecdotes, which lead to truth.

This entire program is insidious. It's dangerous. It's not the history of America; it's a paean to a right-wing, pro-business interpretation of American history which omits so many salient facts that it cannot be deemed substantively accurate. I cannot protest it strongly enough. It's another example of why certain things, like history programs, should never be put in the position of having to make a profit in order to justify their creation.

Lest any of you think that I protest because of my own biases, let me remind you: my sole bias is for the truth. The truth based on facts. I was not a fan of FDR who thus interprets his response to the Great Depression based on any predisposition favorable to him. I was someone who learned about the Great Depression by studying what happened, and gained an admiration for FDR as a result of that study. Developing an opinion based on fact is not the same as shoe-horning selected facts to fit one's predispositions. I do the former. That's why I'm at heart a historian. "America: The Story of Us" does the latter. That's why it's a piece of pro-business propaganda.

So my love-hate relationship with the History Channel continues. I love that more Americans are being exposed to history, in often interesting and frequently innovative ways designed to pique interest. I hate that this is coming at the behest of corporate sponsors who have their hands in production from Day One, and which call the shots about how that which is being presented will be interpreted. I hope that even such biased efforts will spur viewers to do some investigating of their own--and thinking of their own--about what they discover. I fear that that won't happen. I am left with this question: is exposure to some, albeit biased, history better than no exposure to history at all? 'Tis a puzzlement.

I'd Take It With Several Grains of Salt, But I'm Supposed To Be On A Low Sodium Diet

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I have been watching parts of the History Channel's current extravaganza explaining American history, "America: The Story of Us." I am not impressed with what I have seen so far. Rather than being a real recounting of American history, what I've seen has been a collection of anecdotes, designed at once to attract the more salacious of the viewers' tastes and to promote the pro free-market, pro laissez-faire agenda of its corporate sponsor, the Bank of America.

No attempt has been made, that I've seen anyway, to provide a larger context for the events described beyond the notion that Americans were and are always moving forward, grasping and grappling with problems, all in the name of economic "freedom." The Lewis and Clark expedition has been reduced to a search for new sources of beaver pelts, the most luxurious and profitable furs of that long-gone trade. The tragedy of the Donner party has been reduced to a bad episode of "Unsolved Mysteries," emphasizing the bodies which were never found and the fact that one of the survivors was found next to a cauldron of human blood.

Frankly, recent PBS examinations of both subjects were about a million times better, each.

Nor am I impressed with another basic presumption of the History Channel's series, which is that Americans have always been reaching out for new problems to conquer, and our history moves from success to success, the heroic tale of a unique and heroic people. I'm not denigrating American history--I LOVE American history. But such a non-nuanced telling not only makes the American story two-dimensional, it cheapens it. The truth is more complex, and even more amazing. Just as many--if not more--Americans were trying to get away from oppression (real and perceived), boredom, or their own fiscal and familial woes as were moving forward with a dream of a new ideal in mind. They were running away, not consciously and deliberately moving toward anything. Important aspects of America's story are accidental, not part of some unseen, grand, even God-given, design.

Perhaps worst of all, the sponsor's ads have been deliberately designed to make it difficult to tell the ads from the body of the program. I'm sure Bank of America will claim it was just tailoring the ad content to reflect the importance of the program. Given the usual excesses of unchecked commerce, however, I doubt that. The ads really were designed to make viewers who aren't paying close attention think that B of A is part and parcel of the entire panoply of American history. [Here's where, in conversation, I'd insert one of the best bits from the movie My Favorite Year: "Captain from Tortuga? Captain from crap!"--Ed.]

So watch the series, or even buy the DVDs so that you can watch it again, and again, and again. But watch with a skeptical eye and several grains of salt. I'll have to pass on the salt, however, as part of my new regimen is keeping my sodium intake to under 2 grams per day.

Le Roi est mort! Vive le roi!

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I don't know about you, but I find the Burger King "King" with the oversized head creepy. However, I have to admit that ever since the ad agency handling Burger King's account dug him up, the "King" has on occasion provided some very clever commercial fodder, indeed.

My own all-time favorite so far is the one from a few years ago, wherein the King and Darth Vader were standing nose-to-nose, and the only sound was Vader's breathing. What cemented its place in the firmament for me was when a very dear friend suggested it reminded him of the old Saturday Night Live sketch "Quien Es Mas Macho? Fernando Lamas, o Ricardo Montalban?"

There have been any number of lame ads since, but one of the current ones is vying hard for a place in my "best of" list. The Burger King is seen breaking into a corporate headquarters building, stealing the secret recipe for the Egg McMuffin. What makes this ad so great is the voice-over, which says something to the effect that while the Burger King's breakfast sandwich may not be original, "it's only a buck." I snorted my hot tea through my nose, I was laughing so hard.

So, creepy as you are, I salute you, Burger King. Anyone or anything that can poke fun at its own self is not all bad. I just have to remember not to drink anything when a commercial comes on.

So Much For The Belmont Stakes

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Every now and again, I need to be reminded that my lung disease is not the only thing running my life. I just had a "lovely" hospital stay, with tons of tests and lots of blood draws for labs, trouble getting an IV line started, new medicines and disagreements with techs about doctors' orders, all to be reminded that just because I have a chronic and ultimately terminal lung disease, it doesn't mean that some other health problem won't reach up and bite me on my butt.

The upshot? I have been diagnosed with congestive heart failure, and am now taking Lasix and potassium chloride in addition to the pharmacopoeia of other meds I must ingest both for my lung disease and for the side effects of same.

Several states allow race horses which are being given Lasix to race, but New York state is not one of them. I have just lost my chance to run in and win the Belmont Stakes.

I am heartbroken.

Overall, my time in the hospital wasn't bad, considering that I was mentally unprepared for the entire experience. Still, I do have a few standing complaints which may serve as warnings for anyone out there who finds him/herself in similar circumstances. First, be 100% aware of not only what the doctors have ordered, but why. My pulmonologist wanted to get readings of my breathing and oxygenation rates overnight while using my BiPap machine, to make sure my machine was working properly. The respiratory tech who was assigned to set up the test didn't want to use my BiPap, because of "liability issues." I had to explain it to her about 7 times that using the hospital's BiPap would defeat the entire purpose of the test. She STILL didn't want to do it, probably for fear she'd get in trouble somehow. I held my ground, and she eventually either checked with one of her higher-ups, or finally realized I was right. I mean, she had the doctor's order right in front of her, and it specifically said that MY BiPap machine was to be used. Good grief!

If she hadn't done it according to the doctor's order, I'd have been forced to stay an additional overnight, which would not have done my mental health any good, and she probably would have gotten in trouble for not following the doctor's order in the first place.

Second, don't let the nurses gouge you over and over in the attempt to start an IV line. I admit to not being steadfast enough here, mostly because I know I am what they call "a tough stick." I sympathize with the difficulties the RNs have in finding a good place to start an IV on me. But I am learning to say "not only 'NO,' but 'Hell, NO.'" to someone sticking me repeatedly and, upon missing the vein, keeping the needle in and digging around to try to find it. It didn't prevent me from winding up with both arms--and hands--black and blue. But what backbone I exhibited did keep my arms and hands from being abused even worse than they had been. Next time [and there will be one, I know--Ed.], I'm not even going to give them two chances. One try, no digging, and if it fails, I'm going to insist that someone else be called upon to start the IV line.

Third, there are some things that just are not worth getting upset about. Leads and wires and oxygen tubes and phone cords and TV remotes will get tangled up. Live with it, be patient (pun intended), and just untangle them as needed. Fourth, even teaching hospitals are overworked and understaffed, so learn to be proactive. If an alarm on something you're hooked up to goes off, and you know why, AND it's not for a true emergency, turn it off! When I finally did receive an IV, the pump monitoring the rate of infusion clanged horridly once the IV was empty. I waited about a minute, and then, realizing everyone was too busy to drop everything and come for such a minor thing, I just shut it off. The patient in the other bed was happy, I was happy, and the RN on duty was relieved that he had one fewer bit of drudgery to accomplish.

Finally, remember that the hospital is no place to get any rest. Set things up so that you have at least 48 hours after you get home wherein you have to do nothing, so that you can catch up on your sleep and get your mind and attitude recalibrated. Your family will love you for it.

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.

How Much Is 2+2? How Much Do You Want It To Be?

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Some days I wake up grumpy . . . and some days, I let him sleep. No, no. Seriously, some days I wake up grumpy, and it usually has something to do with what's on the radio news as I am coming to in the wee hours. This morning, I am beyond grumpy. I am positively curmudgeonly.

NPR's "Weekend Edition Sunday" aired an interview this morning with Fank Newport of Gallup Polls, discussing public reaction to the passage of the health care reform bill. The general tenor of the discussion was that once the bill passed, a plurality of the public indicated support for the bill according to Gallup's own poll from last Monday. Mr. Newport added that even other polls which showed more people didn't like the bill than did like it constituted not "a vast majority of the American people," contrary to GOP talking points, but only a bare plurality of about 3 points [which, I note, statistically is within the margin of error--Ed.].

I have no quarrel with that. I do have a quarrel with the way all the polls discussed seem to have been formatted. If I understand the recap correctly, the polling was to learn the level of support for the bill. But it seems that what was asked was along the lines of "do you support the legislation, yes or no." That is no way to determine support for the bill. The only thing it indicates with any reliability is whether someone supports what s/he thinks the bill entails, and due to the months and months and months of negative spin spewed out by right-wing talking heads, what people think the bill entails and what the bill actually does are two very, very different things.

The only legitimate way to measure public support for the bill is to ask a series of questions about each key provision of the bill, to wit: do you support or oppose ending the ability of health insurers to deny coverage for "pre-existing conditions"? Do you support or oppose ending the ability of health insurers to drop your coverage if you get sick? Do you support or oppose allowing families to carry their adult children on their parents' policies until those children reach the age of 26? Do you support or oppose eliminating the so-called "doughnut hole" in Medicare's Part D prescription drug coverage? Do you support or oppose reducing the federal budget deficit by billions of dollars over the course of the next 10 years, as the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office has determined this bill will do?

I could go on, but I'll spare you. I will say that I am aware that the way I've phrased some of the questions I listed may not be "value-neutral." But I do not claim to be a pollster. I do think a pollster worth his or her salt could frame the questions in a valid value-neutral way. My point is not about the framing of specific questions in any event. My point is about the way to get the most accurate snapshot possible of the public's true opinions about the legislation, by asking questions about each of its provisions as opposed to asking a meaningless question about the bill as a whole.

Heck, even the overly broad question about the bill as a whole would be instructive IF there had been follow-up questions to determine what people actually think is in the bill in the first place. Without those follow-ups, the poll as it stands is meaningless. Anyone can take its results and twist them into whatever shape suits one's purposes, just as the CPA in the classic joke said "What do you want it to be?" when he was asked "What's two plus two?"

Mark Twain was right: there are three kinds of lies. Lies, damned lies, and statistics.

I Don't Care If It's the First Act of Henry V

Yes, that's the punch line to the old joke about recognizing "the last act of a desperate man." I hope that will be history's take on the continued uproar by the self-styled Tea Partiers and the entire spectrum of far-right nut jobs. I haven't seen such a spate of juvenile name-calling and bullying since junior high school . . . only this is even scarier, because this time the bullies have guns.

The behavior and tactics of these people [and I use the term both loosely and advisedly--Ed] consist of willful denial of facts, delivered loudly, and now not just overt threats of violence [anyone remember the Tea Party rally sign "We came unarmed--this time"?--Ed], but actual incidents of brick-throwing and other acts of violence against their perceived opponents, including increasingly overt threats involving guns.

To its great shame, the "mainstream" wing of the GOP has been encouraging this increasingly apocalyptic reaction. Sarah Palin has tweeted her followers that it's "time to reload" and has posted a map online targeting selected Democratic-Party-held House seats through gun sight cross hairs. This must stop before we wind up with a totally Balkanized nation. Palin and her ilk can disavow overt acts of violence all they want, but whether they admit it or not, they are morally responsible for encouraging the hyper-extremists in their increasingly unstable behavior.

I try to comfort myself with the knowledge, based on history, that this is what always happens when the forces of reaction realize they are losing 100% control of any given situation. It's akin to the notion that the darkest hour is just before the dawn. But the race to the bottom seems to be not just on, but in full swing. I am afraid that this time there will be even darker hours before that new dawn breaks.

Happy Belated Grammar Day, Everyone!

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I have it on good authority that yesterday was officially Grammar Day. In honor of the day, at least one web site hosted a limerick contest. The winning entry naturally referred to the web site's owner [suck up!--Ed.], which didn't occur to me, but for the sake of posterity, I'd like to enshrine my own, non-winning entry here:

A woman accused of apostasy
Told grammar geeks to stop accosting me
Possessives ending in "s"
Can be plural; don't guess--
I'll tell you where to put your apostrophe.

Thank you, thank you. I'll be here all week.

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.

Lawyers, Guns, and Bu . . . uh, Mon . . .uh, Snakes?

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It has been argued that even a government on a war footing can satisfy the needs of its citizens at home, the classic economics expression being "guns and butter." FDR had some success in that regard, despite rationing of certain products and raw materials during World War II. LBJ's efforts to make the same argument got less and less credible with every escalation in Vietnam, despite the fact that rationing was never imposed within the US during the 1960s. Warren Zevon brought an entirely new layer of meaning to the phrase by changing "butter" to "money" and throwing lawyers into the mix, to boot.

And today the US Supreme Court hears another Second Amendment case, one with potentially drastic consequences for the entire nation. In the case at hand, a Chicago citizen is challenging Chicago's ban on possession of handguns, even in one's own home. The citizen concedes that under Chicago's law, he could legally have a shotgun, but he wants a handgun because a shotgun is "inconvenient."

The Second Amendment case (a 5-4 decision) from two years ago determined that gun ownership is a fundamental individual right, but since that case arose out of the District of Columbia's handgun ban, it applied only to federal enclaves such as DC itself and the national parks. [See the post "Strict Constructionist--NOT" for my take on the previous case.--Ed.] This case seeks to expand the judicially-defined meaning of the Second Amendment to all state and local government entities, as well.

Set aside for a moment the delicious irony of so-called conservative "strict constructionists" like Antonin Scalia imposing a massive expansion of federal control over the states. The ramifications of the case at hand could literally mean anarchy--for extended to its logical conclusion, the 100% unfettered right of individual Americans to own guns would result in the eventual overturning of even the paltry gun-control measures we have now, such as licensing and registration of handguns.

There is a workable solution, however, based on long-standing (and thus settled) First Amendment precedent. One's right to the religion of one's choice is unfettered--except where it is regulated. You have an absolute right to believe whatever the heck you want. You do not have an absolute right to act on those beliefs. The classic example is the handling of poisonous snakes. Certain churches have held that God will protect the faithful, and that they will suffer no harm from passing rattlesnakes around amongst themselves, even to their children. Well, the Supreme Court put the kibosh on that a long, long time ago. There's a larger concern: the protection of children and the general public safety and welfare. So the church members are not forbidden to believe that they can handle poisonous snakes with impunity. They just cannot demonstrate their beliefs by actually handling such snakes as part of their religious observances.

It will be instructive to see how the Supremes decide this case, and by what sort of a margin. I'm predicting--and dreading--a 5-to-4 split, with Antonin Scalia again writing for the majority, and dictating that guns rule. Scalia has already shown, by his majority opinion in the DC handgun ban case, that he's willing to throw away all his other cherished philosophical beliefs about strict construction and avoiding judicial activism for the sake of being able to shoot 'em up.

I wonder whether anyone who's considered the looting problems in Haiti and Chile after their recent earthquakes has stopped to think about how much harder it would be for the Haitian and Chilean police and military to restore order if the looters had the unfettered right--and ability--to shoot back.

Still More Things That Make You Go "Hmmm . . ."

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I heard a report on NPR this morning about how the human brain changes during its lifespan. The latest research indicates that while middle-aged brains aren't very good at multi-tasking and are also not as fast as they once were in processing information, they are at their life's peak of being able to perform complex reasoning tasks, and are also at maximum capacity for seeing issues from someone else's point of view, a/k/a empathy. Teenaged brains, on the other hand, while being able to cope with levels of information input that would disorient the rest of us, have very little, if any, capacity to empathize and even less to recognize and anticipate the consequences of the actions they prompt.

The common element affecting both ages of brain is the presence and thickness of myelin, the fatty sheath around nerve endings that improves nerves' ability to process information. Middle-aged brains have a lot of myelin. The quantity and thickness of the myelin enhances complex reasoning functions. Teenaged brains have less myelin, especially around the nerves connecting to the brain's frontal lobes, which are the home of these same higher reasoning functions.

I've bemoaned for years our society's seeming race to the bottom in terms of public behavior, expression of opinions, and general attitude towards civic discourse and political and philosophical differences. Almost nobody cares anymore to be polite, to speak with a civil tongue, and to argue based on the issues and the facts. It seems as if whomever shouts the loudest and longest is declared "the winner," correct on the merits or not. Usually not, too, or else there'd be no need to scream and shout. I always used to think of it in terms of my generation's [yes, I'm talking to and about you, fellow Baby Boomers.--Ed] tendency to raise its children to be its friends instead of raising its children to be good citizens, which in turn those children replicated when raising their own, resulting in at least 3 generations now of selfish brats being at the forefront of society.

But now I wonder. Is there a genetic difference that makes certain people more likely to have less myelin in their brains all their lives? And if so, does this explain the schoolyard bullying and high-school-cliquish behavior of people like Rush Limbaugh and the anchors on Fox "News"?

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Texans are to Americans the way Ugly Americans are to the rest of the world. This could also mean, based on the previous observation, that Texans, too, tend to be permanent teenagers. It's as good an explanation as any for what is largely boorish behavior. Please don't get me wrong. I have lived in Texas. I have friends and family members who have lived in Texas--indeed, some of them are still there. There are a lot of things to love about Texas and Texans. But that does not include the Texans making all the noise about how Texas is better at everything than everybody else, ever, period.

And that constant crowing gets real old, real quick. [Maybe at its deepest heart, it's a sign of fundamental insecurity--the most frightened act the bravest?--Ed.] And it's even worse when listening to Texans turn on one another, as they have during the current campaign among GOP candidates for governor. I will not repeat the accusations, lies, and mud that has been slung. I will say only this: when candidates who've openly claimed to support Texas' secession from the Union are accused by their fellow candidates of not being conservative enough, well, let's just say the train has derailed. [Thank God the primary is this-coming Tuesday, so we'll soon have an at least brief respite.--Ed.]

I always shake my head in rueful wonder when I hear talk of secession as though it were a viable option. The Civil War ended 145 years ago, people. Secessionists lost. Get over it. Besides, as a purely practical matter, would those pro-secessionists really be so keen to leave the Union when doing so would cost them incalculably? I'd like to see Texas try to survive without all the money the federal government dumps into its economy through military bases, NASA, local jobs with everything from the National Park Service to the IRS, and contracts for everything from oil and gas leases to research and weapons development.

Still, Texas and Texans can be as grating as fingernails running down a blackboard. And just because they can't secede doesn't mean we can't throw them out, does it?

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I see from this morning's news that all the financial pundits have their collective knickers in a twist about the fact that Americans' spending levels have gone up again, even though incomes have not. One consequence is that what we're saving has declined again, down to approximately 4 percent of income, though that figure is still twice as high as it has been for most of the past few decades. The pundits are wailing about Americans' bad habits and predicting the end of the world as we know it [hey--a little hyperbole is never out of order when being sarcastic.--Ed.].

I don't think it's any particular cause for alarm, and I want to know what world these pundits inhabit, because it certainly isn't the real one in which I and my fellow normal Americans live. It's simple, really. When times are hard, purchases are put off. I don't buy a new car just because my current car is 15 years old. I wait. But there comes a time when, no matter how bad my economic circumstances are, I can wait no longer. My car is no longer repairable, for any amount of money. So I go and buy another car (even if it's not brand new, it's new for me). So I'm putting myself back into a financial hole, but that hole would be twice as deep if I lacked dependable and reasonably safe transportation to and from my job (if I'm one of the ones lucky enough to still have one) or to and from job interviews (if I'm one of the too many who doesn't).

Frankly, it's no different from how people without health insurance are forced to live. Minor injuries and illnesses are ignored or given band-aids, and only when circumstances have gotten so bad that there's no other option will people go to the emergency room. This is not a good way to live. It's more costly to everyone in society in the long run than stopping problems while they are still minor and treatable would be. But when wages are stagnant, costs are rising, and those with the money and power are more concerned with maximizing their own comfort than in making society better for every one of its members, there really aren't other options.

Such are the consequences of letting those with the mentality of teenagers run the world.

O, Canada!

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I was half asleep, listening to (but not really watching) MSNBC's "Too Early" show this morning, when I heard what has to be the mother of all Olympic tie-ins. As part of its quest to bring us everything possible even remotely connected to the Vancouver Olympics, NBC's cable affiliate took a totally unscientific poll to discern who is the greatest Canadian of all time.

The suggestions apparently poured in. [There must be many, many more people awake at that hour than I can imagine.--Ed.] Neil Young made the list, as did the Canadian scientists/researchers who first developed insulin for human use (worthy nominees all). But according to MSNBC, the top three, in reverse order, are:

Bronze: Michael J. Fox
Silver: Dudley Do-Right
Gold: William Shatner

My eyes were now opened wide as I nearly fell out of bed, laughing. Any poll that has a lovable rascal, an animated naif, and the ultimate space cowboy as its top three is a poll whose results I can endorse!

Quick And Cogent Observations

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Observation the first: the governors of the fifty states have been meeting this weekend. Liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, they all seem to oppose the "intrusion" of the federal government into their lives and statehouses. I am not unsympathetic; I don't have a great deal of love or respect for unfunded federal mandates, myself.

However, I must take issue with the governors' assertion that the states are 50 laboratories which can each do experiments and find solutions for their own pressing problems. (What works best for West Virginia may not work best for Utah, as it were.) True enough, and tailored clothes always fit better than off-the-rack ones. But when it comes to issues like the problems with our current healthcare system, implementing 50 solutions is like shooting 50 BBs at a rampaging grizzly bear. Ain't gonna stop him--only gonna make him madder.

National problems require national solutions. In the case of healthcare reform, BBs won't work. Only high-powered rifle bullets will have any lasting effect. Besides, just because one is buying one's clothes off the rack, it doesn't mean that they don't fit or suit [pun intended--Ed.] their intended purpose. It just means one is wearing a brand-name and not a designer original.

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Observation the second: two weeks ago, an associate professor of politics at the University of Virginia, one Gerard Alexander, wrote an op-ed piece for the Washington Post wherein he decried the condescending attitude of liberals toward conservatives. As a female who follows certain sports diligently, I have been on the receiving end of condescension, and I agree, it's no way to behave. However, Prof. Alexander failed mightily to prove his point. He kept saying that conservatives have good ideas, but he didn't spell out any of them. Thus one must look to what other conservatives are saying to determine whether Alexander's point is well-taken, and in light of the healthcare reform debate alone, the paucity of Alexander's complaint becomes glaringly clear.

So far, the conservatives' "good ideas" consist of "death panels" (a/k/a "killing Grandma"), "socialized medicine," and "higher costs to you, the consumer." The size of the cost is a legitimate concern, but what the conservatives spouting that bit of "wisdom" fail to address is just how much higher the costs of doing nothing will be than will be the costs of doing something. "Death panels" and "socialized medicine" repeatedly have been shown to be outright lies. "Death panels" are what we have NOW, when corporations whose profits depend on denying coverage decide what level of care policyholders will get; "socialized medicine" is impossible under the current plan being debated, seeing as how it is a public "option." Nor does providing the public option put us inevitably on the road to socialized medicine. One would think that our over 40 years' experience with Medicare adequately demonstrates that.

One of the first things that law students learn is this hierarchy of argument: when you have the facts on your side, argue the facts. After all, facts are the strongest possible support for your case. When you don't have the facts, argue the law. Laws already on the books frequently bolster an argument that is unsupported by the facts, so it's the second-best line of attack. Only as a last resort should you make blatant emotional appeals, because resorting to the same demonstrates that you have neither the facts NOR the law on your side . . . and thus is an indication that you have no case.

Yet the conservatives in this country present their "ideas" in terms of distortions and even outright lies, as the second paragraph of this essay-in-miniature demonstrates. Their tactic of first--not last, but first--resort is to incite fear and anger. That's a blatant emotional appeal, which by its very existence proves that conservatives have no case (except their own greedy self-interest). It is hard not to be condescending toward that.

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Observation the third: I am beyond being sick unto death of conservatives claiming that only they love and revere the US Constitution, as the editor of The National Review [whose name escapes me at the moment. My apologies.--Ed.] claimed during the NPR broadcast of All Things Considered which aired locally last night (starting at 4 p.m. CST). I love and revere the Constitution just as much if not more than any of them. I daresay I know it better, too, having taught college-level courses on the history of same and having studied it as one of my fields of particular interest all my adult life.

What conservatives revere is their own interpretation of the Constitution, which is designed to protect and defend their own advantages, too often at the expense of the vast majority (by sheer numbers) of us in this country. Anyone who wants to pooh-pooh that idea must first consider this: if there were only one way to interpret the Constitution, we wouldn't NEED the Supreme Court at all, because there'd never be any disagreements about what the Constitution means and thus how it applies in any given situation.

And don't even get me started on "original intent." I've covered that ground before in this blog, in great depth and detail, so I will not bore you by repeating myself--at least not beyond saying that just because Shakespeare didn't know of, use, or even invent the term "psychological drama," it doesn't mean that he didn't write any.

The More Things Change, The More They Don't

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Even after absorbing the considerable wisdom of the analysis provided by the book What's the Matter with Kansas? and after factoring in my self-proclaimed status as both a Civil War buff and an Abraham Lincoln admirer, I knew I was missing something while trying to connect the dots of American history in my own mind. And then I saw a PBS rerun of Ken Burns' The Civil War. Specifically, I saw the episode wherein Shelby Foote [may he rest in peace--Ed.] explained why so many poor, landless, non-slave-owning whites fought for the Confederacy. In his sublimely subtle Southern drawl, Mr. Foote imagined a Confederate foot soldier talking to his Union counterpart: "Y'all came down here."

I had what can be described accurately only as a true "light-bulb" moment. The average Confederate couldn't care less about "Union," slavery, or any of the larger issues supposedly driving the war. He cared about feeling threatened, put-upon, literally invaded.

And so it occurs to me that even with all the technological and scientific and other advances humanity has made in the past 150 years, humans themselves have not changed--only their roles in society have. Land- and slave-owning Southern patricians have become corporate and banking CEOs (and other high-level managers); poor Confederate foot soldiers have become Tea Partiers; abolitionists have become political progressives . . . and we still have a tall, lanky, President from Illinois whose goals are larger and for the betterment of ALL of us, much more so than many of the country's citizens seem able to imagine.

OK, that last was a bit of a stretch, and said slightly tongue-in-cheek, but the general analogy holds. I don't know why I didn't consciously recognize it sooner. After all, I've been saying for decades that if we all had been alive 300 years ago, everyone on Wall Street would have been pirates.

Wait . . . What?!?

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An NPR report this morning confirms that Sarah Palin has been comparing the Tea Party movement to the US civil rights movement. So blacks (and whites) in the 1950s and 1960s who were beset by police attack dogs, blasted with fire hoses opened to full blast, jailed for politely asking that they be served in segregated lunch counters, bus stations, retail stores, and other establishments, and even murdered, are the spiritual forebears of a group that applauds Tom Tancredo for complaining that people who cannot spell "vote" helped elect President Obama? A group that seems to delight in "clever" name-calling ("Obamanation" anyone?) and which has nary a minority member amongst its adherents? A group that has full access to the political process in this country but is mad because it's no longer in power?

I can't decide whether to call on the spirit of George Orwell or the spirit of Lewis Carroll.

The Tea Party is not the spiritual heir of the battle for civil rights. The Tea Party doesn't want to expand the promise of America to cover all its citizens. The Tea Party is merely the current generation of the white supremacists who sicced the attack dogs and turned the fire hoses on the civil rights demonstrators forty-some years ago.

In a twisted way, then, Palin is right--she's just pointing to the wrong side of the historical equation. The Tea Party is actually the modern incarnation of the 19th century Know Nothing party, a group of xenophobic anti-immigration (and especially anti-Catholic) zealots who made a lot of noise but who, thankfully, amounted to not much. May the Tea Party suffer the same fate.

Grammar Police Redux

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A great many Republicans of late are taking umbrage at news reports regarding the victory of their own candidate, Scott Brown, in taking what has been called "Ted Kennedy's Senate seat." They are mightily offended that anyone suggest, imply, or flat-out say that that seat belonged to the late Senator Kennedy.

I suppose I should not be surprised that their inability to comprehend their own native tongue reflects the same rigid inflexibility they exhibit when "discussing" anything else. Nor should I be surprised that they are so willing to politicize something which, even though it's talking about politics, is NOT a political issue. So I am not surprised. But I am disenheartened. No one would be able to get away with making such stupid statements if we still had proper grammar education in our schools.

English is a prehensile language, and sometimes its ability to bend and flex and stretch causes problems. However, the lack of understanding that English can so bend and flex and stretch should never be the root of what has become a disinformation campaign. I don't know who is worse: the people who dropped grammar education from our standard curriculum, or the people who have cynically exploited that for their own nefarious purposes.

Yes, "Ted Kennedy's Senate seat" can, under one interpretation, mean "the seat owned by/belonging to" Ted Kennedy. HOWEVER, it also can mean "the seat most recently occupied by and identified with" Ted Kennedy. Furthermore, we all know journalism abhors both the passive voice ("something is done by someone" as opposed to "someone does something") and long, drawn-out sentences (why I'll never be a journalist, alas). Thus, "Ted Kennedy's Senate seat" is merely journalism's way of saying "the Senate seat most recently occupied by and identified with Ted Kennedy."

So I beg of you, those of you who are blathering on in protest about "Ted Kennedy's Senate seat," give it a rest, already! You're only making yourselves look foolish. Before you sound off again, please take a moment to consider Mark Twain's sage advice: better to keep your mouth shut and let people think you're an idiot than to open it and remove all doubt.

As The Stomach Churns, Part Two

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I have to admit, I find it shocking that people are defending the majority's decision in the Supreme Court's overturning yesterday of campaign-financing reform laws. Nevertheless, reading some of the comments published online in response to various news reports about the decision, it seems the American public is just as divided as was the Court. And that leaves me once again frightened for the future of not just America, the country, but America, the idea.

I take a backseat to no one in my devotion to the First Amendment. Anyone who knows me at all knows I am a thoroughgoing champion of free speech and the free press, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, and the right to petition the government. But anyone who knows me also knows that these freedoms do not include the right, for example, to yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater when there is no fire--for the danger to the public safety of inciting panic outweighs the individual's right to say what he likes willy-nilly. For the same reason, the Founding Fathers always knew and recognized [read the Federalist Papers if you don't believe me--Ed.] that what they were protecting was political speech. Commercial speech, the right to hawk one's goods, as it were, was never intended to get the same level of protection. Otherwise, we'd have no truth in advertising laws, and people who were damaged by lies such as "oh, this product is 100% safe" when the product was, in fact, toxic, would have no legal recourse. Then again, in the days before the publication of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, many people didn't care. What you don't know can't hurt you . . . except that it can, and frequently does.

But how anyone can equate a corporation with a living, breathing human being is utterly beyond me. We are the United States of America, not the United Corporations of America. Our system is "of the people, by the people, and for the people" not "of, by, and for the Corporation."

Corporations do not have the right to cast ballots in either primary or general elections. Corporations exist to make profits for their owners. They have no other raison d'etre. They do not care about right and wrong, good and bad, or any of the other higher concerns that motivate individual people. Corporations are at best amoral, artificial creatures, which do not exist outside the laws governing their creation and operation. Their behavior thus can be regulated according to the public will. Their only stake in our system of government is to do whatever they can within the law to minimize risk and maximize profit.

But they do have an inordinate amount of money to throw around, and that raw economic power alone puts them in opposition to being regulated by government. After all, when they can make an extra $10 per toy, for example, if they don't have to ensure that said toy is lead-free, they will not spend the money to make the toy lead-free . . . unless an outside regulatory force, government, makes them do so.

Government exists to do the things we as individuals cannot do for ourselves. In its own way, it's "the cost-effective" option. Better for us, as individuals, to have one government agency out there to test and regulate toys for lead content than to force every family in the country to buy lead-testing kits along with every single new toy. We ARE the government. Government is not our enemy. It is our agent, our collective representative. Its raison d'etre is to protect our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Corporations are not alive; they are not free (they don't exist except within the context of the laws); and happiness is NOT their pursuit. Their pursuit is to make money. The most money for the least possible cost. Period.

These are facts. They cannot be disputed. I concede that the implications of these facts are disputed, but too often the dispute is not about the merits of whatever is at issue. The dispute too often becomes a cover for expression of one's personal political proclivities at the expense of genuine discussion and debate. For example, the vast majority of the people posting comments supporting the Court's majority ruling takes a very bullying, schoolyard tone. Most of those people's comments do not rise above the level of name-calling and insulting those with whom they disagree. That alone suggests that those people are in the wrong, for if the facts are on your side, you should be stressing the facts, not making personal attacks on anyone else.

To all you who wrote in favor of the majority's ruling: you who say that this is a great victory for the First Amendment and truly free speech, and who believe that the Internet will protect the full expression and circulation of all ideas, are forgetting something: if the corporate owners of your access to the Internet decide to pull the plug, what will you do then?

Money in politics is like steroids in sports--especially baseball--it distorts everything in favor of those who have the most clout. Again, corporations are not people; corporations do not vote. What if all the shareholders but one in a corporation dislike the position the corporation has chosen to support financially, but the one shareholder has the controlling vote? The controlling shareholder thus essentially gets double expression of his idea since he can express it through his individual vote AND through the corporation's spending. All the other shareholders can cast their individual votes otherwise, but if the one shareholder, through his corporation's money's clout, has the ear of the people in office, they're going to listen to him, not the other shareholders. For they know that if they don't listen to him, he'll put his money and resources at the disposal of their political opponents. "Pay to play" and "get paid to play" will become the norm, not standing up for the larger public good.

If you disagree with this analysis, fine, but answer me this: if my analysis is so wrong, so off-the-beam, why do corporations spend millions and millions of dollars every day on lobbyists and advertising? Because lobbying and advertising work. Jane and John Q. Public's voices can hardly be heard above the din of all the money that's in the system now. Removing the few regulations that were in place until yesterday's ruling means the silencing of Jane and John for good. Maybe not in one fell swoop, but ultimately . . . what do they say in Las Vegas? "Money plays."

Money plays. Money wins. No longer will the best ideas win because of their intrinsic merits. The best ideas will never even get heard. The ideas that win will be the ideas that have the most money behind them. Furthermore, it is error to presume that getting tons of financial support is a sign of being the best idea. It is a sign only of the idea which is in the best interests of those with the most money to spend, which may be antithetical to the best interests of you and of me, we who are supposed to be the beneficiaries of the system.

I was afraid this would happen back when the Court announced it would hear the case. I even wrote about it in this blog. See "Overshadowed In Yesterday's News," posted 9/10/09. I will say at this point that I am sick to death of the way EVERYTHING has become politicized in this country. Some things ought to be bigger than politics, and the fact that nothing any longer is saddens me. Maybe "America" cannot work, for the very freedoms it protects enable the seeds of its own destruction to sprout and grow. For my part, 99% of the hope I felt at this time last year has gone right down the drain.

To conclude with a bit of hyperbole: this Supreme Court ruling truly is the worst thing to happen to people as individuals since the Dred Scott case, for in effect, it makes you and me and every other person who is not a CEO or CFO de facto chattel of those who are. Not all at once, mind you. Just after our access to all ideas has been so squeezed and so circumscribed by those with the money, hence the power, to press incessantly for their points of view that we will be anesthetized or otherwise beaten into submission.

Still, in every "good" there is a "bad," and vice versa. At least the lie that "conservative" justices hew to "original intent" has been put to death once and for all. This ruling is activist in the extreme. Radical, I daresay. Not that that matters to the right-wingers who insist on politicizing everything. As far as they are concerned, it's only "activism" when they disagree with the outcome. Anyone with intellectual honesty and integrity, however, must admit that "activism" is "activism." It's only bad when it takes us (collectively, as a society) backwards and not forwards.