Grumblebear, The Ex-Pat Bear

Bye-Bye Blogger

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

And away we go . . . .

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

Thanks, Blogger, for being a wonderful host.

In Times Like These . . . .

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

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

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

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

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

You Just Can’t Make Stuff Like This Up

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

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

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

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

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

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

(click on image to enlarge – text below)

FROM OUR READERS

Gay issue raises interesting question

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DON TENNANT Champaign

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s Privatize Social Security Now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off

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

UPDATED BELOW

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Death Watch

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

From today’s Think Progress email:

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

And the death watch continues . . . .

Superstition and stuff

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

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

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

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

Just sayin’ . . . .

This Sucks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Random Thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Odds and Ends from Evernote

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

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

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

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

May 13, brought this whole post from Bernard Chazelle

Our Awesomeness in Numbers

from A Tiny Revolution by Jonathan Schwarz

By: Bernard Chazelle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Health Expenditures: 1 out of 30.

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

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

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

Obesity: 30 out of 30.

Incarceration: 30 out of 30.

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

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

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

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

— Bernard Chazelle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Barney Frank Confronts Woman At Townhall Comparing Obama To Hitler

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

My sentiments exactly!

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

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

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

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

You, sir, are such a pathetic disappointment!

OMG

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

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

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

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

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

Virginia Says ‘No’ To Corporate Democrat McAuliffe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brave Sir Robin Blue-Dog

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

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

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

More Random Thoughts (cont.)

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

Public campaign financing, anyone?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Credo, please leave me alone!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And finally

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

More Random Thoughts (incomplete)

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

Naming the beast

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cast your vote or offer your own suggestions in comments.

The Ugly Truth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Odds & Ends

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Torture and Spying on Americans: A Real Republican Opportunity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, Really?

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

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

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

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

Think Progress has a great article on this video here

I highly recommend you read the T-P article.

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

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

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

Tea Bags, etc.

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

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

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

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

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

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