Brother Thomas

Lessons in Power -- Washington Style

2017-03-24T15:22:00.002-07:00

Too many people do not understand power or authority.

They too often think that power comes from a title. They too often think that authority comes from a position granted by others. They do not understand that power and authority comes from one's ability to get the people who work for or with you to do the things you want.

And to get those people on board one must have a vision, and one must be able to get others to believe in that vision. If the buy-in is low, the results often are even lower.

Donald Trump and Paul Ryan just ran into that reality.

Let's take Donald "The Closer" Trump first. The co-author of "The Art of the Deal" thought that every deal he made was based on his personal prowess. He was The Donald and everyone, especially real estate people and bankers, wanted to work with him. He was the brash, high-profile scion of real estate, the marble and gilded king, a man of billion-dollar deals.

That many of his creditors had to fight for 10 cents on the dollar after he filed multiple bankruptcies was not important. Being a part of The Donald's orbit was enough. After all, financial losses can be hidden in balance sheets or slipped into a tax return as a loss and, thereby, a tax deduction that allows one to pay a lower tax rate than a secretary making $35,000 a year.

Style -- even when it is gauche -- trumps substance. (Please pardon the pun.)

Then there is Ryan, an Ayn Rand devotee.

Ryan thinks PowerPoint presentations, an unctuous frat-boy smile, and the ability to talk -- okay I'll just say it -- bullshit makes a thinker. And when the media is desperately looking for a conservative intellectual, even a lightweight will do.

But then comes reality Washington style. Being a bully, thinking that everyone wants to be your friend when several of the people you are dealing with have egos larger than yours, and they believe that you are where you are because they gave too much credence to political polls . . . . well guess what? They do not have to work with you.

You think you can threaten me? Bring it. I know my rubes better than you do.

Oh, you think that fooling a lot of liberal pundits and reporters into thinking you are a budget genius makes me kowtow to you? Think again because I know your Wisconsin rubes as well as I know my rubes.

And I'm in a safe district. Are you?

So Donald "The Closer" Trump and Paul (I Really don"t care health plan) Ryan discovered that in Washington everyone is a self appointed king who does not have to listen to anyone.

Today, Trump and Ryan were given a lesson in the fact that one can only bully the fearful. But will that lesson sink in?

A Multiple Choice Test for America

2017-03-24T07:38:00.001-07:00

If one is still not convinced of the cruelty and mendacity of Republicans today, then one is:

A) Complicit in the GOP's madness
B) Not paying attention
C) Delusional beyond hope
D) Suffering from anosognosia
E) All of the above.

This week proved it more than ever when Republicans, who had campaigned on repealing Obamacare when they were the minority; decided to "repeal and replace" when they took over both chambers of Congress and the White House; postponed a vote on the American Health Care Act on Thursday so Donald "The Closer" Trump could seal the deal, and withdrew the bill on Friday when it was obvious that defeat was at hand.

Simply, the cruelty of the Republican bill was too much for some moderate members of that party, and not severe enough for some of its conservative members. That the bill would have placed too many grandmothers, grandfathers, fathers, mothers, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, cousins, children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren at risk was not enough to stop the Paul Ryan express.

And that is the problem. Though this effort faced its own death panel, other efforts may live on and may be successful.

Ryan, the Republican House Speaker from Wisconsin, offered up the AHCA with great fanfare, even providing his customary PowerPoint to impress the media and the American people.

If the AHCA is passed, Ryan promised, Americans would be free of the yoke of the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare as Republicans derisively call the former president's heath-care insurance plan. Medicaid would be block granted, and the mandate to purchase insurance would be lifted from those who have been harmed by the socialist overreach of Barack Hussein Obama.

Of course, anyone with critical literacy or critical thinking skills knows that to be untrue.

The AHCA is nothing more than a vicious manifestation of Republican desires to make heath care a privilege, not a right. Under the plan announced by Ryan, as many as 14 million people would lose health care in the first year of the plan, according to scoring by the Congressional Budget Office. That number would shoot up to 24 million within a decade, the office concluded. In addition, the cost of health insurance would have jumped 500 percent for the elderly.

The Congressional Budget Office lists many other problems with the Ryan-doesn't-really-care plan.

Yet, while nearly everyone -- from doctors, to hospitals, to citizens, to AARP -- trashed the AHCA, Republicans tried to force it through the House of Representatives, claiming the AHCA would dramatically reduce how much Americans pay for health insurance. (That is probably the one thing that is true about the program: Many Americans will realize those much-vaunted premium savings because they will not have to pay premiums after losing their policies.)

So when discussing the AHCA on the Sunday talk shows, Democrat after Democrat attacked the Republican plan while many in the GOP applauded the speaker's bold action. Too be fair, some Republicans, particularly those in the Senate who hail from state's that expanded Medicaid, voiced concerns about increased costs and benefit reductions for the elderly and poor. Many Republicans, though, cheered the proposed destruction of Medicaid, as well as the gutting of government subsidies to buy insurance. The complaint of the Freedom Caucus was that Ryancare was not draconian enough.

The level of glee at denying millions of people health-care coverage -- along with the conflation that is the Republican standard -- was mind boggling.

On one show on MSNBC, for example, the host brought on a Republican party official from North Carolina and a Democratic strategist to discuss the plan. As one would expect each echoed the talking points of his party.

Where the breakdown really occurred was when the North Carolina Republican proclaimed the AHCA as a great thing because it would allow states to determine who was eligible for Medicaid and would once again increase the support that private charities give to the poor.

To make his point, the North Carolina Republican cited the way the people of the Raleigh-Durham area pulled together to help those affected by a large fire in downtown Raleigh..

The host of the show then became complicit with Republican mendacity and cruelty. Instead of deconstructing that Republican assertion, he quickly moved on to a different question.

North Carolina was one of the state's that did not expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. That means that tens -- if not hundreds -- of thousands of people who might have gotten health insurance that could have lead to care that could have saved their lives were left uninsured. So how did that work out for poor people in that state?

In addition, while people may be quick to respond to a one-off tragedy such as a fire in the heart of a city, it is another thing to expect that same community to respond each and every day to the tragedies facing those without health-care insurance. Imagine the massive undertaking that would be needed for a community to help just 100 families with their medical needs. It could easily overwhelm and drain that community's resources.

That is when the Federal government is supposed to step in. Spreading that costs across the nation through taxes helps all Americans. Yes, some people will be better off than others under such a system. But isn't that what insurance is all about?

A healthy young man or woman might lose on some levels because each may not use their insurance that much. The upside is that by sharing the burden of costs a family that is struggling or an elderly person with greater health needs may have a chance to live longer because of medical care.

Suggesting or hoping that the local church, VFW, Kiwanis Club, Moose Lodge, or any other civic organization should carry such a burden everyday is to expect too much, particularly in light of The Closer's proposal to cut funding from Meals on Wheels.In many towns and cities across America, those charitable organizations are already overwhelmed by the need to feed families, some of whom include working adults.

We are not a small country, and when one realizes the size and diverse needs of America one begins to realize that small government just does not cut it. People come to accept that fact when their community is hit by a natural disaster and the federal government redistributes wealth by sending federal dollars through FEMA to help people rebuild their lives.

Luckily many people, including some Trump voters, are waking up to these facts, albeit slowly. Now they must answer another pressing question: When the 2018 midterm elections arrive I will:

A) Register to vote and register my family and friends
B) Vote in my congressional, state, and local elections
C) Fight efforts to roll back programs that help those who need help the most
D) Oust morally corrupt legislators
E) All of the above.

When the Dog Catches the Car

2017-03-07T19:13:00.001-08:00

When it comes to Republicans one has to wonder just how stupid stupid is. Who knew creating a health care program was so complicated, Donald Trump asked recently. Considering we are only in March and we are talking about Republicans, I am quite sure that stupid is more stupid than we thought because anyone paying attention over the last seven years knew creating a health care plan is extremely complicated.

Which is what the Republicans in Congress are finally discovering. Their plan to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare as GOP leaders like to say, shows that ignorance, stupidity, and hypocrisy knows no bounds when it comes to Republicans and their voters.

Yes, I know we are being told by liberal pundits and others that we liberals should not assail Trump voters, that we should not anger them any more than we have with out elitist views. We should, as the pundits like to say, separate the voters from the candidate and his buffoonery in an effort to bridge the gap that keeps so much of America divided. We must embrace the pain of the white working-class. Criticism of that forgotten America just drives them closer to the Trumps of the world.

Well, making nice with such people will not be easy. They asked for this, and they now have what they have desired for years.

Consider that Kentucky, for example, elected two Republicans to the U.S. Senate, both of whom declared that they would vote to repeal Obamacare. The people who sent Rand Paul and Mitch McConnell to Washington want Obamacare repealed, in part because many of them see it as socialism run amok. Those voters hate Obama and Obamacare.

Yet, they embrace the Affordable Care Act, which gave many Kentucky voters insurance for the first time in their lives. That the Affordable Care Act and Obamacare are one in the same somehow escaped those voters for years.

Kentucky, when it had a Democratic governor, created a very efficient and effective state health portal for those seeking health insurance. The state chose to expand its Medicaid program, and its workers signed up thousands of people who never had health care coverage..

So what did Kentucky voters do?

They elected a Republican governor who is pushing to make the Affordable Care Act and Kentucky's state of the art heath insurance web portal as ineffective as possible. They re-elected McConnell to the Senate. Now many of those same voters fear they will lose their newly obtained health care coverage.

You can't make this stuff up. The Republicans are set to give those Kentucky -- and all the other Republican -- voters what they have been clamoring for for years: A repeal of Obamacare.

The House plan released Monday shows that while Republicans knew how to use a hatred of Obama and Obamacare to generate votes, they have no idea of how to create a health care plan that will not result in millions of people losing insurance or finding themselves unable to afford coverage, putting much of the nation back where it was in those dark days before Obamacare.

It is not just in Kentucky.

Republicans across the country voted again and again for men and women who promised to kill Obamacare. Yet, those voters are now wondering how a loss of Obamacare will affect them and their loved ones. Will Nana be able to stay in her nursing home if Medicaid is block granted? Will I be able to afford my health insurance if my government subsidy is only $3,000 a year?

The list of questions go on and on. The answers are simple.

If Republican legislators have their way Nana will not be able to stay in her nursing home, and you will not be able to afford health care coverage. So be thankful. You are getting what you wanted since the Affordable Care Act was passed in 2010.

The so-called socialism that is Obamacare will be decimated under the GOP plan released Monday by Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. Subsidies to working class families will be cut dramatically. The wealthy will get the biggest breaks. Medicaid will eventually be slashed under block granting.

And that is just the tip of the iceberg.

Republican legislators show a total disdain for helping the American people, and they do so under the guise of protecting "freedom."

Affordable health insurance for all Americans is not a right, according to Republicans, but a privilege. If a person wants health coverage, especially someone who is not well off, then that person needs to get rid of his or her iPhone to pay for health insurance. In the world of Republicans everything is a trade off in which the only people who should get government help are the people who need it the least.

Luckily, some Republicans, including Senators Rob Portman of Ohio, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, Cory Gardner of Colorado, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, have assailed the House "replacement" plan because of its threat to Medicaid, which was expanded in their states.

But others, such as Paul and Mike Lee of Utah, attacked the House plan as not being draconian and heartless enough. Paul labeled the House plan "Obamacare lite." Other conservatives called it "Obamacare 2.0."

The Koch brothers and their network of billionaire sponsored "grassroots" organizations are set to attack the Republican plan as not going far enough to stamp out the socialism of Obamacare. The Heritage Foundation, the organization that came up with the individual mandate and created the blueprint that became Romneycare and later Obamacare, has already gone on the attack in hopes of destroying any remnants of the plan it created as an alternative to Hillarycare in the 1990s.

Of course much of this may be a way for Republicans to provide coverage for those members who now realize it was easier to promise a repeal of Obamacare when there was no chance of it happening than it is to actually come up with a replacement plan that does not harm constituents.

Either way there are some basic things we must remember. The year is less than three months old, and the ignorance, stupidity, and hypocrisy of Republicans and their voters will be on full display for some time to come.

The Not so Newsey News Analysis

2017-02-19T16:18:00.001-08:00

I am a fan of The New York Times. After all, I worked there for nearly nine years.

But there are some stories The Times does that send me over the top.

"Are Liberals Helping Trump," a news analysis that appeared on The Times' website on Saturday was one of those articles.

According to the analysis, the upsurge in anti-Trump protests since the inauguration is pushing "moderate conservatives" who voted for Trump closer to him.

"We're backed into a corner," Jeffrey Medford, a 46-year-old owner of a small business in South Carolina, told the analysis' author, Sabrina Tavernise. "There are at least some things about Trump that I find defensible. But they are saying: 'Agree with us 100 percent or you are morally bankrupt. You're an idiot if you support any part of Trump."

He later told Tavernise: "I didn't choose a side. They put me on one."

Bryce Youngquist, a 34-year-old salesman at a tech start-up in Mountain View Calif., said of liberals:

"They are complaining that Trump calls people names, but they turned into some mean people."

Youngquist told Tavernise that when he finally admitted to his friends that he supported Trump they attacked him as being a "disgusting human being."

"They were making me want to support him more with how irrational they were being," he said. "The name calling from the left is crazy."

Ann O'Connell, a 72-year-old retired administrative assistant in Syracuse who said she voted for Bill Clinton twice, said she drifted from the Democratic Party because she felt it had moved away from its middle-class economic roots toward identity politics.

"I don't have a problem with protesting as long as it's peaceful, but this is destroying the country," she said. "I feel like we are in some kind of civil war right now. I know people don't like to use those terms. But I think it's scary."

She went on to say of liberal protestors: "These people are destroying our democracy. They are scarier to me than these Islamic terrorists. I feel absolutely disgusted with them and their antics. It strengthens people's resolve in wanting to support Trump. It really does."

That Medford, Youngquist, and O'Connell are disgusted with liberals does not bother me. That their responses to liberal protests is to double down on their conservativism does not bother me. The truth is I expect such a reaction.

What bothers me is that there is little evidence that Tavernise pushed the three on why they voted for Trump in the first place, or whether they felt the same way when conservatives attacked President Barack Obama, calling him a closet Muslim and saying he was not born in the United States.

For eight years, conservative trolls referred to liberals as ‘libetards.” They called the President and First Lady apes. A Republican screamed “You lie” at President Obama during a State of the Union address. And of course there were the Tea Party protests.

Were these “moderate conservatives” upset at the protests and attacks from conservatives when it was directed at Obama? If they can't defend Trump now, then why did they vote for him? Are they upset at Trump's tendency to lie? Do they have questions about his possible conflicts-of-interest? Do they think it was okay for Trump not to release his taxes? How can "moderate conseratives," who called Hillary Clinton a crook, justify voting for a man who thinks its good business not to pay the owners of small businesses money he owes? Is there doubling-down a defense mechanism for voting for an unfit candidate for President?

We won’t know reading Tavernise’s analysis.

Rising Anger in Trumpland

2017-02-19T15:01:00.000-08:00

It was possibly one of the most idiotic things a Republican has said so far in this age of Trump.

After being assailed by people afraid of losing their health insurance if the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, is repealed, Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin Republican, complained of “organized opposition by people who were on the losing side of the election.”

No shit Sherlock.

Who else is going to complain? The people who won?

“Oh god, I am so peeved that my candidate won because now he can do everything he promised.”
People who win do not complain. They celebrate. They take victory laps. They spike the ball in the end zone.

People who lose get angry. They protest. They organize other people. They show up at town hall meetings with lots of questions.

And when you threaten to take away the one thing that keeps them or a loved one alive they get into your “grill,” as Rep. Dave Brat, a Virginia Republican, discovered not too long ago.

It is a basic tenet of the First Amendment, the right of the people to seek redress from government, to protest as individuals or as groups. To organize. Lamenting that such people are organized does not silence their voices, nor does it negate the legitimacy of their grievances.

Americans, particularly many of the roughly 73 million people who voted against Donald Trump in November, are angry, and they have every right to be so. Not because Trump won although the majority of Americans who voted chose a candidate other than him.

No.

They are rightly angry because his election has removed the only bulwark against a mob of faux patriots who believe the U.S. Constitution exists simply for their pleasure.

The voices of those angry people have risen to show their displeasure with the Boob-in-Chief. They have fought efforts to marginalize women and minorities, to place a back door ban on Muslim immigration.

Mostly they have raised their voices in chorus against efforts to kill the Affordable Care Act.

Brat, a former economics professor who defeated House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in the 2014 Republican primary, was taken aback when he was accosted by women terrified of losing their health insurance.

“Since Obamacare and these issues have come up, the women are in my grill wherever I go,” Brat told a gathering of local conservatives in Virginia. “They come up to me and go, 'When's the next town hall?' And believe me, it's not to give positive input.”

Other Republicans are experiencing the same reaction.

“If I could give you an answer today, I would, but I can’t,” Sensenbrenner told a questioner at his town-hall-style meeting at the Pewaukee Public Library.

Rep. Tom McClintock of California needed a police escort after his meeting, and Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah faced a crowd of 1,000 people, many of them shouting “Do your job.” Things have become so tense that House Republicans were recently advised on security precautions at their meetings and district offices.

Others, such as Rep. Kevin Brady of Houston and Rep. Mike Coffman of Denver, faced similar audiences.

But such encounters are not enough.

Each protest should include voter registration drives and tips on how to keep people engaged until 2018.

Based on Republican talking points, we also can expect an assault on laws that protect us from a predatory financial class; an assault on Social Security; on women’s health; on voting rights; on public education.

The lists goes on and on. Assaults on everything that progressives hold dear. And that is the true threat to our democracy – attacks on progress by small minded men and women in Congress who want a nation this continuously looks back not forward.

Where's Les McCann When We Need Him?

2015-02-06T11:13:00.001-08:00

Whenever I hear a Republican speak these days I have a serious Les McCann moment.

You know the one that McCann, along with Eddie Harris, gave the world at the 1969 Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland.

"I love the lie and lie the love/A-hangin' on, with push and shove/Possession is the motivation that is hangin' up/The God-damn nation looks like we always end up in a rut (everybody now!)/Tryin' to make it real -- compared to what."

Since Jan. 20, 2009, Republicans have repeatedly shown that they are a callous and irksome lot that loves the lie. Don't simply take my word. Look at the GOP's six-year policy of obstructionism that was hatched as Barack Obama was being sworn in as the nation's 44th president.

For years Republicans lied about the President's economic policies and the Affordable Care Act, saying each would destroy the economy. Now that we have seen more than 50 months of steady job growth -- 3.1 million jobs in 2014 alone -- since 2011, a drop in the unemployment rate to below 6 percent, records set on the stock market, soaring profits by the nation's major corporations, and GPD growth we haven't had since before 2008, Republicans seek to take the credit, saying it was the anticipation of a Republican takeover of Congress this year that pushed the economy forward. Of course, they still lie about the Affordable Care Act and their so-called replacement plan, which seeks to gut the ACA and would leave millions of Americans without health insurance -- again.

But if those six years of Republican "no's" and obstructionism in Congress are not enough then look at the actions of the Republican party since it expanded its majority in the House of Representatives and took control of the Senate after the 2014 midterm elections. One can also look at the actions of Republican governors and state legislatures around the country. Whether it is the doubling down of broken fiscal and tax policies in Kansas, Wisconsin, or Louisiana, the ridiculous comments of state legislators on what constitutes rape, or efforts to further destroy unions, the evidence is there.

Let's look at Congress first. After six years of making Congress as dysfunctional as possible and lowering its favorability rating to single-digits at various times by shutting down the government, playing brinksmanship with the debt ceiling, and blocking all meaningful legislation, the first bills the newly empowered Republican majorities voted in the House and Senate do nothing to break the logjam of do-nothingness in Congress or help the American people who continue to face economic hardship six years after the economy collapsed.

Instead, they have voted to put the Federal Government on the hook again for reckless banking practices that the Dodd-Frank financial regulations sought to curb; have voted to repeal or alter the Affordable Care Act for the 56th time; pushed through a law that would thwart Obama's actions to block the unnecessary Keystone XL pipeline project; have voted that future analysis of tax bills should use a questionable formula that would make all tax cuts seem good; and have added a poison pill to the Department of Homeland Security funding bill in an effort to block the President's executive order granting a reprieve to immigrants whose parents brought them into the country illegally as children.

Oh yeah, we also have a Republican U.S. Senator who says restaurants should be able to "opt-out" of the requirement that employees must wash their hands after using the restrooms, and several so-called Republican doctors who equivocate on the importance of vaccinations to stem preventable diseases that have the potential to kill.

And that is just the tip of the iceberg.

We also have several Republican governors doubling down on failed tax and fiscal policies that have stymied economic growth in their states and have blown large holes in their budgets. With the 2016 presidential election season already in progress, Republicans have said that the next president should be a governor, someone with executive experience.

Yet, a look at those Republican governors gives us Bobby Jindal whose home state is facing a $1.6 billion budget hole this year and in the foreseeable years because of tax cuts, budget gimmicks, one-shots, and a drop in oil prices; Scott Walker whose home state faces so large a budget gap that he plans to cut about $300 million from the state's vaunted public college system; Rick Scott who faces multiple claims of ethics violations, the most recent for allegedly firing the top state law-enforcement official investigating the governor for wrongdoing; Chris Christie -- a bellicose, bullying, buffoon -- who has more scandals and junkets from businessmen than any other governor should ever have and still be walking free; and Jeb Bush who we now know was a hashish smoking alleged bully who wants other people's kids incarcerated for something that he did and seemed to enjoy as a teenager.

To add further insult, Republican-led state legislatures are filled with "whacko birds" that have no idea of what constitutes rape. According to one Republican state legislator, while rape of a woman is ugly, it becomes less ugly if the woman gets pregnant. Then there is the Republican legislator who wonders why it is considered rape to have sex with an unconscious woman.

And we can't forget the religious right, which is trying to change state laws to make discrimination legal as long as one can cite religious belief. Yes, Les McCann was right.

"Church on Sunday, sleep and nod/Tryin to duck the wrath of God/Preachers fillin' us with fright/They all tryin' to teach us what they think is right/They really have to be some kind of nut (I can't use it!)/Tryin to make it real -- compared to what."

Time for the Leaders to Lead

2014-12-22T10:28:00.000-08:00

The tragic shooting deaths of two New York City police officers in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn over the weekend is a grim reminder of how America has lost its way, allowing hatred, partisanship, and revenge to overwhelm tolerance, cooperation, and reason.

Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos were sitting in their car near Myrtle and Tompkins Avenues when Ismaaiyl Brinsley fired several shots without warning. Police and city officials called the attack an assassination.

Patrick Lynch, the head of the Police Benevolent Association, said it was a sign of how Mayor Bill de Blasio had made police a target. Others shot disdainful looks at President Barack Obama, U.S. Attorney Eric Holder, the Rev. Al Sharpton, and the tens of thousands of protesters who have expressed outrage after several incidents in which white police officers have killed unarmed black men and children without facing charges.

Regrettably, very few people in positions of authority noted or took stock of the violence that permeates our society at a time when crime is steadily declining. That Brinsley was armed with a misguided grudge, a silver Taurus 9-millimeter handgun, and a history of mental issues was ignored during the effort to score rhetorical points.

Take Lynch for example. The head of the NYPD's largest police union was quick to say that the officers' blood "starts on the steps of City Hall" in general and "in the office of the mayor" in particular. He also lead a protest in which police officers turned their backs on the mayor at the hospital where the officers were pronounced dead.

Others have warned that the shootings of the two officers, both of whom are being mourned by their family, friends, fellow officers, and the citizenry, were acts of war.

According to a message attributed to police, but which the PBA denies issuing, the NYPD has become "a 'wartime' police department."

"We will act accordingly," the missive declared.

Meanwhile, a who's who of reactionary Republican politicians from former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to former New York Gov. George Pataki to U.S. Sen. Lindsay Graham of South Carolina, assailed de Blasio for expressing support for the rights of protesters, saying he had created a dangerous climate for police officers by indulging lawlessness.

Ignored, of course, is a very basic truth: when police and civilians do not trust each other, do not work together, do not seek common ground then we are all in danger. And when those who are supposed to lead retreat to their partisan rhetorical corners nothing will ever be accomplished.

Let us understand some very simply things. America has married the worship of guns to a delegitimizing of authority -- an authority often steeped in abuse and overreach. Because Brinsley allegedly cited the deaths of Eric Garner in Staten Island and Michael Brown in Ferguson as reasons for his rampage, few people are looking at the things that are at the heart of such violence.

The deaths of Officers Liu and Ramos are not the manifestation of protests against excessive police abuse. Nor are their deaths the desired result that most people sought in voicing their displeasures with police actions. Their deaths can be tied to a mental health system that is almost non-existent, our gun culture, the inability to see each other's humanity, the rationalization of excessive violence in the name of safety, and on and on and on.

When James Eagan Holmes opened fire in a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., on July 20, 2012, conservatives, Republicans, and the National Rifle Association went to great lengths to blame the violence on a single twisted mind, arguing that those deaths had nothing to do with lax gun policies and over the top rhetoric that adulated guns. The same occurred when Adam Lanza killed 26 innocent children in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14, 2012.

We heard it again when many defended the torture of prisoners by the Central Intelligence Agency, and others decided that Garner died not because of pressure applied to his throat and chest, but because he was obese and had asthma.

The humanity of those who died was denied.

For example, in making his claims that the citizenry hates the police, Lynch failed to recognize that it was the mother of Brinsley's shooting victim in Baltimore who sought to help police find him, and it was two civilians who followed an armed and dangerous Brinsley to the subway station so as to point him out to police.

Members of a society that hates police do not take such action. Yes, there are those who in their ignorance will rejoice in the officers' deaths. Such people are not reflective of society. Many people in this country have either friends or relatives who are police officers, and those people worry each night if those loved ones will return home.

It is the same with civilians who wonder if their parents, siblings, relatives, and friends will make it home at night, who fear that a life can be easily snuffed by a person puffed on his or her own sense of authority.

It is why everyone who seeks to end or to at least curb the violence must speak up.

So far, it has been the protesters and the families of those who have suffered the most at the hands of the violence that have been the most reasonable.

"I hope and pray that we can reflect on this tragic loss of life that has occurred so that we can move forward and find an amicable path to a peaceful coexistence," Lucy Ramos, an aunt of Officer Rafael Ramos, said late Sunday afternoon.

"An act of violence is against humanity," Carmen Perez, a co-founder of Justice League NYC, told The New York Times in an interview. "It's not mutually exclusive. We can mourn Eric Garner and the two officers. It's O.K. to do that."

Indeed it is.

"We need to use the pain that all of us are experiencing and turn it into purpose," Eric Adams, a former NYPD captain and current Brooklyn borough president, said, adding that "calling for police reform is not a call for harm of police officers."

Adams' words reflect the reasonable response that many seek and the city so desperately needs. To question police department tactics and policies is not to attack police.

The problem is that for too many anything short of total capitulation and admiration of the police is an attack on the nation's men and women in blue.

But somewhere along the line, the good police and the good citizens have to come to grips with a fundamental truth: As long as the bad guys operate with impunity, regardless of whether they are police officers or rogue citizens, all of us are in danger.

And no amount of partisan rhetoric will change that.

The Insanity of America's Cuba Policy

2014-12-17T14:15:00.001-08:00

Insanity, people say, is doing something the same way over and over, and expecting different results. That also has been the definition of United States policy toward Cuba, and those who have sought to maintain that misdirected policy.

For a little more than half a century America has waged an economic war against the island nation and its people in an effort to topple the Castro regime. It hasn't worked. Fidel Castro, who stepped down as President in 2008, outlasted 10 U.S. presidents before turning power over to his younger brother, Raul. Still, too many political hacks have wanted to stick with the same outdated and unproductive policies toward Cuba. They were unable or unwilling to recognize that something different was needed.

President Barack Obama finally made the correct decision for them: On Wednesday, Dec. 17, 2014, he announced the United States would seek to normalize diplomatic relations with Cuba. Under the agreement, the United States will open an embassy in Havana, and Obama will call for the lifting of the Cuban embargo. In addition, Cuba released Alan Gross, who had been imprisoned there for 5 years, and another man who had been imprisoned for nearly 20 years. The United States released three Cubans convicted of espionage. (Early reports of the agreement also suggested that Cuba would release more than 50 political prisoners.)

"We will end an outdated approach that for decades has failed to advance our interests and instead we will begin to normalize relations between our two countries," Obama said. "These 50 years have shown that isolation has not worked. It's time for a new approach."

Obama's noon announcement from the White House was met with the usual hand wringing, hyperbole, and kvetching.

Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida blasted Obama's actions as "another concession to tyranny," and vowed that he and other Republicans would do all in their power to thwart Obama's efforts, particularly any efforts to roll back the economic embargo.

"This whole new policy is based on an illusion, on a lie, the lie and the illusion that more commerce and access to money and goods will translate to political freedom for the Cuban people. All this is going to do is give the Castro regime, which controls every aspect of Cuban life, the opportunity to manipulate these changes to stay in power," the Cuban-American senator said -- as if the Castro government was set to fall any minute now.

Democrat Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey was just as opposed. "Let's be clear," said Menendez, who is Cuban-American, "this was not a 'humanitarian' act by the Castro regime. It was a swap of convicted spies for an innocent American. President Obama's actions have vindicated the brutal behavior of the Castro government."

Republican presidential wannabe Jeb Bush said Obama was rewarding the Castro brothers' "heinous" behavior, a remarkable comment considering it was Jeb's brother who defiled America's reputation abroad through mendacity, torture, and an unjustified, decades-long war in Iraq.

Of course the irony and hypocrisy of the criticisms are lost on Republicans, many of whom have spent the last week or so defending the torture methods used during George W. Bush's administration. According to Republicans, Obama's overtures to Cuba are misguided because the Castro brothers preside over a corrupt and totalitarian government that does not respect democratic principles.

That should sound very familiar to the party that added a possible bailout of the nation's six largest banks in a must pass budget bill; shut down the federal government to get its way; oversaw a sweeping expansion of government spying on its own citizens; passed laws that made it harder for people to vote; seeks to deny women control over their own bodies; pushes a conservative Christian theocracy in a nation founded on the principles of the separation of church and state; is shamelessly in the pockets of corporate America, particularly the Koch brothers; seeks to deny health care to poor Americans; and justifies police killings of unarmed black men by saying its black people's fault police are killing them.

Nonetheless, many Cuban-Americans in Union City, N.J., and Miami showed muted enthusiasm. While many of the older generation lamented that nothing will change for Cubans until the Castro brothers were gone, many in the younger generation were delighted that the United States and their homeland would move toward normalization.

As they should be.

The issues that have kept this country from correcting a five-decade old wrong are dying with many of those who fled Cuba after Fidel's fighters moved from the mountains into the Presidential Palace.

Surveys by Gallup since 1999 show a shift in how Americans view Cuba, with a majority -- ranging from 55 percent to 71 percent at any given time -- favoring normalizing diplomatic relations. Among Cuban-Americans, support for normalization ran as high as 79 percent in Florida and 73 percent nationwide. A similar poll by Florida International University found that 68 percent of Cuban Americans favor normalized diplomatic relations, while 69 percent want travel restrictions relaxed, and 52 percent want the embargo lifted, according to an article published on The Atlantic's web site. In addition, the old Cold War complaint that Cuba is a communist country no longer carries the same weight considering U.S. relations with Russia, China, and Vietnam.

That so many Americans would want an end to an economic war on a country whose most serious crime appears to have been an association with this country's worst Cold War enemy has not moved Republicans.

"I would argue that, instead of lifting the embargo, we should consider strengthening it," Jeb Bush said in a speech earlier this month. According to The Miami Herald, "the crowd of donors, the backbone of Cuba's exiled elite, applauded loudly."

But not loud enough to drown out the calls for America to end one of its longest and possibly most unjust wars in history.

The True "Racial Hucksters"

2014-11-25T14:07:00.000-08:00

So much for that post-racial America.

Anyone hoping for some form of justice, or at least an attempt at justice, after the slaying of 18-year-old Michael Brown was quickly brought back to reality when a Ferguson, Mo., grand jury declined to indict Officer Darren Wilson this week.

That the grand jury did not indict was not unexpected. Whenever a police officer kills a civilian, whether that civilian is armed or not, the chances of an indictment are slim to none because all the officer has to say is that he or she felt that his or her life was in danger. Once such a statement is made the officer is given the benefit of the doubt with little done to ascertain if the supposed threat was real and the actions taken justified.

Such was evident from the beginning of the Ferguson case. The St. Louis County Prosecutor, Robert McCulloch, had all but signaled that there would be no indictment. The same was true of many Missouri officials. Legal precedent had already told Americans which way the wind was blowing.

The only way a white cop will be indicted on state charges for shooting an unarmed black male is the circumstances of the case must be so revolting, so egregious that even white America is appalled. Indeed, some white Americans were, especially when they saw the heavily armed police response to protests in the aftermath of Brown’s death.

But a majority of white Americans, or at least those who were given the largest megaphones, saw little wrong with the police tactics either in the slaying or during the post-slaying protests that ensued. To them, a white cop waving an automatic weapon at protestors and calling them animals that he would kill was a reasonable response. That police withheld the identity of the officer for days; that the officer disappeared from public; that anonymous police sources were quoted as saying Wilson was beaten “almost unconscious;” or that he suffered a broken orbital bone did not stir questions about police practices.

No.

The problem as they saw it was the black male.

And there is the rub.

A white police officer kills an unarmed black teenager and Rudolph Giuliani, the man who was once dubbed “America’s Mayor,” proclaims on “Meet the Press” that the problem is not with police or police-community relations: It is with black people.

“White police officers wouldn’t be there,” Giuliani told the nation and Georgetown professor Michael Eric Dyson, “if you weren’t killing each other.”

He also said: “Ninety-three percent of blacks are killed by other blacks. I would like to see the attention paid to that that you are paying to this.”

“Black people who kill black people go to jail,” Dyson said. “White people who are policemen who kill black people do not go to jail.”

Sometimes the white killer does not have to be a police officer.

An unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was killed by a dime-store vigilante and wannabe hero, and it was Martin whose character was assassinated. Trayvon’s killer walked free after a trial.

Yet, the most compelling cases seem to always involve police, who seem to have been conditioned to consider every black man a threat. In describing why he killed Michael Brown, Officer Darren Wilson went to great lengths to describe Brown in hulking and animalistic terms. Brown was Hulk Hogan to Wilson, who said he felt like a 5-year-old in trying to defend himself. Brown made a “grunting, like aggravated sound,” his fist clenched, before charging.

But black men do not have to exhibit animalistic characteristics to be a threat.

In August, John Crawford, a 22 year old black man, was killed by police while carrying a toy gun in a Wal-Mart in Beavercreek, Ohio.

Recently, 12-year-old Tamir Rice was killed when officers claimed he pulled a toy gun from his waistband in a Cleveland park. According to police, Tamir did not point the gun at police or make any verbal threats. He was shot twice, nonetheless.

In Brooklyn, Akai Gurley was fatally shot by a rookie police officer when Gurley entered the seventh floor landing at the Louis H. Pink Houses. The officer, Peter Liang, his weapon drawn, was on the eighth floor landing. Liang’s weapon, according to Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, discharged accidentally from 11 feet away. The weapon of Liang’s partner was still holstered.

An even more egregious case involved Jonathan Ferrell, a 24-year-old former FAMU athlete, killed in the Charlotte area in 2013. Ferrell had been in a serious traffic accident, and appeared to be seeking help when he was fatally shot for running toward three police officers. One of the officers was charged with voluntary manslaughter, meaning the officer is accused of using excessive force in self-defense.

The Ferrell case is the rarity where an officer claimed self-defense, but still faces felony charges.

More often, there are no charges, just as there is no clear idea of how many people are killed by police officers every year in America.

According to a Nov. 24 article on The Washington Post web site, 27 police officers were killed in the line of duty in the United States in 2013. That is down from 49 in 2012. Meanwhile, there is no reliable data on how many civilians were killed by police.

The best we know is that America’s 17,000 law-enforcement agencies self-report about 400 “justifiable homicides” per year, according to FBI statistics. Of course, journalists and scholars who study police shootings estimate that as many as 1,000 people are shot and killed by police each year.

Instead of taking that information and using it to ask questions or demand answers, the pundit class – and particularly those who wish to blame black people – decry black activists, saying that those activists are the real issue. Such was the case when Adam Brodsky wrote recently in The New York Post that the real problem with blacks being killed by police are blacks themselves.

According to Brodsky, blacks have failed to take advantage of the opportunities afforded them, instead relying on such “racial hucksters” as the Rev. Al Sharpton. Blacks, Brodsky claimed, need to be more like Jews who do not complain about anti-Semitism. Brodsky does not discuss that Jews have the anti-Defamation League, B’nai Brith, and other organizations that battle anti-Semitism every day.

Of course the more appropriate response would be to ask if there is a problem with local police and the communities they serve, and whether each could work to change the perceptions each has of the other.

To do that, of course, would mean that the “racial hucksters” have to be stopped in their tracks, which won’t be done. After all, what would FOX News, conservative politicians, and all those white pundits do if they can’t blame black people and engage in race-baiting.

The Dangers of Perception

2014-11-10T13:11:00.000-08:00

There is a saying that one’s perception of reality can be just as dangerous as reality. Last week’s midterm elections are proof positive to that point.

Despite six years of Republican obstructionism that has wreaked havoc on the nation, voters in several states rewarded the petulant children that make up the GOP with a resounding victory that gave Republicans the U.S. Senate and expanded the Republican majority in the U.S. House.

Journalists and the pundit class have offered several post-mortems on the elections, and there will be many more such pieces down the road. So far, several things appear clear: Most people have no idea what they are talking about, and too many rely on conventional wisdom without realizing that wisdom is anything but conventional.

If the exit polls are correct and many people voted for the Republicans because they are displeased with the direction in which the nation is headed or because they feel government is not working, then we must ask in exactly which direction do the voters wish the country to go and what makes them think the dysfunction that is the GOP will cease to exist come January?

Despite the sabotage from Republicans and the dire, “sky-is-falling” warnings from their sycophants the economy is doing remarkably well. Preliminary jobs numbers released by the U.S. Department of Labor last week showed that the nation created 214,000 jobs in October. That means the nation has gained an average of 235,000 jobs a month for the last six months. The averages are 224,000 over the last three months, and 220,000 over the last 12 months. The October numbers marked the 56^th month of job gains. In addition, the unemployment rate dipped to 5.8 percent in October, and, more important, the four-week average for unemployment claims hit a 14-year-low the previous week.

The good news does not stop there. Bankruptcies were down 13 percent for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30; gas prices are below $3; the third quarter gross domestic product grew at an annual rate of 3.5 percent; the budget deficit has dropped to 2.8 percent of GDP; the Dow keeps setting records; and the labor force actually grew.

Of course, there is some bad news to go with the good news. Most revealing is that wages continue to be stagnant, although many business leaders and economists say the continued reduction in the unemployment rate should provide upward pressure on wages. And as Daily Beast writer Michael Tomasky reported on Nov. 6, median household income fell each year from 2009 to 2012. While it grew to $52,100 in June 2013, the growth is not enough to make up for the losses American households have endured since 2000 when median household incomes dropped to $55,987 after hitting a peak of $56,080 in 1999 under President Bill Clinton.

So what does all that have to do with the midterm elections?

Apparently very little because according to some exit polls 78 percent of those who voted on Nov. 4 felt that the country is headed in the wrong direction economically. Such a number says either the voters who responded to those exit polls were not being totally truthful, or that they are extremely ignorant of current events. Both may actually be true.

Because if a lack of faith in the direction of the economy and a disdain for dysfunctional government were the motivators for voters then why would Republicans win? It was Republicans who blocked a vote to increase the minimum wage, an issue that passed ballot initiatives even in states that voted for Republican legislatures and governors. It also were Republicans who blocked efforts to help jump start the economy by improving the nation’s infrastructure, something nearly all agree must be done eventually. Most important, it was Republicans who took the nation hostage, shutting down the government in an effort to overturn the Affordable Care Act and threatening default during the debt ceiling brinksmanship.

As Paul Krugman wrote in a Nov. 6 post on The New York Times web site:

“…the biggest secret of the Republican triumph surely lies in the discovery that obstructionism bordering on sabotage is a winning political strategy. From Day 1 of the Obama administration, [Mitch] McConnell and his colleagues have done everything they could to undermine effective policy, in particular blocking every effort to do the obvious thing — boost infrastructure spending — in a time of low interest rates and high unemployment.

“This was, it turned out, bad for America but good for Republicans. Most voters don’t know much about policy details, nor do they understand the legislative process. So all they saw was that the man in the White House wasn’t delivering prosperity — and they punished his party.”

Apparently, some pundits are just as clueless. David Brooks of The New York Times and Dana Millbank of the Washington Post each offered his take on the election.

In his Nov. 6 post on The New York Times website, Brooks basically argued that the Republican Party’s massive victory on Nov. 4 occurred because the party had grown up, that its leaders had pulled “back from the fever swamps” that followed the injection of Sarah Palin and the like onto the national stage. The key, according to Brooks, was that Republicans returned to their stalwart roots.

“Republicans didn’t establish this dominant position because they are unrepresentative outsiders,” Brooks proclaimed after reciting Republican gains. “They did it because they have deep roots in four of the dominant institutions of American society: the business community, the military, the church, and civic organizations.”

In support of his argument, he offered up several examples: Larry Hogan, who won the governor’s race in Maryland; David Perdue, who was elected to the Senate from Georgia; Thom Tillis, who was elected senator in North Carolina; Bruce Rauner, who was elected governor in Illinois; and James Lankford, the Senator-elect from Oklahoma who ran “the nation’s largest Christian camp.”

Of course Brooks did not mention, for example, that Rauner has been accused of questionable practices in how his private equity firm, GTCR, has handled Illinois’ pension fund, which Rauner now says cannot pay retirees the promised nearly $2,500 a month in benefits. Brooks also does not mention that Tillis championed the 2011 North Carolina bill that would have forced women seeking abortions to view an ultrasound against their wills. Brooks also did not mention several other extreme candidates, including Joni Ernst of Iowa.

Millbank, in his Nov. 5 post to the Washington Post web site, simply decided the real problem was that President Obama did not humble himself after the midterm election, that he did not take serious the idiocy of an American electorate that gave control of the government and economy to the very same people who wrecked it six years ago, an electorate that passed a referendum calling for a hike in the minimum wage while electing people who have vowed to fight any such increase.

That Republicans have spent the last six years rejecting all of the President’s overtures in an effort to embarrass him is of no consequence to Millbank. To Millbank, the fact that an exit poll showed that 33 percent of the voters who responded said their vote was to show disapproval of Obama was all that mattered. Apparently Millbank did not notice that 47 percent of the American electorate voted against Obama in 2012, or that if 33 percent said they wanted to show disapproval of the President that would also suggest that 67 percent had other reasons for voting as they did.

Simply, there is no single reason why Democrats were trounced during this year’s midterm elections. There appears to have been several factors involved – a lack of understanding of the political process, an aversion to facts, low voter turnout, a party ashamed of its leader – and many of those things may not be easily fixed. That is the reality, and it is froth with as much danger as the one many perceive.

Republican Rationalizations: When Up Is Down

2013-02-23T07:25:00.001-08:00

Is the Republican Party schizophrenic? Are its members and supporters bipolar? The fight over sequestration, the party’s efforts to remake itself and the recent embrace of Obamacare by several Republican governors seem to answer both questions in the affirmative.

In the 2011 debt ceiling deal, Republicans and Democrats agreed to place a sword of Damocles over their heads. At the time, House Speaker John Boehner and other Republican leaders hailed the sequester as a “Two Step Approach to Hold President Obama Accountable.” Now that the across-the-board budget cuts loom large on March 1, Republicans claim that it is all the President‘s fault. In addition, Republicans, who for months decried the cuts as ominous, now argue that maybe the cuts aren’t so bad after all. Yes, the sequester could lead to 700,000 people losing their jobs and major cuts to state aid, but that is a small price to pay for shrinking the size of the federal government, they now argue.

“The sequester is something of a political phenomenon,” Ed Rogers, a Republican political consultant who worked in the presidential campaigns of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, wrote in The Washington Post in declaring that the sequester may not be a disaster. “When it goes into effect, it will be one of the most significant things to occur in Washington in the last four years and oddly, none of the Congressional leadership nor the president is for it. Again, something big is about to happen that no one in power supports. Maybe there is a lesson to be learned here. Perhaps we should write more laws that declare if the president and Congress don’t act then spending cuts will ensue. We have never been particularly successful in slowing spending any other way.”

Boehner, who once embraced the sequester as a hammer that could be used to force spending cuts, now argues that the bipartisan agreement is actually “Obama’s sequester.” Instead of negotiating a deal to eliminate the sequester or even to delay it, Boehner and other Republicans have spent the last few weeks blaming the President.

“It’s pretty clear to me that the sequester’s going to go into effect,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said recently. “I have seen no evidence that the House plans to act on this matter before the end of the month.”

Faced with the sudden Republican shift on the sequester – remember Republicans and Democrats said the sequester should never, ever, ever happen – the party’s sycophants have been forced to engage in mental gymnastics in an effort to shift the blame to the President.

In a recent column in The New York Times, David Brooks argued that neither the Republican Party nor President Obama has a plan to avoid the sequester. That such a statement is patently false – the President and Senate Democrats have come up with a plan that calls for new revenue and budget cuts – does not matter to Brooks.

To Brooks, the sequester allows Democrats and Republicans to “dance the moves they enjoy the most:” the Permanent Campaign Shimmy for Democrats and the Suicide Stage Dive for Republicans.

“The conservative press is filling up with essays with titles like ‘Learning to Love Sequestration,’” Brooks wrote. “Of course, Republican legislators are screwing up their courage to embrace it. Of course, after the cuts hit and the furor rises, they are going to come crawling back with concessions as they do after every Suicide Stage Dive.”

Ron Fournier, of the National Journal, was even more schizophrenic is his recent column. Fournier, unlike Brooks, acknowledges that Obama has “reached farther toward compromise than House Republicans.” But Fournier says that while seeking compromise makes the President right, it does not negate his failure to reach a deal with a party that refuses to compromise.

“Is this fiscal standoff (the fifth since Republicans took control of the House in 2011) just about scoring political points, or is it about governing? If it’s all about politics, bully for Obama,” he wrote. “A majority of voters will likely side with the President over Republicans in a budget dispute because of his popularity and the GOP’s pathetic approval ratings.

“If it’s about governing, the story changes: In any enterprise, the chief executive is ultimately accountable for success and failure. Sure, blame Congress – castigate all 535 lawmakers, or the roughly half you hate. But there is only one President. Even if he’s right on the merits, Obama may be on the wrong side of history.”

Such thinking is why so many are urging the Republicans to remake themselves, not just repackage their ideas.

In making his argument, Fournier quoted an op-ed in the Green Bay Post-Gazette by Rep. Reid Ribble, a Wisconsin Republican. Ribble argued that Republicans must accept that new revenues must be considered if we are to deal with the nation’s debt. “Neither party is without fault,” Ribble wrote. “Republicans must confront their own conventional wisdom that says ‘The only way to shrink government is to starve it of resources.’”

Ribble is not the only Republican advocating that Republicans rethink their party and its ideas. In an article for Commentary magazine, Michael Gerson and Peter Wehner argue that GOP leaders must recognize that that they cannot lash out at middle-class Americans as an undeserving 47 percent as Mitt Romney did. Instead, they must come up with ideas that help the bulk of Americans.

One way would be to seek policies that help “individuals attain the skills and values – the social capital – that allow them to succeed in a free economy,” the two wrote. “The Republican goal is equal opportunity, not equal results. But equality of opportunity is not a natural state; it is a social achievement, for which government shares a responsibility. The proper reaction to egalitarianism is not indifference. It is the promotion of a fluid society in which aspiration is honored and rewarded.“

They later added: “Instead of signaling that America is a closed society, which it is not and never has been, Republicans would do better to stress the assimilating power of American ideas – the power whereby strangers become neighbors and fellow citizens. In this connection, they would also do better, for themselves and for the country, to call for increasing the number of visas issued to seasonal and permanent farm workers; to champion a greater stress on merit and skill in admitting legal immigrants; and, for the 12 million or so undocumented workers in the United States, to provide an attainable if duly arduous path to legal status and eventually citizenship.”

Mostly, they argue that Republicans must begin to see themselves as champions of the collective, which may have been what drove some Republican governors to accept Obamacare after spending several years fighting it.

“This country is the greatest in the world, and it’s the greatest largely because of how we value the weakest among us,” Florida Gov. Rick Scott said in announcing that his state will expand Medicaid under Obamacare. “It shouldn’t depend on your Zip Code or on your tax bracket. No mother or father should despair over whether they have access to high-quality health care for their sick child.”

“I cannot in good conscience deny Floridians that needed access to health care,” he said.

Apparently Scott wasn’t the only Republican governor to grow a conscience. Ohio’s Republican governor, John Kasich, urged his fellow lawmakers there to “examine your conscience” before opposing his plan to embrace the Medicaid expansion.

“I can’t look at the disabled, I can’t look at the poor, I can’t look at the mentally ill, I can’t look at the addicted and think we ought to ignore them,” Kasich said. “For those that live in the shadows of life, those who are the least among us, I will not accept the fact that the most vulnerable in our state should be ignored. We can help them.”

Gov. Rick Snyder of Michigan and Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona also joined the chorus of Republicans singing the praises of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion

Yet even as they do, the party of Lincoln and its apologists continue to suffer from a personality disorder, unable to determine which way is up.

Rubio and the GOP's Big Gulp

2013-02-14T13:36:00.000-08:00

There was a very good reason why Sen. Marco Rubio took a swig of water during his reply to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address Tuesday night: Even the Republican Senator from Florida could not swallow the political bane he was peddling to the American public.

Rubio, as expected in his official response for the GOP, labeled Obama in a way that fits neatly into the Republican myth about the President – he is a taxing, big spending, liberal, Democrat, Socialist – but has little to do with the political reality. Then Rubio offered no realistic alternatives to what the President suggested. Instead, he offered the same tired and faulty Republican bromides.

“Presidents in both parties – from John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan – have known that our free enterprise economy is the source of our middle class prosperity,” Rubio said. “But President Obama? He believes it’s the cause of our problems. That the economic downturn happened because our government didn’t tax enough, spend enough and control enough. And, therefore, as you heard tonight, his solution to virtually every problem we face is for Washington to tax more, borrow more and spend more.

"This idea – that our problems were caused by a government that was too small – it’s just not true. In fact, a major cause of our recent downturn was a housing crisis created by reckless government policies,” the senator said.

On Wednesday, Paul Krugman, the Nobel-prize winning economist and New York Times columnist, assailed that argument.

“OK, leave on one side the caricature of Obama, with the usual mirror-image fallacy (we want smaller government, therefore liberals just want bigger government, never mind what it does); there we go with the ‘Barney Frank did it’ story,” Krugman wrote. “Deregulation, the explosive growth of virtually unregulated shadow banking, lax lending standards by loan originators who sold their loans off as soon as they were made, had nothing to do with it — it was all the Community Reinvestment Act, Fannie, and Freddie.”

In his Wednesday post to Wonkblog in The Washington Post, Mike Konczal noted that the housing crisis was driven by subprime loans in the private market, not mortgages from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, or the Community Reinvestment Act.

“The fly-by-night lending boom, slicing and dicing mortgage bonds, derivatives and CDOs, and all the other shadiness of the mortgage market in the 2000s were Wall Street creations, and they drove all those risky mortgages,” Konczal wrote.

To support his contention, Konczal cited data that showed “more than 84 percent of the subprime mortgages in 2006 were issued by private lending institutions… Private firms made nearly 83 percent of the subprime loans to low- and moderate-income borrowers that year.”

He went on to quote David Min, a University of California, Irvine law professor, who said the argument that the government directly created either the housing bubble or subprime loans has a serious problem with the timing:

“From 2002-2005, [GSEs] saw a fairly precipitous drop in market share, going from about 50 percent to just under 30 percent of all mortgage originations. Conversely, private label securitization [PLS] shot up from about 10 percent to about 40 percent over the same period. This is, to state the obvious, a very radical shift in mortgage originations that overlapped neatly with the origination of the most toxic home loans.”

Of course Rubio’s arguments fly in the face of other realities. Republicans are quick to say that the government creates regulations and laws that destroy America. They also argue that government, especially on the federal level, is incapable of getting things done.

No Child Left Behind was passed to improve education, yet our schools continue to flounder. The Environmental Protection Agency and several presidents have pushed to reduce carbon emissions from industry and cars, yet those emissions remain high. The government is trampling the people’s right to bear arms, yet gun sales continue to climb. The Obama administration is pushing socialist ideas, yet the markets continue to climb and many companies are enjoying large profits.

But somehow a federal government that cannot get anything else done was able to force private bankers to give housing loans to undeserving families at great risk to the banks. How could such an incompetent government get private banks, which seek to maximize profits, to put those profits at risk?

The point is the government was not able to accomplish that.

“Did Fannie and Freddie buy high-risk mortgage-backed securities?” Min asked. “Yes. But they did not buy enough of them to be blamed for the mortgage crisis. Highly respected analysts who have looked at these data...including the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office, the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission majority, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, and virtually all academics, including the University of North Carolina, Glaeser et al at Harvard, and the St. Louis Federal Reserve, have all rejected the Wallison/Pinto argument that federal affordable housing policies were responsible for the proliferation of actual high-risk mortgages over the past decade.”

The sub-prime lending leaders among private banks in 2008 were Countrywide Financial, HSBC, JP Morgan Chase, and Wells Fargo, according to data from Inside Mortgage Finance. In 2011, the Center for Public Integrity reported that “mortgages financed by Wall Street from 2001 to 2008 was 41/2 times more likely to be seriously delinquent than mortgages backed by Fannie and Freddie.”

Yet Rubio and other Republican sycophants continue in the misguided meme that the housing crisis was the fault of Fannie, Freddie and the CRA. Never do they mention the removal of Glass-Steagall, the 1933 law that banned banks from gambling with depositor’s money.

Rubio also argued that more government will not “help you get ahead;” will not “create more opportunities;” will not “inspire new ideas.” Of course, history tells us that argument does not hold water. It was through government programs after World War II that many returning veterans were able to attend school and make themselves more valuable to employers.

While one may not be able to say definitively that the computer industry would not be at its current level without government, one cannot honestly claim that government research and contracts did not help to support the industry as it grew. Can one claim that the Internet would have been created without government support? Maybe, but one cannot honestly claim that the government did not play a major role in its development.

And the Republican Party cannot claim to support innovation in education, as Rubio did in his comments, after vowing to eliminate the Department of Education, seeking to cut PELL Grants, and denigrating the teaching of critical thinking skills.

Rubio was correct when he said that we need to “incentivize” local school districts to offer more advanced placement courses and more vocational and career training. He also was correct in saying that the cost of college must be contained if we wish to have an educated workforce and populace. Yet, Republicans cannot make those arguments without looking like hypocrites. They cannot claim to be for education when they are the party of cuts to the education budget, are dismissive of science, and unwilling to reign in the biggest abusers of education funding – for-profit colleges that offer students a GED and an associate’s degree or certification, but only give them a large federal loan bill that cannot be forgiven.

“I believe in federal financial aid,” Rubio proclaimed. “I couldn’t have gone to college without it. But it’s not just about spending more money on these programs; it’s also about strengthening and modernizing them.”

Indeed, much of that may be true. The problem is that it is hard to swallow when it comes from Republicans.

Obama's Drone War: A Bourne-like Identity

2013-02-11T08:58:00.000-08:00

The President, in wanting to keep the nation “safe” from terrorists, asks a few select members of his staff to put together a list of people to be targeted for death. Once the list is compiled, the President and his staff meet secretly in the White House where the President goes through the list, listens to suggestions then decides who will be assassinated. To make his acts legal, the President has his lawyers draw up a secret memorandum justifying his decisions. That would be an excellent plot for a Robert Ludlum-like novel or movie – if it were not so true.

President Barack Obama’s drone war has taken us beyond the point in which art imitates life and dropped us squarely in that realm where life imitates art. Using drone strikes, the Obama administration – through the Central Intelligence Agency and the military – has made assassination a regular part of the presidential routine. Members of the President’s national security team meet to discuss the administration’s kill list.

We have known about this for some time. (The New York Times and The Washington Post have written news articles as far back as 2010 detailing different aspects of the international drone war.) But many of us have been too obtuse to its particulars. That is until 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awalki was killed in a drone attack in Yemen several weeks after his father, Anwar al-Awalki, was killed.

The al-Awalkis were United States citizens. The father had been identified as a senior al-Qa’ida operative, a man plotting to kill Americans. The son seems to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, but because of the secrecy of the drone program and the mystery of his death we cannot be sure.

Since January 2009, the Obama administration has conducted six times the number of drone attacks as the Bush administration. Most of the Obama administration attacks – 283 as of September 2012 – have been CIA operations in remote parts of Pakistan. There have also been attacks in Yemen and Somalia. Most Americans – liberals, conservatives, and moderates – support the drone strikes, according to several national polls. (A Washington Post-ABC poll from February 2012 found that 83 percent of Americans approved of the Obama administration's use of unmanned drones against suspected terrorists overseas. Two-thirds of those surveyed even agreed with strikes against U.S. citizens.)

And there lies the rub.

After the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, President George W. Bush sought, and received, from Congress a naked declaration of war. According to that declaration:

The “President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent future acts on international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.”

That declaration — as well as other events – led this nation into armed conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. The declaration was also used to redefine a battlefield and war, and what the United States could do to protect its people – warrantless wiretaps, rendition and torture. To rationalize its actions, Bush had his own lawyers draw up the legal precedent under which he could act. Much of the public was rightly outraged.

Since then, President Obama has not only embraced the very same tactics and definitions the Bush administration used to justify its actions, he has expanded those tactics and definitions to make White House ordered assassinations legal – even on U.S. citizens – without any outside oversight. The President – to borrow from conservative author and professor, George W. Carey – has ratcheted up his presidential powers.

“An incoming president will assume whatever advances in presidential power were made by his predecessor,” Carey wrote recently in The Imaginative Conservative. “In turn, an incumbent will strive to accrue new powers that can be passed on.”

And that is what makes this so scary. Who or what will stop the next president from going even further. Bush pushed the envelope when he had John Yoo, a lawyer at the Office of Legal Counsel, draw up a legal opinion justifying “enhanced interrogation” techniques. Obama, even while drawing down troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, has embraced too much of the Bush doctrine on what constitutes a battlefield and what is a war in explaining how and where the Federal government gets the authority to target people for death.

A white paper explaining the Obama administration’s reasoning states that the “United States retains its authority to use force against al-Qa’ida and associated forces outside the area of hostilities that targets a senior operational leader of the enemy forces who is actively engaged in planning operations to kill Americans. The United States is currently in a non-international armed conflict with al-Qa’ida and its associated forces. Any U.S. operation would be part of this non-international armed conflict, even if it were to take place away from the zone of active hostilities.”

And who identifies who is a “senior operational leader” of a terrorist group?

It only takes “an informed, high-level official of the U.S. government,” according to the white paper. It does not matter if the accused is a United States citizen or not. The discussion of who will be targeted in a drone strike can be initiated by a “high-level official” in the secrecy of the White House, without outside oversight, without what we in this nation have come to know as due process. Under this policy, the accuser, jury, judge, and executioner are one in the same.

When the Bush administration created its own legal opinions to justify its questionable actions, Democrats were up in arms. Several leading Democratic lawyers, such as Dawn Johnsen who Obama considered for his Office of Legal Counsel, declared that the “Bush administration’s excessive reliance on ‘secret law’ threatens the effective functioning of American democracy” and “the withholding from Congress and the public the legal interpretations by the [OLC] upsets the systems of checks and balances between the executive and legislative branches of government,” according to an article by Glenn Greenwald in The Guardian last week.

For years, many of us ignored the events unfolding around us, leaving the questions about the drone war to a few. It left us not knowing who we were as a nation. Then three American citizens – Anwar al-Awalki, Samir Khan and Abdulrahman al-Awalki – were killed, and some of us recoiled at what our President was doing in our names. According to the White House, Anwar al-Awalki was a senior al-Qa’ida operative. What was his son’s alleged crime? As far as we know it simply may have been that he was the son of a man who the President and his committee of secrecy had declared a terrorist.

Considering our government’s track record on getting things right in this post-9/11 world, that may be the scariest scenario of all.

Naysaying the Economic Naysayers

2013-01-30T13:39:00.002-08:00

Things are starting to look better economically in the United States. Not because of any particular thing that is going on, but because of several things that spark guarded optimism for 2013. Of course in expressing this optimism we cannot be naïve, nor can we ignore or deny the extreme resistance that remains in some quarters – particularly among the naysaying, sky-is-falling denizens of the Republican Party.

But as we acknowledge that resistance we cannot be distracted from the facts. The nation is, indeed, a long way from experiencing robust economic growth. (After all, we just learned this week that fourth quarter GDP was a negative 0.1 percent.) Yet, there are signs all around us that we are making steady strides toward coming to grips with what ails this nation economically. In doing so we may finally be able to make some fixes if we can just get enough people to accept policies over politics.

America is not in decline, no matter how often the extreme declare it. America is not on the verge of bankruptcy, no matter how loud the extreme proclaim it. America is not headed toward “European-style Socialism,” no matter how forcefully the extreme assert it.

How do I know this? Why do I express such optimism?

For one, the amount of investment some companies are pouring into their businesses. Just recently, General Motors announced that it plans to invest $1.5 billion in its plants around the country. The company said $600 million of that will go into its complex in Kansas City. Although the improvements will not result in more hiring at the plant it should help several businesses that supply the plant and will be assisting in its makeover. At the same time, Ford, Daimler and Nissan announced that they will work together to build fuel-cell electric cars by 2017, and Ford and Toyota have partnered to develop hybrid rear-drive trucks.

We also have more people recognizing the need to create an infrastructure bank to pay for numerous much needed projects, which should lead to jobs and economic growth, as Mark Thoma argued in his Fiscal Times article, "One Investment That Can Reduce Our Long-Term Debt." And even though the fourth quarter GDP numbers were not impressive, there were some impressive things in the report. For example, "real disposable personal income increased 6.8 percent," leading to a rise in both personal consumption and personal savings. There were also increases in nonresidential fixed investment (up 8.4 percent.) and residential investment (up 15.3 percent).

The icing on the cake came Friday when the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its January jobs report. According to the bureau's preliminary numbers, the nation added 157,000 private sector jobs last month. The bureau also revised its jobs numbers for November (247,000) and December (196,000). That means the country has experienced more than 30 months of positive job growth. Included in those January numbers were 28,000 construction jobs and 33,000 retail jobs. The education, health care, and business services industries each added 25,000 jobs.

In addition, for what might be the first time in many years, economists across the ideological divide have come to grips with one of the most argued points since the start of the Great Recession: It’s not about the national debt; rather it is about revenue, jobs, and economic growth. While that could be seen as a minor adjustment in emphasis, it is an important one because it removes the cover that so many hid beneath.

Economists from Paul Krugman to Bruce Bartlett to Jan Hatzius to Richard Koo to Alan Blinder to Lawrence Summers to James K. Galbraith to John Makin and Daniel Hanson have declared that the way to worry about the nation’s long-term deficit is to not worry, to stay calm, to deal with it in a few years when the economy is better.

“The federal government is not on the verge of bankruptcy,” economics columnist Martin Wolf said last week in the Financial Times. “If anything, the tightening has been too much and too fast. The fiscal position is also not the most urgent economic challenge. It is far more important to promote recovery. The challenges in the longer term are to raise revenue while curbing the cost of health. Meanwhile, people, just calm down.”

According to E.J. Dionne of The Washington Post, Wolf, a “thoroughly pro-market economist," offers excellent advice. Wolf is not alone.

In the same column, Dionne quotes conservative economist Bruce Bartlett, a former White House advisor to Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, saying: “In fact, our long-term deficit situation is not nearly as severe as even many budget experts believe. The problem is that they are looking at recent history and near-term projections that are overly impacted by one-time factors related to the economic crisis and massive Republican tax cuts that lowered revenues far below normal.”

In his Jan. 29 column, “Outsourcing, Insourcing and Automation,” for The New York Times, Bartlett wrote that one of the major issues facing the nation is unemployment, in particular cyclical unemployment that is turning into structural unemployment. Cyclical unemployment, Bartlett argues, does not have the same long-term impact as structural unemployment, which occurs when workers’ skills do not match the jobs being created.

“The longer someone is out of work, the less likely that person is to find a job,” Bartlett wrote. “Skills deteriorate, younger workers tend to be hired for available vacancies, jobs move to new geographical locations and so on.”

According to former treasury secretary Lawrence Summers, we cannot “lose sight of the jobs and growth deficits that ultimately will have the greatest impact on how this generation of Americans live and what they bequeath to the next generation.”

Even the International Monetary Fund has admitted that it underestimated the damage poorly-timed austerity has on economic growth.

Meanwhile, economic analysts at Goldman Sachs recently told clients that this country still has the world’s strongest economy. Goldman’s analysts also said there are “key economic, institutional, human capital and geopolitical advantages the U.S. enjoys over other economies.”

For example, gross domestic product in the U.S. is almost $16 trillion, “nearly double the second largest (China), 2.5 times the third largest (Japan).” Goldman also says America will continue to enjoy an advantage over other nations because this nation's work force is younger and more energetic; America has greater natural resources, including oil, gas and arable land; America performs the greatest amount of research and development; and America is still the land of choice for motivated immigrants, including those who are highly educated.

So as James K. Galbraith said: Stop worrying about our long-term deficit problem because we don’t have one.

“Foggy rhetoric about ‘burdens’ that will ‘fall on our children and grandchildren’ sets the tone of discussion,” Galbraith wrote in an Aug. 9, 2011, article for The New Republic. “The concept of ‘sustainability’ is often invoked, rarely defined, never criticized; things are deemed unsustainable by political consensus. Backed by a chorus of repetition from the IMF, headline-seeking academics, think-tankers, and, of course, the ratings agencies.

“But there isn’t, in fact, a ‘long-term deficit problem.’ So long as interest rates stay below the growth rate, as they are, debt-to-GDP levels eventually stabilize and even decline. The notion that there is a big problem is pure propaganda based on pseudo-debate, pitting two viewpoints that nevertheless converge on the practical issue.”

Galbraith’s point from more than a year ago was recently supported by Makin and Hanson of the conservative American Economic Institute. The two concluded that trillion dollar deficits are sustainable for now because of low interest rates.

“The Chicken Little ‘sky is falling’ approach to frightening Congress into significant debt reduction has failed because the sky has not fallen,” the two wrote. “Interest rates have not soared as promised… Trillion dollar federal budget deficits have continued to be sustainable because the federal government is able to finance them at interest rates of half of a percent or less. Two percent inflation means that the real inflation-adjusted cost of deficit finance averages -1.5 percent.”

Indeed, it's about jobs and growth.

Republicans Say the Most _______ Things

2013-01-14T10:50:00.000-08:00

Art Linkletter was right – kids do say the darndest things. If he was alive today he could start a new show – Republicans say the scariest, most dangerous, most asinine things.

That is especially true when it comes to guns, rape, and anything Obama.

Take a look at some of the recent statements from Republican leaders and their followers, particularly the Tea Party and evangelical Christians.

The National Rifle Association, whose top leaders have pushed arming teachers across the country in response to the Newtown, Conn., shooting, have vowed to fight any gun control legislation and have been warning members that President Barack Obama is coming after their guns. That argument has led to a right-wing declaration that a civil war is brewing in this nation.

For example, James Yeager, the chief executive of Tactical Response, which teaches people weapons handling and other tactical skills in Tennessee, produced a YouTube video in which he declared that he will kill anyone who tries to confiscate his weapons. In the clip, Yeager said increased gun measures would “spark a civil war” in which he would be “glad to fire the first shot.”

“If it goes an inch further,” he said, “I’m going to start killing people.” While he now states that his pledge to “start killing people” was just overwrought anger, he has not backed away from his overall claims.

No wonder since Fox has become the major purveyor of the gun control will lead to insurrection meme.

Bill O’Reilly recently warned that we could have a civil war if Obama uses executive orders to alter gun control laws. O’Reilly said Obama could “chose to be a good President or whether he just wants to have blood in the streets.” O’Reilly went on to suggest that the President should cut spending on such things as Medicare and Social Security to avoid armed conflict.

O’Reilly was not the only rabid Fox employee to talk about insurrection. Several conservative – is there any other kind? – Fox contributors compared the President to Hitler and Stalin, and cited Nazi Germany to argue against his policies. They also warned of civil war, revolution, and insurrection if Obama’s policies on guns, spending, and entitlements are enacted.

Brian Kilmeade and Steve Doocy told their Fox and Friends audience that if the Obama government tried to confiscate guns nationally “there would be an insurrection.” A short time later, Todd Starnes, a Fox radio host tweeted: “I can assure you the federal government will not be confiscating the Starnes family guns,” which seems reasonable since there has been no recommendation that federal officers go door to door taking guns out of people’s homes.

Columnist Arthur Herman wrote in a Jan. 3 op-ed on FoxNews.com that riots in Argentina foreshadowed a coming civil war in America.

“Some have said my warnings about a coming civil war between makers and takers are exaggerated,” Herman wrote. “It’s true that Argentina’s politicians have been waging class warfare since Juan and Eva Peron – and they aren’t fazed when it turns bloody. Obama and the Democrats are relative newcomers to the game. But Argentina reveals who really suffers when those who create a nation’s wealth get mugged by those who spend it.”

Then there are the rape comments.

Months after Todd R. Akin and Richard Mourdock destroyed any Republican chances of picking up U.S. Senate seats with asinine comments about rape, Republican Rep. Phil Gingrey of Georgia decided to come to Akin’s defense by saying Akin was “partly right” in his declaration that in the case of legitimate rape, women’s bodies have the ability to shut down to avoid pregnancy.

“I’ve delivered lots of babies, and I know about these things,” said Gingrey, a former OB/GYN. “It is true. We tell infertile couples all the time that are having trouble conceiving because of the woman not ovulating, ‘Just relax. Drink a glass of wine. And don’t be so tense and uptight because all that adrenaline can cause you not to ovulate.’ So he was partially right wasn’t he? But the fact that a woman may have already ovulated 12 hours before she is raped, you’re not going to prevent a pregnancy there by a woman’s body shutting anything down because the horse has already left the barn, so to speak. And yet the media took that and tore it apart.”

As if such wild comments are not enough, Republicans have threatened to shut down the government or default on the nation's debt in an effort to force the President and Democrats to cut the safety net.

But the most egregious attacks may revolve around Obama’s efforts to fill his cabinet. Republicans have attacked him for seeking like-minded appointees. They have also assailed him for recommending a former Republican Senator, Chuck Hagel, for a major security post. Apparently, reaching across the aisle for talented people is against the rules.

Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, says Hagel should not be confirmed as Secretary of Defense because Hagel was against imposing economic sanctions on Iran. One would think that would make Hagel a good candidate in the eyes of the GOP since its members spent the last election saying the sanctions are weak and ineffective. The Iran sanctions, according to Republicans, made Obama weaker than Jimmy Carter.

Then there are the attacks against feeding poor children in America. Guest on Fox Business’ Varney & Co. spent a great deal of time recently claiming that children receiving food assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program are becoming a “group of entitlement nation children.” Feeding those kids through the SNAP program, the Fox contributors said, means those children will grow up with a sense of entitlement that will hamper their productivity throughout life.

We can’t forget the comments concerning same-sex marriages. According to one conservative preacher, an acceptance of homosexuality and same-sex marriages mark the end of time. The pastor, Scott Lively, who is on trial for inciting human rights abuses against members of the LGBT community in Uganda, recently said that the great flood of the Bible was caused by people writing songs about same-sex marriages.

“We need to remember that in the time leading up to the Flood what the rabbis teach about the last straw for God before He brought the Flood was when they started writing wedding songs to homosexual marriage and Jesus said that you’ll know the End Times because it will be like the days of Noah,” Lively said in an interview with Sandy Rios of the American Family Association.

“I think this is the issue of the End Times, homosexuality,” he continued in the interview. “It’s present, if you do a careful investigation of all the scriptures dealing with this from the beginning and all the way to the end, God is painting a very clear picture that this represents the outer extent of rebellion against Him in a society and the last thing that happens before wrath comes.”

His comments echoed those of another conservative southern preacher, Aaron Fruh of Alabama, who also blamed the biblical flood on homosexuality. Fruh said God “knew that the people on the earth were going to destroy themselves through same-sex marriage.”

Of course, there is also the denial of climate change (Fox asked if the government faked the hottest year on record data released recently); Wyoming’s effort to nullify any federal firearms regulations by making it a felony punishable by up to five years in prison for any federal official to enforce any gun laws; the downplaying of a government default on the nation and the world economy; the hostage style negotiations over the debt limit; and Sean Hannity’s attacks against John Brennan.

Indeed, Republicans say the scariest, most dangerous, and most asinine things.

On the Redolence of Washington

2013-01-08T14:14:00.001-08:00

There is a repugnancy that permeates our political system, a malodor that wafts from Capitol Hill across this vast nation. It hovers not only in the air around us, but also reaches deep into our social consciousness, and leaves a stench that overwhelms ours and the nation’s souls. Occasionally, though, a strong wind comes through providing us with a cleansing or a reprieve.

The deal to avert the so-called fiscal cliff was such a moment. For a short time, it seemed that Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill smelled what the rest of us had smelled for the last four years. Our lawmakers in Washington came together, albeit at a late hour, to keep us from plunging in what many had described as an economic abyss. Although the deal was less than perfect, it gave many a moment of hope, a sense that the best way to pass meaningful legislation is to begin in the U.S. Senate.

Of course, it was a fleeting moment. Before the fiscal cliff bill could reach President Barack Obama’s desk for signature Republicans had already returned to their recalcitrant ways.

House Speaker John Boehner, who had thrown the fiscal cliff debacle to the President and Senate, announced to the nation that his party would again use the debt ceiling in seeking to wrest spending cuts from the President and Democrats.

His statement was reinforced by Sen. John Cronyn of Texas, who declared that the GOP is willing to shut down the government in order to extract concessions from Obama.

“The coming deadlines will be the next flashpoints in our ongoing fight to bring fiscal sanity to Washington,” Cornyn wrote in an op-ed for the Houston Chronicle not long after a fiscal cliff deal was reached. “It may be necessary to partially shut down the government in order to secure the long-term fiscal wellbeing of our country, rather than plod along the path of Greece, Italy and Spain. President Obama needs to take note of this reality and put forward a plan to avoid it immediately.”

Cornyn, like many of his GOP colleagues, has decided that the only way to go is to slash the safety net that helps to support as many people in the red states as it does those in the blue states.

“Republicans are more determined than ever to implement the spending cuts and structural entitlement reforms that are needed to secure the long-term fiscal integrity of our country,” Cornyn wrote days after Sen. Pat Toomey, a Pennsylvania Republican, said Republicans should be ready to tolerate a partial government shutdown in the battle over the debt limit.

The declarations by Boehner, Cornyn, Toomey, and other Republicans of course sent the pundit class into a tizzy. Within hours of the fiscal cliff deal and the Republican announcements, pundits began debating, pontificating on, and dissecting the winners and losers of that deal as if the obstinate players were the only ones that mattered.

But while the talking heads search for new ways to describe the game they help promote the rest of us should look deeper for answers and connections. The problem is we may not find many.

The Jan. 1 deal does bring much needed revenue – granted not as much as desired – to the federal coffers. It also preserves unemployment insurance – while not a substitute for employment – for 2 million people without incomes. It will keep the cost of milk – already high – from rising through the roof. And it will allow poor, working, and middle-class people to continue using the child and tuition tax credits to lower their tax bills.

But what price will we have to pay?

Indeed, the fiscal cliff deal fell short on many fronts. It failed to include a stimulus package. It failed to avert another battle over the debt ceiling. It allowed the temporary payroll tax cut to expire. It did not raise taxes on capital gains and estates high enough. And it did not solve any long term fiscal problems.

More important, it put us back where we were 18 months ago, preparing to fight another battle with a political party that believes not only in taking hostages, but in executing them as well.

That is why we may not find those deeper answers and connections.

The fact that the deal was negotiated by Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell signals just how bad things have become in Washington in general and the House of Representatives in particular.

That so many urged the President to allow the Bush-era tax cuts to expire in an effort to gain greater negotiating leverage over the Republicans shows that too many people in Washington fail to recognize the real consequences of such actions. Theirs are arguments steeped in politics not policy.

For the millions of people whose unemployment ran out a few days before the deal was struck, it was no game. Yes, Congress could have passed a bill after Jan. 1, resulting in retroactive benefits. But unless one has lived from paycheck to paycheck one does not understand how a delay, even of a few days or weeks, can create havoc. Allowing those benefits to expire would have caused real harm to real families, something lawmakers should avoid at all costs.

The problem of course is that Washington is unable to do anything – even the things on which all parties agree – until the last moment

“Debt-ceiling dilemma: In the short run, it enables Republicans in Congress to excite their base about entitlement reform that base doesn't really want. (After all, it's the over-65 Republican base that collects most entitlements.) In the long run, it hardens the image of the congressional GOP as a collection of desperadoes who can never safely be trusted with power," David Frum, a The Daily Beast writer and former speechwriter for George W. Bush, said after the fiscal cliff deal.

The debt-ceiling dilemma and the Republican response so far also remind us that the slightest shift in the wind can bring back that fetid aroma emanating from inside the Beltway.

Turn Right? Turn Left? What's the Destination?

2012-12-21T09:34:00.001-08:00

As the House of Representatives heads home for a short Christmas break, I am reminded of a story about two men – one a leftist, the other a right winger – who live across the street from each other. Both men are driving to the same venue, but do not share a ride because of their disdain for each other. Before they leave for their destination each man seeks to convince the other that he alone has the best short cut.

“All you have to do is go left at the corner then turn left again, and so on,” the leftist says.

“Oh, BS,” says the right winger. “You go right at each corner. Everyone knows that.”

The men decided to bet on whose was the better short cut. Each took his own route only to end up back in front of their individual homes.

I offer that story because it seems to be where we are in Washington today. No matter what, those on the right want to continue going right, while those on the left want to continue going left – neither acknowledging that adhering to such directions just takes us back to where we started.

This past week, House Republicans showed us just how ignorant making the same right turn time and time again takes us nowhere but back to square one. After a lot of posturing, whining, and maneuvering, House Speaker John Boehner walked away from the negotiation table where efforts were underway to avoid the so-called fiscal cliff. Instead of continuing talks with President Barack Obama to close the gap between each other’s deficit reduction proposals, Boehner offered up a “Plan B” that called for tax increases only on those making $1 million or more a year. “Plan B” never reached the House floor for a vote, with Boehner pulling it because he did not have enough support for it among his own caucus.

Meanwhile, those on the left argue that we continue on their route, refusing to acknowledge that while we must preserve the safety net, we cannot adhere blindly to all of its provisions. As the nation ages the cost of Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security will keep rising. While we do not have to eviscerate those programs we must take prudent steps to safe guard them.

The same is true with gun control. We cannot continue with a mishmash of gun laws around the country, a poor mental health system, and a blind adherence to the Second Amendment if we want to save ourselves from the senseless whims of mass murderers. There is not one answer to the question we face on gun control laws, but there are some things that we can put into place to lessen the risks we face as a nation. Will we be able to completely remove guns from our society? No, but we can limit access to high-power weapons and multi-round clips.

Yet, neither the left nor the right seems ready and willing to act sensibly. For the right, any effort to regulate firearms is an attack on personal liberty. The Second Amendment, according to many of them, was intended so that Americans could protect themselves against a tyrannical Federal Government. That the Second Amendment calls for gun ownership as a way to maintain a “well-regulated militia” is lost on the right, as well as the U.S. Supreme Court.

In addition, we cannot fix our fiscal house if we do not recognize some very basic tenets, including that while Federal spending must be brought down, we cannot continue to allow such people as Willard Mitt Romney to pay less than 15 percent in taxes on income above $20 million, while those making much, much less pay a higher rate. We cannot reduce the budget deficit if we do not add jobs to the nation through additional stimulus spending, which could result in greater demand for goods by both businesses and individuals. We cannot tackle the long-term systemic issues in our economy if we do not recognize that the current level of safety net spending cannot be maintained forever.

The same goes for our gun policies. We cannot address mass killings in America if we do not recognize that many of the shooters have been young men in that age range where mental illness becomes most pronounced. We cannot help those young men who are a threat to themselves, and more important, a threat to society if the mental health system is fragmented with few options for parents and others who detect the warning signs of a meltdown. We cannot provide the treatment those young men need if we do not have the facilities or if insurance companies are allowed to limit how much psychiatric care a person can receive.

And we cannot stem the flow of guns into the hands of those who would do the most harm if we continue to allow each state to have varying laws, to allow weapons to be sold at gun shows without background checks, to allow people to buy as many guns as they can carry without red flags going off, to allow people to continue purchasing large amounts of ammunition without some investigation.

The battle over gun control is not just about the mass killings that seem to be occurring more frequently in this nation. It is about the thousands of shootings that occur across the nation every week. It is about making it harder for abusive husbands – and in some cases wives – to grab a gun and kill their spouses. It is about taking guns out of the hands of people who would commit suicide. It is about recognizing that in the majority of murders in the United States the victim and the assailant knew each other. It is about accepting that more guns do not necessarily make the world safer. Mostly, it is about admitting that our love affair with guns as a symbol of freedom is an anachronism, a vestige of time that has long passed.

And the fiscal battle being waged is not about right-wing or left-wing doctrines. It is about the millions of people who remain underemployed or unemployed. It is about a deteriorating infrastructure. It is about investing in education to better prepare our students for tomorrow. It is about reducing long-term costs for safety net programs. It is about restoring a sense of confidence in the American economy and the nation's ability to tackle large issues.

More important, though, it is deciding that if we really want to get somewhere in this nation, if we really want to make that journey together, to reach our destination then we are going to have to make some right and some left turns. Otherwise we will end up back where we started.

Let America be America

2012-11-16T08:04:00.001-08:00

If you are still struggling with who won the 2012 presidential election then let me give you a hint: America.

Was it simply because President Barack Hussein Obama was re-elected to the White House, defeating Willard Mitt Romney? No. America won because more people than expected voted, and in doing so they rejected the idea that we must become a callous, vengeful, and barbarous nation, one in which selfishness, greed, and xenophobia stand supreme.

Indeed, voters did not give any candidate or party an overwhelming “mandate” as many have said, but the majority did speak loudly about the type of nation they want. They spoke not only in the voting booth, but also in exit polls in which they addressed questions the answers to which cannot always be discerned by analyzing election results.

Yes, about 48 percent of Americans supported Romney, and about 51 percent supported Obama. More important, though, was the number of voters who in exit polls supported a kinder America. For example, 60 percent of those polled say they agree with increasing taxes on those making more than $250,000 a year as part of a balanced debt reduction plan, compared with 30 percent who oppose any tax increases. In addition, a majority of voters supported protecting the safety net. If the exit polls reflect how people really feel, then that means even some people who voted for Romney support a more balanced approach to dealing with the nation’s problems.

Or as E.J. Dionne said in a recent Washington Post column: “The voters repudiated the very worst aspects of post-Bush conservatism: its harsh tone toward those in need, its doctrinaire inflexibility on taxes, its inclination toward extreme pronouncements on social issues, and its hard anti-government rhetoric that ignored the pragmatic attitude of the electorate’s great middle about what the public sector can and can’t do.”

That voter response would suggest that we should begin moving forward, allowing America to open her arms to all of her children. Of course, that does not mean we will. Already, conservatives are trying to re-fight the election.

Some conservative business people have given walking papers to employees in retaliation for Obama’s win, while others say they will add surcharges to customers’ bills and will reduce hours for workers to avoid providing health care insurance.

The day after the election, Robert Murray, the chief executive of the Murray Energy Corp., a privately held mining company, gave 160 workers layoff notices, citing the re-election of what he called a coal hating president. John Metz, whose company owns and/or manages numerous Denny’s and Hurricane Grill & Wings restaurants, said he will add a 5 percent surcharge to customers’ bills, as well as reduce employ hours to below 17, to deal with the added costs of Obamacare. John Schnatter, the chief executive at Papa John’s Pizza, is willing to give away 2 million free pizzas to the tune of $24 million to $32 million a year, according to a recent Forbes article, but he is not willing to add $5 million to $8 million to his bottom line in order to pay for employees’ health care. He has threatened to cut workers to below 30 hours a week to avoid Obamacare requirements, and has said he would add 11 cents to 14 cents per pie. (Forbes calculated that Obamacare would add an extra 3.4 cents to 4.6 cents per pie at Papa John's.)

In addition, conservative Republicans already have begun the election conspiracy theories, from mysterious black people showing up like extraterrestrials at rural polling places in Maine to Obama using mind control on people so that he and the United Nations can create a communist dictatorship in America.

Of course, no post-election spin can be complete without the doubling down of old conservative standbys, including efforts by the Conservative Majority Fund to start an impeachment drive against the President because he is not a natural born citizen in its view. “Our only recourse now is to move forward with the full impeachment of President Obama,” the fund announced in a recent fundraising letter. “We suspect that Obama is guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors and that there may be grounds for impeachment as is laid out in the constitution. Further, he may not even be a U.S. citizen because nobody, I mean no one, has seen an actual physical copy of his birth certificate. Impeachment is our only option.”

We also have seen calls by conservatives to revolt against the federal government, including on-line secession petitions from 40 states. Romney has returned to his disparaging of the “47 percent” of takers in this country, saying in a conference call to his conservative donors that Obama won because he gave “gifts” to minorities and young women. (Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah later corrected Romney’s assertion that 47 percent of the population is moochers. Hatch says it is 51 percent.)

But even with all of that America is still the winner because while overt and subtle racism are up, according to an Associated Press poll released before the Nov. 6 presidential election, the numbers are not as high as they were a decade or two ago. And the racist dogma is being rejected by a majority of America, especially the young. Obama won with a broad based coalition that included blacks, Latinos, Asian-Americans, women, white workers, and the young.

Suffice it to say that the 2012 election did not put to rest all of the issues facing our nation. It did, however, give us a greater sense of what the majority of Americans want and how they want to proceed. By rejecting the calls for a return to the 1950s, the voters gave America a resounding victory.

America can, finally, be America again.

The Bitterness Within Us

2012-10-19T11:24:00.000-07:00

With the U.S. presidential election entering its final weeks, it might be time to ask ourselves what we have learned this year about our nation and its people. The answers may not come very easily and may not be to anyone’s liking. The partisan divide makes one wonder if this nation will be able to move forward after such a contentious election season.

We appear more divided than ever, with few people able to open their minds to the harsh realities that lie ahead. Too many of us have become trapped in political echo chambers, unable to hear anything but the sounds of the like-minded. Few people actually listen to opposing views. Some seem afraid that respect for another opinion will shatter all previous beliefs, that it would upend the universe. Civility and respect are lost in a cacophony of hateful rhetoric, and the win at all cost attitudes of so many. Chalk it up to the messiness that is democracy, many say.

But what ails discourse in this country goes beyond the messiness of democracy. Our ailments lie in bitter hearts unable to empathize with others, in jaundiced eyes unable to see the tragedy that exists in a world different from our own. Two distinctive incidents recently brought this home.

One was the attempted murder of 14-year-old Malala Yousafzai in Pakistan on Oct. 9. The other was the responses to a New York Times column in which Nicholas D. Kristof wrote about his uninsured college roommate, Scott Androes, who was dying of Stage 4 prostate cancer.

Malala, as nearly everyone knows by now, was heading home from school when gunmen boarded her school van, demanded she be identified, and then fired three shots – striking Malala and two other girls. Malala was rushed to a military hospital where she remained until recently being transferred to a hospital in Britain. The Taliban has claimed responsibility for the attack, saying that it will go after Malala again.

Why? The Taliban said because Malala is “promoting secularism” by pushing for education for women and girls. The attempted murder of Malala was rightfully met with outrage from many corners of the world. On Oct. 14, tens of thousands of people in Karachi protested against the Taliban’s actions.

In the United States, President Barack Obama decried the shooting as “reprehensible and disgusting and tragic.”

“Directing violence at children is barbaric, it’s cowardly, and our hearts go out to her and the others who were wounded as well as their families,” Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said.

In Britain, the BBC quoted Foreign Secretary William Hague as saying that the attack had “shocked Pakistan and the world,” and that Malala’s bravery was “an example to us all.”

“The public revulsion and condemnation of this cowardly attack shows that the people of Pakistan will not be beaten by terrorists,” Hague said. “The UK stands shoulder to shoulder with Pakistan in its fight against terrorism.”

Unfortunately in America, the shooting of Malala became a political football, a way to attack the Obama Administration. One conservative blog, Redstate.com, took a December 2011 comment by Vice President Joe Biden out of context in an effort to suggest that Obama and Biden had no issues with the Taliban and it’s shooting of Malala.

“Look, the Taliban per se is not our enemy,” Biden said in an interview with Leslie Gelb of Newsweek. “That’s critical. There is not a single statement that the president has ever made in any of our policy assertions that the Taliban is our enemy because it threatens U.S. interests.”

During the interview, Biden was seeking to explain U.S. efforts in Afghanistan, in particular those aimed at reconciliation between the Afghan government and the Taliban. Biden was also discussing U.S. reasons for going into Afghanistan: To oust al-Qaeda, not necessarily to wipe out the Taliban.

Meanwhile, others decided that the shooting was an opportunity to attack Islam in general and the President in particular, rather than show solidarity with Malala. The virulent attacks were numerous and outrageous. One has to ask: What manner of person is unable to empathize with a young girl nearly killed for seeking an education?

The answer may be found in the reaction to Kristof’s column. Kristof wrote that Scott Androes “had a midlife crisis and left his job in the pension industry to read books and play poker.” Androes worked part time and earned $13,000 last year. To save money he did not carry health insurance and did not go to the doctor for wellness visits. During that time, Androes developed prostate cancer that spread to his bones.

Kristof used Androes’s story to argue the merits of Obamacare. While many readers empathized with Androes, many also blamed him for his plight, basically saying he made his bed and must lie in it.

According to Kristof, one Oregon reader wrote: “Not sure why I’m to feel guilty about your friend’s problem. I take care of myself and mine, and I am not responsible for anyone else.”

Another reader wrote that many people in hospitals are there because of their own poor choices: “Smoking, obesity, drugs, alcohol, noncompliance with medical advice. Extreme age and debility, patients so sick, old, demented, weak, that if families had to pay one-tenth the cost of keeping the poor souls alive, they would instantly see that it was money wasted.”

A third reader said, “Your friend made a foolish choice, and actions have consequences,”

It would be easy to chalk up those responses to a few callous people hiding behind the anonymity of Internet posts. To do so is to fail to recognize that in these trying times, people are not only filled with disdain and vitriol, they are even more willing to share that with all of society. Recent Pew Research Center polling found, for example, that such feelings have increased dramatically among Republicans.

And that raises some serious questions about how this nation will move forward, and whether everyone will be invited on the trip.

Selling America's Soul for a White House

2012-10-10T14:06:00.002-07:00

Nearly a year ago I wrote that this presidential election was a battle for America’s soul. That is truer today than it was on Oct. 12, 2011, when that post first appeared. You don’t agree? Take a look at this election cycle and you will see what I mean. There is an assault on the ideas that make America great. It is not only the mendacity of the Republican presidential candidate. It is the efforts by the GOP, particularly conservatives, to roll back the progress that has occurred over the last 50 to 60 years, from civil rights to voting rights, from education to worship. No longer do we discourage the corrupting influences of big money in our elections, we revel in it.

And we do it all in the guise of protecting the U.S. Constitution, though many of those who claim to hold that document sacred fail to adequately distinguish it from the Declaration of Independence. We have become a nation of angry tribes whose members cannot see beyond their own myopias, unable to discern fact from fiction, dogma from policy, substance from style, bluster from diplomacy. You sell it, we'll buy it. The market place of ideas has been inundated with cheap products with fake expiration dates.

Willard Mitt Romney’s recent debate performance was a prime example of the obfuscating that is occurring in this election. Indeed, Romney and President Barack Obama have engaged in hyperbole in an effort to win votes. When facts were not available, each has turned to spin and speculation to make a point. But what we are seeing from Romney is a complete abandonment of the ideas that sprung from his “severely conservative” philosophy. His dodging is beyond what we have seen in previous elections. Romney shows the sales skills that helped him become a multi-millionaire, not the skills that are needed to be a leader.

During the Republican presidential primary, for example, Romney promised that his tax cut plan would help the “job creators” (the 1 percent) not the moochers (the 47 percent). During the presidential debate, he declared that he had no tax cut for the wealthy, just a gosh-darn great plan to cut taxes by 20 percent across the board. According to the non-partisan Tax Policy Center, as well as other groups, Romney’s math does not add up because there are not enough high-end loopholes to make up for the level of tax reduction he seeks. The center estimated that Romney’s “plan” would cost $456 billion by 2015. Extrapolated over 10 years, including inflation and other costs, the total would be $4.8 trillion, the center concluded. Of course that $4.8 trillion ($5 trillion when rounded) is not a hard number because Romney has refused to give details. But that is not the problem. No, the problem occurred when he tried to suggest that he would not reduce the amount of money that the wealthy pays in taxes, a counter argument to what he had been saying since the Republican primary.

Add to that his statements about having a health plan that protects people who have pre-existing conditions (not so said his campaign after the debate); his claims that he would seek no limits to abortion access (he has said he wants to appoint Supreme Court justices who will overturn Roe v Wade and he wants to defund Planned Parenthood); his support for hiring more teachers (in June and again this week he mocked Obama for wanting to hire more teachers); his claim that Obama wants to drastically cut the defense budget (a plan approved by the House GOP); and one sees the manner in which Romney has distorted the political landscape.

The same is true of his party. Republicans have been claiming since their national convention that they, like much of America, supported the President and wanted him to do well. The problem, they say, is the President was in over his head. That argument requires us to forget that since the first day of the Obama presidency GOP lawmakers have done all they could to deny him a second term. That included taking the nation to the fiscal cliff during the debt ceiling debate, spending more time on voting to repeal Obamacare than helping to fix the economy, and launching all out attacks on women’s reproductive rights, including suggesting that abortions should only be available in the cases of “forcible rape.” (This week House Republicans are investigating "lax" security at the U.S. embassy in Benghazi, although they will say little about more than $400 million in GOP cuts to the State Department's security budget over the last two years.) Add to that local Republican efforts to tamp down the vote through a series of voter identification laws and we see a GOP that has put its interests before that of the nation.

And they have been able to do so because of the shady dealings of a host of conservative billionaires who have created shell groups disguised as grass-roots movements in an effort to buy the campaign without most people knowing. From the Koch brothers to Sheldon Adelson to Karl Rove’s army of check-writing robots, conservative billionaires have decided that no political race will be without their financial influence. (Conservative billionaires have spent $20 million in Ohio alone in an effort to oust Democrat Sen. Sherrod Brown.) They have pumped millions upon millions into congressional campaigns not to promote the general welfare, but to increase their own.

David Siegel, the chief executive of the timeshare company Westgate, went so far as to send a menacing email to his employees telling them that their jobs would be in jeopardy if Obama wins next month, according to a story posted to The Huffington Post. While the email was couched in terms of tax increases, it raises questions about whether Siegel was making an indirect threat against his employees. Vote for Obama and you get to be part of the mooching 47 percent. Richard Lacks, the chief executive of the car parts manufacturer Lacks Enterprises, told his workers that an Obama election would result in a decrease in their pay, the Huffington Post article said. Those two incidents came after a Republican coal mine owner forced his workers to take part of the day off without pay so they could be props for a Romney campaign stop.

The result is a close election where few people truly understand the issues or are willing to study them. Instead they are swayed by bluster. Too many voters have decided that the election season is too long and every politician is too corrupt to warrant citizen participation in the political process. More pronounced, of course, are the so called undecided voters, those who have not made up their minds this late in the game. One has to ask: If one cannot choose between Obama and Romney after more than a year of campaigning, then what else does one need before making a choice?

What makes it all the more appalling is the U.S. Supreme Court’s failure to recognize that its Citizen United decision has indeed corrupted the political system, turning corporations into people and making the will of the few more valuable than the needs of the many. The High Court, as well as several lower Federal courts, has all but gutted Montana’s century-old, anti-corruption laws, which were aimed at protecting the electoral process.

It is a Faustian bargain that Republicans have made in an effort to wrest control from President Obama. It was most evident when Romney went from being “severely conservative” to “moderate” in 90 minutes. He leads that team that has put a “For Sale” sign on America’s soul. But what can one expect from a man who – if not for the advantages of his family pedigree – might otherwise be selling used cars in Roxbury?

The Allure of the First Debate Winner

2012-10-04T14:10:00.002-07:00

The political pundits and party surrogates have spoken: Willard Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts and the Republican presidential candidate, won the first presidential debate in Denver Wednesday night. The problem with that conclusion is that the voters, particularly the undecided ones in the swing states, have yet to speak on the issue.

Indeed, Romney was the more assertive and more focused candidate. He rattled off statistic after statistic, and he seemed in control of the numbers. Meanwhile, President Barack Hussein Obama appeared tentative and disengaged for much of the debate. It was not until late in the exchange that the President seemed to gain his footing.

But once voters get past the style questions of the first debate they might find that the allure Romney projected is much like that presented by a hook up at a party. From across the room, that person looks attractive, worth considering for a long-term relationship. Then you get up close, engaging that person in conversation. The more that person talks and the more you listen the less attractive he or she becomes. Eventually, there comes the realization that the object of your desires, that alluring, generous specimen of humanity is actually very vacuous and self-absorbed, lacking many socially redeeming qualities.

Core values shift depending on with whom the person speaks. The passion comes and goes depending on whom that person is seeking to court. That was Willard Mitt Romney Wednesday night. He was alluring, charming, and warm from 9 p.m. to 10:30 p.m., but chances are he will become cold and unattractive at 2 a.m. when the party is well over and the euphoria of the night’s alcohol wears off.

Why? Because that is when one steps back, looks at the real person, and asks: “Did he really say that?”

Yes, America, Willard Mitt Romney really did say that.

After 18 months of proclaiming that he had a multi-billion dollar tax cut plan that included breaks for the top 1 percent of earners, Romney announced Wednesday night that he did not have a tax plan that could cost the nation $5 trillion over 10 years. While the numbers attached to Romney’s tax plan were not of his making, they were a realistic assessment by economists and tax experts – including some whom he claims agree with him – seeking to fill the numbers void left by Romney’s lack of details.

According to Romney, he will not offer any tax plan that adds to the deficit. If that is true, then how does he plan to reduce taxes by 20 percent across the board? Nearly every study looking at Romney’s proposed tax cut says he cannot accomplish his goals by simply closing loopholes and eliminating deductions for the rich. The non-partisan Tax Policy Center – which Romney views as credible when it challenges Obama’s plans, but not when it questions his – suggests that Romney would have to raise taxes on the middle class to reach his goals. So do other studies, including one by Martin Feldstein, a Romney advisor and Harvard economist.

Feldstein’s study showed that Romney can accomplish his tax-cut goals if he eliminates deductions for mortgage interest, charitable contributions, and state and local taxes for households making more than $100,000. The problem is Romney views the middle class as including people whose household income reaches $250,000, a figure many economists put above the middle class.

“First of all, I don’t have a $5 trillion tax cut,” Romney proclaimed to Obama. “I don’t have a tax cut of a scale that you’re talking about. My view is that we ought to provide tax relief to people in the middle class. But I’m not going to reduce the share of taxes paid by high-income people.”

He added later: “With regards to that tax cut, look, I’m not looking to cut massive taxes and to reduce – the revenues going to the government. My – my number-one principle is, there will be no tax cut that adds to the deficit. I want to underline that: no tax cut that adds to the deficit.”

Of course, such a proclamation sounds great, but in order for it to be true we have to take the word of a man who has often changed his positions on major topics. According to Romney, 47 percent of the people who do not pay taxes in this nation are moochers, a bunch of lazy government draining takers living off the sweat and hard work of the makers. The makers, Romney proclaimed during the Republican primary, need tax relief because they are the job creators. Those job creators are the 1 percent of the population that Romney now says will not receive any tax relief beyond what can be paid for, suggesting that the tax rate cannot drop by 20 percent.

In addition, Romney wants to develop a medical insurance program that allows children to remain on their parents’ policies until age 26; that bans insurance companies from denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions when those people change jobs; that helps to reduce medical costs. To accomplish such Romney has vowed to repeal Obamacare and replace it with . . . Obamacare. He also said recently that sick people can get free health care in emergency rooms, a practice that both Obamacare and Romneycare seek to discourage because of the additional costs incurred in such situations. Romney did not address how he will accommodate the millions of people who would be left uninsured, or how he will replace the preventive care provisions of Obamacare that make contraceptives free for women.

On Wednesday Romney also proclaimed the need to hire more teachers -- a major shift from what he said during a speech to Iowans in June. In that speech Romney claimed that Obama's call for more teachers was an expansion of Big Government that must be stopped.

"He says we need more firemen, more policemen, more teachers," Romney said on June 8. "Did he not get the message of Wisconsin? The American people did. It's time for us to cut back government and help the American people."

And then there is Dodd-Frank. For 18 months, Romney proclaimed that government regulations, particularly Dodd-Frank, were ruining the economy. That changed Wednesday night when he offered support for regulations and Dodd-Frank, if not in total at least in part.

“Regulation is essential,” Romney said. “You can't have a free market work if you don't have regulation. As a businessperson, I had to have – I need to know the regulations. I needed them there. You couldn't have people opening up banks in their – in their garage and making loans. I mean, you have to have regulations so that you can have an economy work. Every free economy has good regulation.”

It’s getting late and Willard Mitt Romney is losing his luster.

The Enigma of Willard Mitt Romney

2012-09-28T12:10:00.001-07:00

The closer we get to the Nov. 6 presidential election the more Willard Mitt Romney reminds me of two quotes. The first was addressed to Mulder in the X-Files. The second is attributed to Winston Churchill and was used in a different variation by Mulder in an episode of the X-Files:

“And a lie, Mr. Mulder, is most convincingly hidden between two truths.”

And:

“It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”

Both quotes reflect Romney, his campaign, the Republican Party, and the Tea Party. And each may explain why Romney seems to be losing grounds in polls of the critical swing states that are expected to decide this election.

A look at the entire campaign season lends support to that assertion. Ever since the Republican presidential primary Romney has at various times shown that he is out of touch with most Americans. From his comments about the number of Cadillacs his wife owns, to their dressage horse, to his push for tax breaks for the wealthy, to his friendships with NASCAR owners, Romney has shown that he is insensitive to the plight to those unlike himself. Add to that the distortions that he has spread about President Barack Obama’s policies and views, and one sees that Romney is not only insensitive to most Americans, but he is also averse to the facts.

If he is asked how he will dramatically cut taxes with a revenue neutral plan, he defers, saying just trust me. If he is asked how he will create the 12 million jobs he has promised, he defers, saying just trust me. In question after question, Romney slithers away, clamoring for the electorate to just trust him. Then, out of nowhere comes an unguarded moment filed with truth that is sandwiched between lies.

Most recently, it was in his disdain for the so-called 47 percent of Americans who do not pay taxes, who are dependent on the government for handouts, and are, therefore, beholding to Obama. That many of those people are military veterans, the elderly, students, working poor, the unemployed, did not register with Romney, who seems to view so many as the unwashed masses unable to take responsibility for their own lives.

Of course, sensing that his comments have hurt him, Romney began proclaiming his love for the masses, all Americans, the 100 percent. Even as he did he continued to flub other moments with outbreaks of candor.

As evidence of his empathy for the 47 percent he proclaimed all the good his health care reform produced in Massachusetts. According to Romney, as well as several nonpartisan studies, the number of people, particularly children, with medical insurance in Massachusetts increased dramatically after Romneycare was passed.

Yet, even as he highlights such an accomplishment he rails against Obamacare, declaring to kill it on Day One of a Romney presidency the national law based on what is surely his own most worthwhile acheivement. Even more, he proclaims that one reason that Obamacare is not needed is because the uninsured can always receive care in the nation’s emergency rooms, one of the most costly aspects of the health care industry that both Obamacare and Romneycare seek to eliminate.

There are even more examples in this campaign season. And as we get closer and closer to Nov. 6 there will probably be even more from Willard Mitt Romney, the “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”

When Truth is Worse Than Lies

2012-09-19T14:39:00.001-07:00

If one looks at former Gov. Mitt Romney’s – and by extension the Republican Party’s – push for the presidency this year, one sees that Romney has decided that no lie will go untold. Time and time again, Romney, his vice presidential candidate, Paul Ryan, and the campaigns sycophants have told lie after lie after lie about President Barack Obama and his policies in an effort to scare Americans into voting the GOP ticket.

What is really scary though is not the lies that the GOP tells. It is the truths that emanate from Romney. For in those truths lie the most horrific of ideas, the most stunning displays of selfishness, the most neurotic self-aggrandizement in a presidential candidate in some time.

If one did not see this before, then Romney’s comments in the last several weeks, and the release of the video from a May fundraiser in Boca Raton, FL., should provide evidence of how out of touch Romney and the Republicans are with Americans and what it means to be an American. Romney's knee-jerk response to the violence in the Middle East last week demonstrates the chest-thumping, sabre rattling that he and the conservatives seek to pass off as foreign policy. His speech in Florida lays out the plutocratic philosophy of the GOP. No longer is there the lip service to compassionate conservatism. No longer is there a pretense of creating a society where all have a chance to flourish. No longer is there a desire to reach out to others – if only in rhetoric.

Romney and the GOP have decided that the world is made up of makers and takers. The GOP is the party of the makers. The takers are all Democrats, a bunch of left-leaning, Socialist moochers trying to redistribute the gains of the wealthy. So let us now return to the Gilded Age, when the rich bought seats in the U.S. Senate from state legislators. Let us return to that time when the wealthy could live without guilt as they walked by the poor and desolate, ignoring their plight. Let us return to that time when one of the richest men in the world was seen as loving and charitable because he gave a poor child a nickel in a photo op outside a church.

We, the makers, are the worthy, the Republicans shout. We, the makers, are the job creators, they rail. We, the makers, shall allow the hoi polli to bask in our greatness, they declare.

Meanwhile, they strike at all that America should be, a country of shared sacrifice.

According to Mitt Romney's Florida comments, the takers are the 47 percent of Americans who pay no federal income tax. They sit on their oversized duffs, demanding more food, more welfare, more housing, more health care, more of everything from the glorious makers. The takers, Romney and the GOP rants, have no desire to work and they are totally dependent on government handouts.

Not the makers though. No, they built everything they have from the ground up, forsaking government assistance, thriving in a free market economy on their hard work and wits.

Of course we know better. In one of its most recent campaign ads propagating the "You didn't build that" taunt the GOP has been throwing at Obama, the owner of a small-business in Wisconsin talks about making it alone, without government assistance. The owner does not mention that the business received more than $300,000 in government contracts in the Obama years alone. Another of Romney's makers boasted about how he had built his business from scratch, while at the same time complaining that under Obama he has not received enough government contracts.

Yet, that is not the most repugnant stench that rises from the Romney camp. No, that stench comes from the trash heap onto which Romney has placed 47 percent of the American electorate, an electorate he says is beholding to Obama because of a dependency on government, an electorate whose members are unwilling to take personal responsibility or care for their own lives.

It makes you wonder what Mitt Romney's father and mother would think of their little boy. After all, George Romney's first years in America was spent on public relief after Congress created a $100,000 fund to care for the Mormons exiled from their colony in Mexico, according to a recent article on NPR's Web site.

Or at least that is what Romney's mother, Lenore, said in an interview in 1962 when George Romney was running for governor of Michigan, according to NPR. The picture Lenore Romney painted of her husband, a fiscal conservative and social moderate, was a touching one, about a man whose family relied on public assistance, but who was able to rise to become an auto executive and later a governor. And it all started with some government help.

Help that George Romney's son does not want to offer 47 percent of the country, those moochers, those takers, those Obama supporters.

Setting the Stage for the DNC

2012-09-05T14:17:00.001-07:00

“It’s time for Democrats to stiffen our backbone and stand up for what we believe.”

That quote from Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts resounded through the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., Tuesday night. The question is will it resound through the nation because now, more than ever, we must decide what type of nation we want to be. Do we want a selfish, vindictive, xenophobic America? Or do we want a generous, forgiving, inclusive America?

For too long Democrats – as well as moderate Republicans – have been willing to acquiesce to the extreme right of the GOP, to hide for fear that acknowledging the Democratic Party’s basic principles will lead to members being labeled big-government, big- spending liberals. It is a label Democrats have been running from for decades.

But Tuesday, Patrick gave voice to what many Democratic voters have been longing for: A strong party that stands by ideas for the common good, the sense of community over the selfishness of the Ayn Rand acolytes.

“We Democrats owe America more than a strong argument for what we are against,” Patrick said. “We need to be just as strong about what we are for.”

The question, Patrick said, is “what do we believe?”

“We believe in an economy that grows opportunity out to the middle class and the marginalized, not just up to the well connected,” he said. “We believe that freedom means keeping government out of our most private affairs, including out of a woman’s decision whether to keep an unwanted pregnancy and everybody’s decision about whom to marry. We believe that we owe the next generation a better country than we found, and that every American has a stake in that. We believe that in times like these we should turn to each other, not on each other. We believe that government has a role to play, not in solving every problem in everybody’s life, but in helping people help themselves to the American dream. That’s what Democrats believe.”

Patrick was not the only one who pushed for Democrats to be Democrats, but he may have been the most vehement.

First Lady Michelle Obama reiterated Patrick’s lament, arguing that President Barack Obama should be re-elected because those ideas are at the heart of what is and should be America.

The president “believes that when you've worked hard, and done well, and walked through that doorway of opportunity you do not slam it shut behind you,” she said. “You reach back, and you give other folks the same chances that helped you succeed.”

“I know from experience that if I truly want to leave a better world for my daughters, and all our sons and daughters, if we want to give all our children a foundation for their dreams and opportunities worthy of their promise, if we want to give them that sense of limitless possibility – that belief that here in America, there is always something better out there if you're willing to work for it – then we must work like never before,” she continued.

And there lied the heart of what this election – and America – is about. It is one thing to extoll America’s “exceptionalism.” It is another to live up to it. Most recently, we have failed on the latter.

“The days we live in are not easy ones, but we have seen days like this before, and America prevailed,” said Julian Castro, the mayor of San Antonio. “With the wisdom of our founders and the values of our families, America prevailed. With each generation going further than the last, America prevailed. And with the opportunity we build today for a shared prosperity tomorrow, America will prevail.”

Indeed it will if we take the right action.

Eastwood, the GOP, and the Harvey Syndrome

2012-08-31T10:42:00.000-07:00

I’m a great fan of Clint Eastwood: Unforgiven; Gran Torino; Bird; Play Misty for Me; Sudden Impact; Escape from Alcatraz – all were good, as were the spaghetti westerns. The same can be said of the Dirty Harry movies. I’ll even give him a nod for The Bridges of Madison County.

But the last night of the Republican National Convention made me think he was having either a "senior moment" as Rex Reed declared several years ago when he was accused of shoplifting CDs at a Tower Records in Manhattan; or a Pee Wee Herman moment when he was caught pleasuring himself in a movie theater in South Florida; or maybe it was an Elwood P. Dowd moment when the empty chair on the stage in Tampa seemed to take the shape of a 6-foot invisible rabbit named Harvey.

Either way, the rambling, often off-point speech Eastwood made Thursday night seemed to say so much about the 2012 Republican National Convention. There Eastwood stood, talking to – and sometimes admonishing – an empty chair, not totally aware of what his own actions meant. An American icon reduced to a caricature. It was a disturbing scene, awkward in its execution, so eerie that one could not easily turn away. As Tom Brokaw tweeted: “Clint Eastwood became huge star as a man of few words As a surprise guest on the Tampa stage he had too many words.”

Even worse, Eastwood seemed to be leading tens of thousands of Republicans in a mental self-pleasuring while millions of people watched dumfounded, shocked at what they saw. Indeed – to borrow from Mike Lofgren, a former 30-year Republican staff member on Capitol Hill – the GOP looked like an “apocalyptic cult.” Forget the Kool-Aid; we’ll take the arsenic straight up, no chaser.

That was true of so much of the GOP convention. As I watched the unfolding of the coronation of Willard Mitt Romney as the Republican presidential candidate, I kept thinking of his party as a horde of petulant children. After breaking all the lamps and light bulbs in the house, they complained of the darkness and demanded that someone else pay the repair bill. The Republicans, particularly those in Congress, have spent nearly every day since Jan. 20, 2009, distorting America’s light until all that was left were shadows, a shadiness steeped in claims that President Barack Obama has been a failure, an un-American, post-colonial Kenyan Socialist.

Obama ignored an urgent report by his own 18-person debt commission, the Republicans said this week without mentioning that Rep. Paul Ryan, their vice presidential candidate, led the GOP charge to ignore that urgent report and to strike it down. Obama failed to save a GM plant in Janesville, WI, the Republicans said without mentioning that the decision to close the plant was made six months before Obama was elected. Obama is taking the work out of the welfare-to-work program, the Republicans shouted without mentioning that two Republican governors were among the five who recently sought waivers that would give each more flexibility in meeting federal work requirements.

And there were the claims that Obama had destroyed the economy, despite evidence that Obama has created more jobs in the time since the economic downturn ended than Ronald Reagan did in the same period of his presidency after the end of the economic recession of the early 1980s.

Of course, we expect a certain amount of fudging of facts in a political campaign, a certain amount of hyperbole, and a certain amount of partisanship. Political conventions are infomercials, a chance to sale the nation your candidate, to keep them from ordering the Jinsu knives or the Amway products being hustled on the other cable channels.

But this year’s GOP infomercial went beyond what we normally expect. It was peppered with outright lies and grand omissions, a floundering about in the marketplace of ideas. Racial overtones and undercurrents hovered over the Tampa Bay Times Forum. Concrete details about policies and national direction were as scarce as the number of dark-hued faces in an arena in a state where tans are ubiquitous.

Yet, that was nothing compared to the Hollywood deity who was once the Pale Rider, a gun-toting avenging preacher. He stood talking to a chair, looking not much different than Grandpa Simpson, a crotchety old man. Eastwood would have been better off if we could just chalk it all up to a “senior moment.” We can’t though. No wonder even Republicans take issue with their party. Let’s hope the Democrats do better when their turn comes up.