Political Waves by Judith Gayle

50 years ago in Alabama

2013-05-20T05:16:55Z

In the last few years, we’ve seen an exodus from Congress; legislators retiring, running from the frustration of deadlock or, in some cases, “primary’ed” out of office. In fact, fully HALF of Congress is new. There were even more newbies in 2010, as old, seasoned hands were replaced by zealots eager to kill off government.

Olympia Snowe, recently retired Republican moderate from Maine commented to Charlie Rose that the new kids on the block are really at a disadvantage, having no template for actual governance to follow. All they’ve seen is deadlock, preparing them for nothing else.

The days of statesmanship seem to be behind us, and respect for government at a low. Today I heard a Pub legislator say, with a sneer, that this government was “activist.”

Like most of what lawmakers say, these days, I can only shake my head. What would they prefer? Government that’s passivist? One that’s winnowed down to nothing much but the bare bones? One that’s, perhaps, drowned in a bathtub? Exactly so, with only enough means to slip the Pentagon some bucks, then stay out of the way of big business and Wall Street.

I also heard a Representative refer to taxes as “evil.” I’ve got to go with my dear Fishin’ Jim’s commentary on taxes — he always says he was happy to pay them, that meant he was making a good living.

One House member that has my 100% approval is Florida’s Alan Grayson — not only is he firmly progressive, he’s PROUDLY/LOUDLY so. He also sends the most entertaining requests for money, and invariably either amuses or moves me.

Here’s what he wrote this weekend, I’ll let him do the heavy lifting in the introduction — then read excerpts of what Dr. King wrote in the Birmingham jail, half a century past. No matter how many times you’ve read it before, it will not fail to stir that longing within you for the world within our hopes, the one we welcome in our dreams and envision in our hearts.

Fifty years hasn’t changed our culture a hell of a lot but it’s brought us to the brink of change, alright; we can clearly see our racism, now, know where NOT to step unless it is our intention to do so. Some of us do, our course. Those that would stand in the way of progress will fail, but they will continue their culture war until the last gasp.

All I can add to this is yet another patriot’s quote, this one from Teddy Kennedy. We need to keep this one as a daily mantra if we’re to pull our share of the load:

“The work begins anew. The hope rises again. And the dream lives on.”

Jude

From the desk of Alan Grayson

Tomorrow marks the 50th anniversary of the first publication of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” King was jailed for campaigning against racial segregation in Birmingham, in violation of an injunction against anyone “parading, demonstrating, boycotting, trespassing and picketing.” His letter was written on the margins of a newspaper, scraps of paper that another prisoner gave to him, and then a legal pad that his attorney left behind. It has been an inspiration to millions of people; I am one of them. Here are some excerpts:

MY DEAR FELLOW CLERGYMEN:… .

I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly….

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we stiff[ly] creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you go forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness” then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience….

But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.” Was not Amos an extremist for justice: “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.” Was not Martin Luther an extremist: “Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God.” And John Bunyan: “I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience.” And Abraham Lincoln: “This nation cannot survive half slave and half free.” And Thomas Jefferson: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal …” So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? In that dramatic scene on Calvary’s hill three men were crucified. We must never forget that all three were crucified for the same crime—the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thus fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment. Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists….

I have no despair about the future. I have no fear about the outcome of our struggle in Birmingham, even if our motives are at present misunderstood. We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham, and all over the nation, because the goal of America [is] freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with America’s destiny. Before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before the pen of Jefferson etched the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence across the pages of history, we were here. For more than two centuries our forebears labored in this country without wages; they made cotton king; they built the homes of their masters while suffering gross injustice and shameful humiliation — and yet out of a bottomless vitality they continued to thrive and develop. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands….

One day the South will recognize its real heroes. There will be the James Merediths, with the noble sense of purpose that enables them to face jeering and hostile mobs, and with the agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneer. There will be the old, oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized in a seventy-two-year-old woman in Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride segregated buses, and who responded with ungrammatical profundity to one who inquired about her weariness: “My feets is tired, but my soul is at rest.” There will be the young high school and college students, the young ministers of the gospel and a host of their elders, courageously and nonviolently sitting in at lunch counters and willingly going to jail for conscience’s sake. One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judaeo-Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

Never before have I written so long a letter. I’m afraid it is much too long to take your precious time. I can assure you that it would have been much shorter if I had been writing from a comfortable desk, but what else can one do when he is alone in a narrow jail cell, other than write long letters, think long thoughts and pray long prayers?…

Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear-drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.

Yours for the cause of Peace and Brotherhood,

Martin Luther King, Jr. ++

“I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. That is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.”
~ The Reverend Martin Luther King

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

City mouse, country mouse

2013-05-11T03:10:45Z

[with bygones to those living in Red states everywhere ...]

When I was a little city mouse, my country cousin came to stay; she was not quite right, with developmental issues and rickets caused by early nutrition problems. Adopted by elderly and religious parents that were totally unprepared to raise a flirtatious teen in the 60s, they sent her on to the progressive side of the family.

Newly arrived from Texarkana, she was promptly dubbed “Tex.” She was older than me, socially inappropriate, embarrassing to a fault and always too loud. Now I’m going to say something really mean: I was THRILLED when she finally left. It took well over a year, one in which every day was painful to my fledgling adolescent sensitivities. She was part of me and mine, I developed an enormous amount of patience to deal with her but — at a critical time in my ‘becoming’ — she was a hindrance I simply couldn’t overcome.

I feel the same way now about the South.

Those of you who have read me over the years know I have no love for the Federalists. These are the states rights people, anxious to protect their little corner of privilege and power. We’ve seen a lot of that recently. In fact, with the rise of the church folk back in the 90s, the states have been flexing their muscles in a way reminiscent of the mid-19th century.

My state, for instance, is trying to pass a law to declare any federal gun laws put into place void, should they occur — this is called “nullification” and it isn’t constitutional. States don’t care, they do it anyway; they have since way back … and way WAY back, a good many of them did so as “the ultimate act of treason.”

When the North finally won that war, Lincoln was prepared to be even-handed with the South. All that was put to bed by one disgruntled Southerner, John Wilkes Booth. Abe’s replacement, Andrew Johnson, was unable to establish a moderate plan for rehabbing a conquered enemy, rolled over by Radical Republicans who insisted on a pound of flesh for their wartime troubles. This led to a period known as the Reconstruction, for which the South has still not forgiven the Fates that betrayed them nor the rest of the nation for its participation.

They’re taking their vengeance now, re-dividing the country along the Mason/Dixon line as well as those invisible barriers established by the culture wars. They’ve fought our black president to a standstill, and they’re not through.

The first read that follows is what I tell myself when I’m exhausted, annoyed, and impatient:

Hell, let ‘em go, we can’t convince them. Give ‘em Texas … and Georgia and Florida and South Carolina, where they’ll back their lying, philandering ex-governor — creepy Mark Sanford, oozing Christian platitudes and dragging his mistress behind him — the moment big anonymous money goes after moderate Dem. Elizabeth Colbert-Busch, branding her a liberal abortionist with a police record. If they can’t rise above the muck, let them wallow in it.

The next tells you about nullification; who’s trying, who’s fighting it. Then, read about the new NRA President and the “War of Northern Aggression.” Great Balls of Fire!

Whoever said “the South shall rise again” got it right — and the WHOLE WORLD is paying a very heavy price for their latest attempt.

None of this solves the problem of our schism, of course — nothing here is particularly productive. Think of it as a whine of frustration, out into the night!

Jude

Memo to the South: Go Ahead, Secede Already!
Lee Siegel, the Daily Beast
Apr 30, 2013

Let’s face it—on nearly every important issue, from gun control to immigration to gay marriage, red states are holding America back. Lee Siegel on why the South should get the hell out of the union.

Let’s not be fooled by all the bipartisan rhetoric that has been streaming out of the GOP since Romney’s self-destruction. Hundreds of thousands of petitioners in a handful of red states still want to secede? Well, don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

A solid block of Southern states continues to refuse to expand Medicaid, thus squashing one of the linchpins of the president’s health-care reform. The South will likely be the last and most stubborn battleground in the fight for gay marriage. Gun control? The more the two sides seem to get cozier with each other, the faster gun-control legislation gets watered down—and more and more red states are passing laws making it legal to carry a concealed weapon. As for immigration, the red states seem to be relaxing their anti-immigrant fervor, but nothing approaching new legislation is even on the horizon.

The sad truth is that “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” can only be achieved at this point if the nation is split in half. Far from being fanciful or fanatical, the proponents of secession have a stronger grasp of political reality than just about anyone else. In fact, there are serious reasons why the North itself should take the lead in a secessionist movement.

Just think what America would look like without its mostly Southern states. (We could retain “America”: they could call themselves “Smith & Wesson” or “Coca-Cola” or something like that.) Universal health care. No guns. Strong unions. A humane minimum wage. A humane immigration policy. High revenues from a fair tax structure. A massive public-works program. Legal gay marriage. A ban on carbon emissions. Electric cars. Stronger workplace protections. Extended family leave from work in case of pregnancy or illness. Longer unemployment benefits. In short, a society on a par with most of the rest of the industrialized world—a place whose politics have finally caught up with its social and economic realities.

But I don’t want to appear blindly partisan—a sundering of the union would make the other half of America equally fulfilled. The red-state republic could finally establish a theocracy in which the fundamentalist Christian church would legislate all the important aspects of civic life. It could either send its illegal and/or legal immigrants northward or reinstitute a reformed system of indenture whereby immigrants are purchased by bona fide citizens who have a fully modernized respect for private property. It could, taking the lead from the pioneering Kansas legislature, abolish the income tax, raising revenue from, for example, a “pay to work” program. It could ban abortion in all instances, including rape and incest, and use the growing population of orphans to establish an impressive standing army.

The red-state nation, giddy with new mobility, could make the 1958 Chevy its official car, and use the cutting-edge resources of cable television and the Internet to broadcast postwar situation comedies 24 hours a day. It could arm all of its citizens, and thus relieve itself of the financial burden of maintaining law-enforcement agencies. And without any type of regulation, it could finally compete with similarly unhampered societies all over the world.

Without the FDA, a new red-state republic could use refined transfats to develop ever tastier delicacies, perhaps energizing its economy by instituting a toxic-food-for-toxic-toys program with China.

Bitter sarcasm aside, both regions of the country would, in a word, have conferred on them the fundamental freedoms they each believe the other side is denying them.

Instead, we are stuck living in an America whose politics hang suspended somewhere in the 1850s, when the almost symmetrical divide in the country kept one half of it mired in a barbaric system of slavery—itself rooted in ancient customs and conventions—and the other half moving quickly, along scientific and technological lines, into the modern era. Almost 150 years after the end of the Civil War, when it comes to basic issues and fundamental values, America is still split right down the middle.

***

Liberal pundits, especially, refuse to see this, perhaps because their livelihood depends on their ability to cheer readers and viewers through the deepening gloom with ever brighter optimistic prognostication. Nonetheless, the country is still as neatly divided as quinoa pilaf with mushrooms on one side and roasted pork belly on the other, and will continue to be. The presidency will swing one way and Congress—then, or two years later—will swing another. No matter the current state of the Republican Party, the iron law of “throw the bums out” will kick in, and the outsiders will once again have the White House. And still nothing will have changed.

It boggles the mind that, even as I write this, the so-called sequester, imposed by law in lieu of a balanced budget, has kicked in and is about to cause misery for millions of the most vulnerable Americans on both sides of the divide. Other countries suffer strife or war or anarchy or real economic terrors. We, on the other hand, the most prosperous and most powerful nation on the face of the earth, squabble like young newlyweds over how to pay the household bills.

The conventional, almost formulaic description of this political psychosis is that the Democrats and Republicans cannot “agree” on a solution, which they would be able to do if only the two sides would act rationally and “listen to” each other. The fact that they cannot “negotiate” results in a “stalemate,” which summons to mind the happy delusion of a demanding chess match at the end of which the two competing parties can at least take solace in a game beautifully and intelligently played. Or we hear on Fox that the Democrats are ideologically blind and fanatical in their pursuit of a totalitarian government. Or we hear on MSNBC that the Republicans are ideologically blind and fanatical in their pursuit of a Darwinian dystopia.

The. Country. Is. Split. Right. Down. The. Middle. May I, with the subtlety of cannonballs falling upon Fort Sumter, suggest that we stop using the anodyne categories of red and blue, and start calling the two sides “Confederate” and “Union,” which is what they really are?

The association of North with modernity and South with regression is so prominent, so visible, so all-encompassing that its familiarity has made it invisible. Here are the facts—with important exceptions in every category. The great research universities are in the blue states. So are the great medical schools, the great hospitals, and the great law schools. The great art and history museums are in the blue part of the country.

The most important popular and “high” art is produced by blue people, in blue places. Even the best comedians—with the exception of Stephen Colbert—are, you might say, from free as opposed to slave states.

By contrast, the South leads in all the negative trends. The South has the highest infant mortality rate. It has the most traffic deaths. It leads the country in gun deaths. It has the greatest number of obese people. It has the highest rate of diabetes. It has the largest number of people dying from stroke—a broad swath of the southeastern United States is known as the “stroke belt.” The South has the highest rates of cognitive decline.

Interestingly, though the South is home to the major tobacco companies and to carcinogenic Coca-Cola, the highest incidence of many types of cancer happens to be in the North. Which just proves that the stress of living alongside the Confederacy is now seriously affecting our health.

And the country’s great, recent Southern presidents? Jimmy Carter did more damage to the liberal agenda, which had been heroically advanced by that arch-fiend Richard Nixon, than any other modern president. In 1993, Arkansan Bill Clinton proposed a budget nearly devoid of social investment and almost identical to Reagan’s years earlier. Even when they find themselves in the vanguard of mainstream American politics, Southern politicians heed their atavistic instincts—and their gift for nimble expedience—and turn, like flowers straining toward the setting sun, back to the 19th century.

As for the great numbers of enlightened men and women in the South, let me cut through all the nuances of history and polemic and invite them all to flee northward. To paraphrase Swift, I am opposed to the Southern tribe as a voting, obstructing, retarding whole, but not to the countless individuals who make up the tribe, some of whom of course are exemplars of decency, humanity, wit, sophistication, and charm. Let them come north, and enrich us with their grace and charm. (And maybe if CNN moved their headquarters to New York or Philadelphia or Boston, the network could save its plummeting ratings simply by changing its employees’ diets.)

***

I used to take sharp issue with the argument, advanced by Tom Frank, that red-state citizens are rubes deceived into voting against their own material interests by wily Republican elites. My feeling was that people who lead a hardscrabble existence, like so many in the South, don’t define their lives in economic terms since the economy has failed them, and always will. Instead, they set the spiritual wealth of their cultural values—God and country—against the liberal domination of national culture; against liberal elites who are every bit as rich as their Republican counterparts but who seem to have no sympathy for the ordinary lives of the hard-pressed who abide by a different system of values.

By this point, I could care less about such people. All I know is that they stand opposed to every social and economic arrangement that would make an increasingly harsh and exponentially more complicated America more bearable for those with little or no material resources. I don’t really care what the matter is with the so-called average American. My attitude now is somewhat less cerebral. Fuck Kansas, and fuck the horse it rode (into the Union) on.

Perhaps my newfound sense of explicit disgust with America’s backside is why I cannot join in the ongoing celebration of Abraham Lincoln that seems to have seized the country since Obama’s first election. Never mind the perhaps 1 million lives that Lincoln destroyed for the sake of preserving the Union—not for the sake of abolishing slavery, which was Lincoln’s sacred pretext. Slavery was an abomination and it had to be wiped out. But how many slaves would have been destroyed, spiritually or physically, by the time the South fell if it had been allowed to secede? Would it have been 1 million? Who has the audacity to compare agonies?

These days I sometimes fall into a counter-historical revelry in which Lincoln allowed the South to remove itself from the Union. Within months, hundreds of Underground Railroads would have sprung up, slowly draining the South of its shackled manpower. The thriving Northern economy, galvanized by technological advances, would have made it possible to boycott Southern goods that could then have been bought from other countries. Northern economic and political might would have purchased important foreign alliances, which could have been used to isolate the South. In maybe 10 years, with the help of Northern and foreign arms, Southern blacks would have overthrown a feeble, decaying government run mostly by alcoholics lost in a haze of deluded grandeur.

Who knows? By the 1870s, we might have had a black republic; by the 1880s, the first free and equal pair of interracial countries; by 1890, cool jazz. On the eve of the Second World War, the pact between the North American nation and the Southern American nation might have established such a powerful and enlightened pair of biracial republics that Nazi and Japanese theories of racial superiority would never have gotten off the ground.

Or not.

But it hardly matters what might have been. What exists now is unworkable, untenable, and damn near unendurable. We are living in a permanently forked land. If you’re reading this website, you’re most likely one of “us.” And what “we” often write about, with scathing exasperation, is the retrograde stubbornness of “them.” Just as the German playwright Gustav Freitag famously reduced all drama to a single five-act structure, all of “our” political writing can be reduced to a few themes or tropes. We are for high taxes. They are for no taxes. We are for prohibiting, in various degrees, the private ownership of guns. They are for the universal ownership of guns. We are for choice on abortion. They are against it. We are for stem-cell research. They are against it. We are for universal health care paid for by taxes. They are for excluding government from health care (except when it comes to Medicare). We are for legal immigration in generous numbers. They are for a small trickle of legal immigration. We are for a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, materialist, rationalist, secular society in which gay people marry and raise adopted children, and women more often than not rule a roost that has two electric cars in every garage and a small bottle of morning-after pills in every purse. How about them?

Let us, along with the secessionists, get real. Maybe, by turning our unacknowledged, absolute division into a recognized aggression—by liberating the two irreconcilable halves of the country into two frankly contending rivals—just maybe, we can, at last, play ball.

Little Czechoslovakia split itself in two; why can’t we? ++

States begin passing pre-Civil War ‘nullification’ laws to fight gun safety laws
Lois Beckett, Pro Publica via Raw Story
Thursday, May 2, 2013

In mid-April, Kansas passed a law asserting that federal gun regulations do not apply to guns made and owned in Kansas. Under the law, Kansans could manufacture and sell semi-automatic weapons in-state without a federal license or any federal oversight.

Kansas’ “Second Amendment Protection Act” backs up its states’ rights claims with a penalty aimed at federal agents: when dealing with “Made in Kansas” guns, any attempt to enforce federal law is now a felony. Bills similar to Kansas’ law have been introduced in at least 37 other states. An even broader bill is on the desk of Alaska Gov. Sean Parnell. That bill would exempt any gun owned by an Alaskan from federal regulation. In Missouri, a bill declaring federal gun laws “null and void” passed by an overwhelming majority in the state house, and is headed for debate in the senate.

Mobilizing the pre-Civil-War doctrine of “nullification,” these bills assert that Congress has overstepped its ability to regulate guns 2014 and that states, not the Supreme Court, have the ultimate authority to decide whether a law is constitutional or not.

The head of the Kansas’s State Rifle Association, an affiliate of the National Rifle Association, says she put the bill together and found it a sponsor. While the NRA regularly lauds passages of states’ gun-rights laws, it stayed silent on Kansas’ law, and, so far, has kept a low profile on nullification. (The group did not respond to our requests for comment.)

Many observers see nullification bills as pure political theater, “the ultimate triumph of symbolism over substance,” as UCLA law Professor Adam Winkler put it. He said he doubts the laws will ever be enforced, and, if they are, expects them to be struck down by the courts.

Winkler and others say nullification laws violate the Constitution, which makes federal law “the supreme law of the land2026anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.” Indeed, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder wrote a letter last week to Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback, asserting that Kansas’ law is “unconstitutional.” (Brownback, who signed the bill into law, did not immediately respond to our requests for comment.)

But the growing number of such bills — which have passed by large majorities in at least one chamber of seven state legislatures–highlight the challenge gun control advocates face in their attempt to fight for gun regulation at the state level.

It also shows how nullification is fast becoming a mainstream option for state politicians. In Pennsylvania, 76 state legislators signed on to sponsor a measure that would invalidate any new federal ban of certain weapons or ammunition. The bill would impose a minimum penalty of one year in prison for federal agents who attempt to enforce any new law.

Supporters of nullification are not simply frustrated at what they see as congressional and presidential overreach. During a hearing about one of the nullification bills she had introduced, Tennessee State Sen. Mae Beavers called the Supreme Court a “dictatorship.”

“You think that the Supreme Court is the ultimate arbiter of any of these laws. I don’t believe that. I don’t believe it was ever granted the authority under the Constitution,” Beavers was quoted as saying in The Tennessean. (Reached by phone, she asked to comment later, then did not respond to further requests.)

The Supreme Court rejected nullification in 1958, after Southern states tried to use the concept to avoid desegregating public schools. “No state legislator or executive or judicial officer can war against the Constitution without violating his solemn oath to support it,” the Court ruled.

Winkler, the UCLA law professor, said that even though the nullification trend was likely to be ineffectual, “It represents a strong, powerful opposition to our government.”

The concept of nullification has had a resurgence since the beginning of President Obama’s administration. More than a dozen states have introduced bills to nullify Obamacare.

The Tenth Amendment Center, a group that advocates nullification as the solution to a range of policy issues, from marijuana legalization to Obamacare, publishes model gun nullification language. The center has little direct contact with state legislators, Michael Boldin, the center’s founder, said.

The roots of guns law nullification trace back nearly a decade.

In 2004, Montana gun rights activist Gary Marbut drafted a bill stating that any guns manufactured and retained in Montana are not part of interstate commerce, and thus are exempt from federal regulation. The bill failed twice, but it became law in 2009 after Republicans took control of the statehouse. By Marbut’s count, at least eight states soon enacted “clones” of the Montana law. (Those laws don’t go quite as far as the more recent nullification legislation. For instance, most of them don’t make it a crime to enforce federal law.)

The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms responded to the earlier laws with letters to local firearms dealers explaining that federal laws and regulations “continue to apply.”

The day the Montana law went into effect, Marbut filed a lawsuit in federal court asserting the right to manufacture weapons in the state without a federal license. The suit, now before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, has been backed by a large group of supporters, including Gun Owners of America, the Second Amendment Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Goldwater Institute, and a group of nine attorneys general, some of them from states that had passed their own versions of the Montana law.

Representatives of Goldwater and the Cato Institute said they see the case as not primarily about guns. Instead, they say, it’s meant to persuade the Supreme Court to rollback the Congress’ power to regulate commerce within a state.

“The likelihood of victory is low,” said Trevor Burrus, a research fellow at the Cato Institute’s Center for Constitutional Studies.

The latest set of bills 2014 including Kansas’ new law 2014represent a far broader and more aggressive challenge to federal law. Even conservative organizations have been skeptical of the trend.

“A state law that criminalizes federal activity 2014 I would oppose that as both imprudent and wrong,” Burrus said. The Cato Institute’s chairman wrote an op-ed this spring arguing this kind of nullification is invalid.

Goldwater Institute’s Nick Dranias, a constitutional expert, said the term “nullification” is sometimes applied to legitimate attempts to exert state sovereignty, “and sometimes it is essentially lawless civil disobedience.”

States should only pass laws challenging federal power “when there is a reasonable legal argument for sustaining them,” he said. And the penalty for enforcing federal law in “hard cases” should be “a misdemeanor at most.”

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative research group, released a “fact sheet” last year titled “Nullification: Unlawful and Unconstitutional.” (The fact sheet does not address guns in particular.)

The Montana activist whose helped inspired the nullification movement Kansas is also a bit skeptical. While he simply chose to challenge the federal government’s commerce power, Kansas is “bucking federal power more generally,” he said.

“I think, maybe tactically, they may have gone a little further than they needed to,” Marbut said.

Though he supports the principles behind the Kansas law, “I don’t know how much of that they can uphold when it gets to the courts.”

But Marbut hopes that the rapid spread of gun law nullification bills across the country will encourage the Supreme Court to hear his case.

”I see the tide moving our way,” Marbut said. “I think the Supreme Court has figured out that the people of America are gathering their torches and pitchforks and it’s time to settle things down by reeling in the federal giant.”

A spokeswoman for Alaska Gov. Parnell, who has not either approved or vetoed the state’s nullification bill, said last month that “he is supportive of it.” But, she added, “The bill (as with all bills that pass) is currently undergoing a thorough review by the Department of Law.”

In Kansas, Patricia Stoneking, the president of Kansas State Rifle Association, said she was recommending that Kansans not start manufacturing guns under the new law until its legal status has been clarified.

Even if Kansas’ law ends up being struck down in court, “We actually are not going to roll over and play dead and say, 2018Oh, no, shame on us,’” Stoneking said. “The fight will not be over.” ++

Incoming NRA President Calls Civil War The ‘War Of Northern Aggression’Ian Millhiser, Think Progress
May 3, 2013

In a 2012 speech to the New York Rifle & Pistol Association, where he also refers to President Obama as a “fake president” and calls Attorney General Eric Holder “rabidly unAmerican,” incoming National Rifle Association President Jim Porter applied an odd label to the war that ended slavery in the United States and put down the single greatest act of treason in our nation’s history:

But that was the very reason that they started the National Rifle Association, was to teach and train the civilian in the use of the standard military firearm. And I am one who still feels very strongly that that is one of our most greatest charges that we can have today, is to train the civilian in the use of the standard military firearm, so that when they have to fight for their country they’re ready to do it. Also, when they’re ready to fight tyranny, they’re ready to do it. Also, when they’re ready to fight tyranny, they have the wherewithal and the weapons to do it.

Watch it [at the link above.]

Setting aside Porter’s unfortunate label for the Civil War, his speech suggests the NRA could take an even sharper turn to the right than it has under its present leadership. One of the standard issue firearms for infantry servicemembers is either the M16 rifle or the M4 carbine, depending on the branch of service. Both come standard with the ability to fire 3-round bursts, and many models are fully automatic weapons. So when Porter calls for civilians to be trained “in the use of the standard military firearm,” these are the weapons he is describing.

Indeed, the the term “standard military firearm” may include even more deadly weapons. A former Army sergeant and Iraq War vet ThinkProgress spoke with identified the AT-4 antitank grenade launcher and the M203A1 grenade launcher as weapons she was trained to use as part of her standard issue training. In addition to her rifle and a standard issue pistol, she also carried a SAW M249 sub-machine gun as a standard armament during convoy missions.

Here is video of what this weapon can do [open the link above to watch]

By contrast, the NRA’s outgoing president David Keene, recently told an audience at Harvard University that he believes “fully automatic weapons” should be illegal for civilian use. ++

138,500 dolphins and whales …

2013-05-01T04:00:22Z

I don’t know about you but I’ve been signing petitions to save whales and dolphins, seems like, for decades. Now, approximately 138,500 of them are in harms way, perhaps fatally, as seismic airgun testing is projected to be used to locate deep-sea pockets of oil and gas on the Atlantic coast.

That OK with you? Me neither.

Seismic airguns will emit noise 100,000 times more intense than a jet engine every few seconds for days on end, deafening and disrupting all sea life in its range. Here’s a YouTube defining the airgun process from Oceana.

Ted Danson, a board member of Oceana — an organization that advocates for the worlds oceans — has gone to Obama’s government site and started a petition. It will take 100,000 signatures to force the administration to take notice, weigh in on this project.

There are over 22, 000 signatures now; we have until May 15th to get 77,148 more. It requires one to sign up on the White House site, but that isn’t such a big deal … not when you consider the result of doing nothing. You’ll find a piece Danson wrote for Huffy below, and here’s a quote that pulled my heart up into my throat:

“In some cases where seismic airgun testing has been used, fin and humpback whales within 100,000 square miles stopped singing.”

No, no, no, no, NO!

That’s NOT alright with me — if it’s not alright with you, PLEASE go check in with Obama’s petition site and tell him so! Pass the YouTube around and encourage your friends to protect the sea creatures by adding their signatures as well.

Jude

My Petition to the President – A Deaf Whale Is a Dead Whale
Ted Danson and Andrew Sharpless, HuffPo
04/30/2013

In the ocean you find a symphony of sound, from the clicking of snapping shrimp to the long mournful wails of whales, and zips of dolphins. Now imagine this oceanic soundscape shattered by dynamite-like blasts, every 10 seconds for days and even weeks on end. Blasts so loud they can literally deafen marine mammals that need to listen to live, possibly injuring or killing these animals by the tens of thousands.

This grisly scenario may soon become a reality in an area of the Atlantic Ocean twice the size of California, where the Department of the Interior is currently reviewing a proposal to test the seafloor with seismic airguns, all in the speculative pursuit of more offshore oil and gas.

Seismic airguns are towed behind ships. From there they discharge compressed air to generate intense pulses of sound, 100,000 times more intense than a jet engine. These sounds are loud and powerful enough to penetrate the earth’s crust and bounce back, potentially uncovering pockets of oil and gas deep beneath the ocean floor. Animals caught in the crossfire are considered collateral damage by the industry. In this case, the government — by its own, likely conservative, estimate — predicts that 138,000 marine mammals will be injured and possibly killed by the blasts in an area that stretches from Delaware to Florida.

The constant airgun noise is particularly harmful for whales and dolphins which depend critically on their hearing to survive. As animals that rely on sound to navigate their environment, find food, find mates and communicate, going deaf is effectively a death sentence. For some of the animals in the proposed area of testing the margin for survival is already razor thin. There are fewer than 500 North Atlantic right whales left on planet earth. The government predicts the testing will directly injure or kill nine of them. Innumerable fish and sea turtles would also be harmed by the blasts.

In the best case, the reward for all this destruction would be the opening of more of our oceans to the kind of offshore drilling that a few short years ago resulted in the worst environmental catastrophe in the country’s history, and fresh new reserves of fossil fuels to burn as the world’s thermometer ticks steadily upward.

But stopping seismic airgun testing is a goal that should appeal to more than just environmental sensibilities. In the North Sea, catch of cod and haddock dropped by 40 to 80 percent for thousands of miles in the wake of seismic airgun testing. Norwegian fishermen sought compensation for a drop in catches in 2008 and the worst tuna fishing season on record has fishermen in Namibia looking to recent seismic surveys in the region as a culprit. Extrapolating these examples to the area currently being proposed for the United States reveals the financial folly of the proposal. The area currently being reviewed for potential airgun use hosts an $11.8 billion fishing industry supporting 222,000 jobs, with an additional half million marine tourism and recreation-related jobs located within the blast zone.

The alternative to this strategy — one that seems to benefit only a handful of oil and gas companies at the expense of entire marine, as well as human, communities — is an investment in offshore renewable energy. Offshore wind could provide at least three times as many jobs as offshore oil and gas in the Atlantic, could power millions of homes with clean power indefinitely, does not require seismic airgun testing, and eliminates the risk of catastrophic oil spills. This is the approach organizations like Oceana have taken, by both protesting and challenging the use of seismic airgun arrays while pushing for the development of cleaner, more sensible offshore energy resources like wind.

In some cases where seismic airgun testing has been used, fin and humpback whales within 100,000 square miles stopped singing. Other marine mammals have been so frightened by the noise as to get the bends, or decompression sickness, during dangerously quick ascents to the surface. In Alaska some bowhead whales abandoned their habitat altogether. In the Atlantic, the Obama Administration is seriously considering a proposal that would injure or kill more than 42,000 bottlenose dolphins alone. It is clear that seismic testing is something this administration should abandon in favor of cleaner alternatives, and it’s time they hear this message loud and clear.

This is why I am respectfully petitioning the President to stop seismic airgun testing in the Atlantic. Please join me and others in signing this whitehouse.gov petition as we stand up for Atlantic marine life and the people who depend on a healthy ocean.

We need 100,000 ocean-inspired voices to sign and stop seismic testing. ++

Chilling

2013-04-21T03:51:09Z

A couple of provocative reads on the Boston issue — first, from the New Yorker, a perspective piece about the Tsarnaev family, then an article by Norm Solomon about the brutality of this serial event, magnified across the planet in country after country with nary an end in sight…

As well, I can’t shake the notion that this is Kabuki … and we’re left with a bloodied, terrified 19 year old kid with NO Miranda rights and no future, to tell the tale. Will we ever know the truth of it?

The one cold truth that grabbed me by the collar yesterday was the sight of SWAT teams in the streets, houses locked-down and hundreds of thousands of residents ‘contained.’ And then, when the kid was finally put in an ambulance and driven away, the captives ran out into the streets clapping and cheering like the home team had won the grand prize.

Sweet Jesus! Is anybody as chilled by all this as am I?

Discussions continue over at Planet Waves — join us, if you’d like! Here’s the weekly bit.

Jude

The Culprits
David Remnick, The New Yorker
April 29, 2013

In the midst of the Second World War, Joseph Stalin, seized by one of his historic fits of paranoia and cruelty, declared the Chechen people disloyal to the U.S.S.R. and banished them from their homeland in the northern Caucasus to Central Asia and the Siberian wastes.

Tens of thousands of Chechens, along with members of other small ethnic groups from the Caucasus and the Crimean Peninsula, died in the mass deportation or soon after—some from cold, some from starvation. The Tsarnaev family eventually settled in a town called Tokmok, in Kyrgyzstan, not far from the capital, Bishkek. Most who survived the next thirteen years in exile were permitted to return home, in the late fifties, under Nikita Khrushchev, and they reëstablished a sense of place as well as identity. Some remained expatriates. Chechens speak Russian with a thick accent; more often they speak their own language, Noxchiin Mott. The Caucasus region is multicultural in the extreme, but the predominant religion in the north is Islam. The Chechen national spirit is what is invariably called “fiercely independent.”

When the Soviet Union collapsed, in 1991, nationalist rebels fought two horrific wars with the Russian Army for Chechen independence. In the end, the rebel groups were either decimated or came over to the Russian side. But rebellion persists, in Chechnya and in the surrounding regions—Dagestan and Ingushetia—and it is now fundamentalist in character. The slogan is “global jihad.” The tactics are kidnappings, assassinations, bombings.

Anzor Tsarnaev, an ethnic Chechen who lived much of his life in Kyrgyzstan, emigrated a decade ago to the Boston area with his wife, two daughters, and two sons. Despite arthritic fingers, he made his living as an auto mechanic. Members of the family occasionally attended a mosque on Prospect Street in Cambridge, but there seemed nothing fundamentalist about their outlook.

Anzor’s elder son, Tamerlan, appeared never to connect fully with American life. “I don’t have a single American friend,” Tamerlan told a photographer named Johannes Hirn, who asked to take pictures of him training as a boxer. “I don’t understand them.” He studied, indifferently, at Bunker Hill Community College, for an engineering degree. He described himself as “very religious”; he didn’t smoke or drink. Twenty-six and around two hundred pounds, he boxed regularly at Wai Kru Mixed Martial Arts. He loved “Borat” (“even though some of the jokes are a bit too much”). He had a daughter, but scant stability. Three years ago, he was arrested for domestic assault and battery. (“In America, you can’t touch a woman,” Anzor told the Times.)

David Bernstein, a retired mathematician from Moscow, who emigrated thirty-three years ago, said he knew the family because he used to take his car in regularly to Anzor. He noticed that Tamerlan sometimes worked at the body shop, although he didn’t seem happy about it. “I talked with Tamerlan about stupid things,” Bernstein recalled. “I asked him if he knew about his name, the great warrior. He talked a little about religion and politics. I said everyone is religious in a certain sense, and he said I should become a Muslim. I put him off, saying everyone invents his own religion.” When Bernstein discovered that his acquaintance was believed to be responsible for an act of terror at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, he was mystified. “I feel like Forrest Gump,” he said. “Suddenly, he is famous through this terrible act, and I had these conversations with him. But who can say they know him, really?”

Dzhokhar, nineteen, had graduated from Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, where he was a locally celebrated wrestler, described as slight, agile, and a little shy. He won a scholarship from the City of Cambridge. He worked for a couple of years as a lifeguard at a pool on the Harvard campus. A fellow-lifeguard remembered him as a “nice” kid with a “good sense of humor.” Dzhokhar’s high-school friends remembered him fondly, too. “He was a cool guy,” Ashraful Rahman said. “I never got any bad vibes from him. He wasn’t a star student, but he was smart. We met sometimes at the mosque in Cambridge. Dzhokhar went to the mosque more than I did, but he wasn’t completely devoted. When I think about this, I have to ask, was he forced to do this? Was he brainwashed? It’s so out of character. And you have to remember—he was a stoner. He was really into marijuana. And generally guys like that are very calm, cool.”

Essah Chisholm, a fellow-wrestler, said, “He was a cool dude.” But when Chisholm and a couple of his friends saw photographs of the Tsarnaev brothers on television Thursday night, they called the F.B.I. tip line. Late that night, the armed confrontation began—a shoot-out, a furious chase, hurled bombs. “It’s mind-boggling,” Chisholm said on Friday afternoon.

“Every time I see his name on TV, it’s just unbelievable. To see Dzhokhar’s name, to see his face. I think this had to do with his older brother. Unless he was some sort of sleeper agent, I think his brother had a pretty strong influence. Tamerlan maybe felt like he didn’t belong, and he might have brainwashed Dzhokhar into some radical view that twisted things in the Koran.”

The sense of bland unknowingness—“He seemed so nice!”—began to evaporate the closer we got to the Tsarnaev brothers. Tamerlan’s YouTube channel features a series of videos in support of fundamentalism and violent jihad, including a rant by Feiz Muhammad, an Australian cleric and ex-boxer based in Malaysia; in one video, the cleric goes on about the evil “paganism” in the Harry Potter movies. Another video provides a dramatization of the Armageddon prophecy of the Black Banners of Khurasan, an all-powerful Islamic military force that will rise up from Central Asia and defeat the infidels; it is a martial-religious prophecy favored by Al Qaeda.

Dzhokhar’s Twitter feed—@J_tsar—is a bewildering combination of banality and disaffection. (He seems to have been tweeting even after the explosions at the finish line last Monday.)

As you scan it, you encounter a young man’s thoughts: his jokes, his resentments, his prejudices, his faith, his desires.

March 14, 2012—a decade in america already, I want out

August 16, 2012—The value of human life ain’t shit nowadays that’s #tragic

August 22, 2012—I am the best beer pong player in Cambridge. I am the #truth

September 1, 2012—Idk why it’s hard for many of you to accept that 9/11 was an inside job. I mean I guess fuck the facts y’all are some real #patriots #gethip

December 24, 2012—Brothers at the mosque either think I’m a convert or that I’m from Algeria or Syria, just the other day a guy asked me how I came to Islam

January 15, 2013—I don’t argue with fools who say islam is terrorism it’s not worth a thing, let an idiot remain an idiot

March 13, 2013—Never try to fork a mini tomato while wearing a white shirt, it will explode

April 10, 2013—Gain knowledge, get women, acquire currency #livestrong

April 15, 2013—Ain’t no love in the heart of the city, stay safe people

April 15, 2013—There are people that know the truth but stay silent & there are people that speak the truth but we don’t hear them cuz they’re the minority

April 16, 2013—I’m a stress free kind of guy

Gregory Shvedov, the editor of a Web site based in Moscow called Caucasian Knot, visits the Caucasus regularly and studies both the jihadist movement and the Russian government and military’s draconian behavior in the region. He was hardly shocked that two ethnic Chechens, raised largely in the U.S. but with a strong attachment to their homeland, might carry out such an act on a “soft target” like the marathon.

“These days there are social networks, and people make their decisions from them,” he said from Moscow.

“I would not be surprised if they had another life over social media. What kind of videos are they watching? What kind of lectures and YouTubes about jihad?” If Tamerlan did what he is suspected of doing, he might not have got his education, or instructions, entirely through digital means. On January 12, 2012, he flew from New York to Moscow, a regular target of Chechen rage; he didn’t return until seven months later.

The greatest sympathy is reserved for the families of those who were killed by the bombing and in the violent pursuit that followed—and for the dozens who were severely injured in the blasts. Even the most ardent New Yorkers felt a profound allegiance to, and love for, the people of Boston. But, as the day was coming to an end, you could not help but feel something, too, for the parents of the perpetrators, neither of whom could fathom the possibility of their sons’ guilt, much less their cruelty and evil. Interviewed at their apartment in Makhachkala, the capital city of Dagestan, they spoke of a “setup,” an F.B.I. plot. The mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, told the television station Russia Today, “Every single day, my son used to call me and ask me, ‘How are you, Mama?’ Both of them. ‘Mama, we love you.’ My son never would keep a secret.” The father described Dzhokhar as an “angel.” By the end of Friday (Saturday morning in Dagestan) their sons were gone—one dead, the other wounded, hospitalized, and under arrest.

The Tsarnaev family had been battered by history before—by empire and the strife of displacement, by exile and emigration. Asylum in a bright new land proved little comfort. When Anzor fell sick, a few years ago, he resolved to return to the Caucasus; he could not imagine dying in America. He had travelled halfway around the world from the harrowed land of his ancestors, but something had drawn him back. The American dream wasn’t for everyone. What they could not anticipate was the abysmal fate of their sons, lives destroyed in a terror of their own making. The digital era allows no asylum from extremism, let alone from the toxic combination of high-minded zealotry and the curdled disappointments of young men.

A decade in America already, I want out. ++

The Orwellian Warfare State of Carnage and Doublethink
Norman Solomon, Common Dreams
Wednesday, April 17, 2013

After the bombings that killed and maimed so horribly at the Boston Marathon, our country’s politics and mass media are awash in heartfelt compassion — and reflexive “doublethink,” which George Orwell described as willingness “to forget any fact that has become inconvenient.”

In sync with media outlets across the country, the New York Times put a chilling headline on Wednesday’s front page: “Boston Bombs Were Loaded to Maim, Officials Say.” The story reported that nails and ball bearings were stuffed into pressure cookers, “rigged to shoot sharp bits of shrapnel into anyone within reach of their blast.”

Much less crude and weighing in at 1,000 pounds, CBU-87/B warheads were in the category of “combined effects munitions” when put to use 14 years ago by a bomber named Uncle Sam. The U.S. media coverage was brief and fleeting.

One Friday, at noontime, U.S.-led NATO forces dropped cluster bombs on the city of Nis, in the vicinity of a vegetable market. “The bombs struck next to the hospital complex and near the market, bringing death and destruction, peppering the streets of Serbia’s third-largest city with shrapnel,” a dispatch in the San Francisco Chronicle reported on May 8, 1999.

And: “In a street leading from the market, dismembered bodies were strewn among carrots and other vegetables in pools of blood. A dead woman, her body covered with a sheet, was still clutching a shopping bag filled with carrots.”

Pointing out that cluster bombs “explode in the air and hurl shards of shrapnel over a wide radius,” BBC correspondent John Simpson wrote in the Sunday Telegraph: “Used against human beings, cluster bombs are some of the most savage weapons of modern warfare.”

Savage did not preclude usage. As a matter of fact, to Commander in Chief Bill Clinton and the prevailing military minds in Washington, savage was bound up in the positive attributes of cluster bombs. Each one could send up to 60,000 pieces of jagged steel shrapnel into what the weapon’s maker described as “soft targets.”

An unusually diligent reporter, Paul Watson of the Los Angeles Times, reported from Pristina, Yugoslavia: “During five weeks of airstrikes, witnesses here say, NATO warplanes have dropped cluster bombs that scatter smaller munitions over wide areas. In military jargon, the smaller munitions are bomblets. Dr. Rade Grbic, a surgeon and director of Pristina’s main hospital, sees proof every day that the almost benign term bomblet masks a tragic impact.

Grbic, who saved the lives of two ethnic Albanian boys wounded while other boys played with a cluster bomb found Saturday, said he had never done so many amputations.”

The LA Times article quoted Dr. Grbic: “I have been an orthopedist for 15 years now, working in a crisis region where we often have injuries, but neither I nor my colleagues have ever seen such horrific wounds as those caused by cluster bombs.” He added: “They are wounds that lead to disabilities to a great extent. The limbs are so crushed that the only remaining option is amputation. It’s awful, awful.”

The newspaper account went on: “Pristina’s hospital alone has treated 300 to 400 people wounded by cluster bombs since NATO’s air war began March 24, Grbic said. Roughly half of those victims were civilians, he said. Because that number doesn’t include those killed by cluster bombs and doesn’t account for those wounded in other regions of Yugoslavia, the casualty toll probably is much higher, he said. ‘Most people are victims of the time-activated cluster bombs that explode some time after they fall,’ he said.”

Later, during invasions and initial periods of occupation, the U.S. military dropped cluster bombs in Afghanistan and fired cluster munitions in Iraq.

Today, the U.S. State Department remains opposed to outlawing those weapons, declaring on its official website: “Cluster munitions have demonstrated military utility. Their elimination from U.S. stockpiles would put the lives of its soldiers and those of its coalition partners at risk.”

The State Department position statement adds: “Moreover, cluster munitions can often result in much less collateral damage than unitary weapons, such as a larger bomb or larger artillery shell would cause, if used for the same mission.” Perhaps the bomber(s) who stuffed nails and ball bearings into pressure cookers for use in Boston had a similarly twisted rationale.

But don’t expect explorations of such matters from the USA’s daily papers or commercial networks — or from the likes of NPR’s “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered,” or the PBS “NewsHour.” When the subject is killing and maiming, such news outlets take as a given the presumptive moral high ground of the U.S. government.

In his novel 1984, Orwell wrote about the conditioned reflex of “stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought . . . and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction.”

The doublethink — continually reinforced by mass media — remains within an irony-free zone that would amount to mere self-satire if not so damaging to intellectual and moral coherence.

Every news report about the children killed and injured at the finish line in Boston, every account of the horrific loss of limbs, makes me think of a little girl named Guljumma. She was seven years old when I met her at an Afghan refugee camp one day in the summer of 2009.

At the time, I wrote: “Guljumma talked about what happened one morning last year when she was sleeping at home in southern Afghanistan’s Helmand Valley. At about 5 a.m., bombs exploded. Some people in her family died. She lost an arm.”

In the refugee camp on the outskirts of Kabul, where several hundred families were living in squalid conditions, the U.S. government was providing no help. The last time Guljumma and her father had meaningful contact with the U.S. government was when it bombed them.

War thrives on abstractions, but Guljumma was no abstraction. She was no more or less of an abstraction than the children whose lives have been forever wrecked by the bombing at the Boston finish line.

But the same U.S. news media that are conveying the preciousness of children so terribly harmed in Boston are scarcely interested in children like Guljumma.

I thought of her again when seeing news reports and a chilling photo on April 7, soon after 11 children in eastern Afghanistan were even more unlucky than she was. Those children died from a U.S./NATO air strike. For mainline American journalists, it wasn’t much of a story; for American officials, it was no big deal.

“Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip,” Orwell observed, “but the really well-trained dog is the one that turns his somersault when there is no whip.” ++

Hydrogen, carbon dioxide, salt, algae, bacteria … and cover-up

2013-04-08T20:45:33Z

Making alternative fuels from all the above is quite a breakthrough, don’t you think? Algae remains my favorite, especially now that climate change is creating more of it than we know how to deal with, but the concept of making something important out of readily available waste products — especially when we’re suffering from our oil addiction — seems so glorious it should be shouted from the rooftops. Only … we aren’t hearing about it.

I suspect you already know where the cover-up’s going on. You guessed it — Arkansas! Raw Story is reporting that the oil supposedly diverted away from Lake Conway, wasn’t — and it has video to prove it. As well, people in the effected area are reporting health issues and disputing media reports about the who, what, where and when facts, duly reported and caught in the spin cycle.

Meanwhile, Exxon — the #2 most profitable oil conglomerate globally — is behaving with a remarkably heavy hand, sequestering the town of Mayflower away from the prying eyes of the public; even requesting, and receiving, a temporary no-fly zone over the spill, while police screen people entering the area and weeding out reporters.

This ain’t pretty, kids and none of it should come as a surprise.

The larger question — the one we MUST ask and bring pressure to bare on — is what kind of energy can we ethically support? Carbon-based fuels are killing us and, as you’ll find below, R&D has a whole list of possible alternatives that might make all the difference.

Some fine day, coal, nuclear power and petroleum will be considered as antique artifacts from civilizations’ past, as outgrown as garters, bowler hats and chamber pots. It can’t come soon enough.

Here’s Bill McKibbon’s most recent explanation about WHY we can’t wait.

Jude

Biofuel breakthrough turns virtually any plant into hydrogen
Stephen C. Webster, Raw Story
Thursday, April 4, 2013

Researchers at Virginia Tech announced Thursday that their latest breakthrough in hydrogen extraction technology could lead to widespread adoption of the substance as a fuel due to its ease of availability in virtually all plant matter, a reservoir previously impossible to tap.

The new process, described by a study in the April issue of the scientific journal Angewandte Chemie, uses a cocktail of 13 enzymes to strip plant matter of xylose, a sugar that exists in plant cells. The resulting hydrogen is of an such a “high purity” that researchers said they were able to approach 100 percent extraction, opening up a potential market for a much cheaper source of hydrogen than anything available today.

“The potential for profit and environmental benefits are why so many automobile, oil, and energy companies are working on hydrogen fuel cell vehicles as the transportation of the future,” study author and Virginia Tech assistant professor Y.H. Percival Zhang said in an advisory. “Many people believe we will enter the hydrogen economy soon, with a market capacity of at least $1 trillion in the United States alone.”

The rise of such an alternative fuel could seriously disrupt the pollution-producing industries that run on oil and natural gas, and potentially spark a new industrial emphasis on growing plants with high levels of xylose in their cells. The environmental benefits of that potential future are twofold: the plants absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, helping in small part to address the climate crisis, and the resulting portable fuel only outputs water when burned.

Beyond hydrogen fuel cells in cars and industrial equipment, U.S. space agency NASA says that hydrogen in its super-cold liquid form makes an ideal fuel for space exploration due to its low molecular weight and extremely high energy output. If plants could be grown on a space station traveling to a distant solar system some day, it is possible future breakthroughs could lead to an onboard system that actually renders more fuel mid-flight.

Of course, there are potential downsides to Zhang’s enzyme cocktail, namely in the costs of production on a large scale, questions about disposal of the enzyme goo and remaining carbon, and the likelihood of endless legal battles over who owns patents on which enzymes or combinations thereof. Nevertheless, if the world is to move forward into a renewable energy future, this is still a pretty big step. ++

Discovery May Allow Scientists to Make Fuel from Carbon Dioxide in the Atmosphere
Science Daily
March 26, 2013

Excess carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere created by the widespread burning of fossil fuels is the major driving force of global climate change, and researchers the world over are looking for new ways to generate power that leaves a smaller carbon footprint.

Now, researchers at the University of Georgia have found a way to transform the carbon dioxide trapped in the atmosphere into useful industrial products. Their discovery may soon lead to the creation of biofuels made directly from the carbon dioxide in the air that is responsible for trapping the sun’s rays and raising global temperatures.

“Basically, what we have done is create a microorganism that does with carbon dioxide exactly what plants do-absorb it and generate something useful,” said Michael Adams, member of UGA’s Bioenergy Systems Research Institute, Georgia Power professor of biotechnology and Distinguished Research Professor of biochemistry and molecular biology in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences.

During the process of photosynthesis, plants use sunlight to transform water and carbon dioxide into sugars that the plants use for energy, much like humans burn calories from food.

These sugars can be fermented into fuels like ethanol, but it has proven extraordinarily difficult to efficiently extract the sugars, which are locked away inside the plant’s complex cell walls.

“What this discovery means is that we can remove plants as the middleman,” said Adams, who is co-author of the study detailing their results published March 25 in the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “We can take carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere and turn it into useful products like fuels and chemicals without having to go through the inefficient process of growing plants and extracting sugars from biomass.”

The process is made possible by a unique microorganism called Pyrococcus furiosus, or “rushing fireball,” which thrives by feeding on carbohydrates in the super-heated ocean waters near geothermal vents. By manipulating the organism’s genetic material, Adams and his colleagues created a kind of P. furiosus that is capable of feeding at much lower temperatures on carbon dioxide.

The research team then used hydrogen gas to create a chemical reaction in the microorganism that incorporates carbon dioxide into 3-hydroxypropionic acid, a common industrial chemical used to make acrylics and many other products.

With other genetic manipulations of this new strain of P. furiosus, Adams and his colleagues could create a version that generates a host of other useful industrial products, including fuel, from carbon dioxide.

When the fuel created through the P. furiosus process is burned, it releases the same amount of carbon dioxide used to create it, effectively making it carbon neutral, and a much cleaner alternative to gasoline, coal and oil.

“This is an important first step that has great promise as an efficient and cost-effective method of producing fuels,” Adams said. “In the future we will refine the process and begin testing it on larger scales.”

The research was supported by the Department of Energy as part of the Electrofuels Program of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy under Grant DE-AR0000081. ++

Salt-based solar thermal power plant takes shape in Nevada
Tina Casey via Clean Technica, Raw Story
Saturday, April 6, 2013

The notorious Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Plant near Tonopah, Nevada passed another milestone this month, as workers finished placing receiver panels on top of a 540-foot tower that forms the centerpiece of the facility. Crescent Dunes is based on molten salt thermal technology and we say notorious because when completed, Crescent Dunes will give the U.S. bragging rights to the largest renewable energy plant of its kind in the world. In certain quarters, however, the project is also notorious because it benefited from a federally backed construction loan to the tune of a whopping $737 million, creating another potentially juicy opportunity for critics of the Obama Administration’s renewable energy policies.

Unfortunately for anyone who is still rooting for failure, Crescent Dunes is on track for completion by the end of this year. ++

Making Fuel from Bacteria
Science Daily
March 13, 2013

In the search for the fuels of tomorrow, Swedish researchers are finding inspiration in the sea. Not in offshore oil wells, but in the water where blue-green algae thrive.

The building blocks of blue-green algae – sunlight, carbon dioxide and bacteria – are being used by researchers at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm to produce butanol, a hydrocarbon-like fuel for motor vehicles.

The advantage of butanol is that the raw materials are abundant and renewable, and production has the potential to be 20 times more efficient than making ethanol from corn and sugar cane.

Using genetically-modified cyanobacteria, the team linked butanol production to the algae’s natural metabolism, says Paul Hudson, a researcher at the School of Biotechnology at KTH who leads the research. “With relevant genes integrated in the right place in cyanobacteria’s genome, we have tricked the cells to produce butanol instead of fulfilling their normal function,” he says.

The team demonstrated that it can control butanol production by changing the conditions in the surrounding environment. This opens up other opportunities for control, such as producing butanol during specific times of day, Hudson says.

Hudson says that it could be a decade before production of biofuel from cyanobacteria is a commercial reality.

“We are very excited that we are now able to produce biofuel from cyanobacteria. At the same time we must remember that the manufacturing process is very different from today’s biofuels,” he says. “We need to improve the production hundredfold before it becomes commercially viable.

Already, there is a demonstrator facility in New Mexico, U.S. for producing biodiesel from algae, which is a more advanced process, Hudson says.

One of Sweden’s leading biotechnology researchers, Professor Mathias Uhlén at KTH, has overall responsibility for the project. He says that the use of engineering methods to build genomes of microorganisms is a relatively new area. A bacterium that produces cheap fuel by sunlight and carbon dioxide could change the world.

Hudson agrees. “One of the problems with biofuels we have today, that is, corn ethanol, is that the price of corn rises slowly while jumping up and down all the time and it is quite unpredictable,” he says. “In addition, there is limited arable land and corn ethanol production is also influenced by the price of oil, since corn requires transport.

“Fuel based on cyanobacteria requires very little ground space to be prepared. And the availability of raw materials – sunlight, carbon dioxide and seawater – is in principle infinite,” Hudson says.

He adds that some cyanobacteria also able to extract nitrogen from the air and thus do not need any fertilizer.

The next step in the research is to ensure that cyanobacteria produce butanol in larger quantities without it dying of exhaustion or butanol, which they cannot withstand particularly well. After that, more genes will have to be modified so that the end product becomes longer hydrocarbons that can fully function as a substitute for gasoline. And finally, the process must be executed outside of the lab and scaled up to work in industry.

There are also plans to develop fuel from cyanobacteria that are more energetic and therefore particularly suitable for aircraft engines.

The project is formally called Forma Center for Metabolic Engineering, and it involves researchers Chalmers University in Sweden. It has received about EUR 3 million from the
nonprofit Council Formas. ++

Spanky

2013-04-08T04:36:58Z

This is Spanky, look at those Pisces eyes!

Here’s the link to this weekends Planet Waves post, where a recent accident with my little guy, above, is mentioned in the comments. Thought you might like to see him — he’s the sweetest, gentlest critter, atypical of his breed which is usually feisty. He’s mending, thanks for asking.

Come Again

Additionally, here’s a link to a Moyers episode discussing Martin Luther King in respect to the economy of his times, and King’s changing activist tactics. This is worth watching, if you missed it. Listening to intelligent conversation is a respite to a weary world!

The interview includes a clip of King’s declaration that there are “two America’s” — an echo we heard in 2008, from John Edwards; and, of course, as true today as in the 60s.

Most of you know I was sorry to see Edwards go, he had the fight in him to go after Wall Street and income inequality. We simply CAN’T put that off forever, if we’re to thrive into the new century and beyond.

Jude

Birds and Bees

2013-03-29T23:07:50Z

… and even butterflies at risk from the mundane evils of human greed, arrogance and apathy.

Wish I had some happier news to share, but we have allowed ourselves a stunning disconnect from what is natural and normal and we need to take a good look before it’s too late. When the bees and birds disappear, the butterflies can’t be found, bats and insects, frogs and turtles begin to die from obscure maladies that disrupt the natural order our ancestors understood and revered, we’ve gone too far. You know we have. There’s no time to waste if we are to recover.

Easter is always a time of renewal, of redemption and hope. This Easter, take time to visit the great outdoors, seek out nature, bask in it. What we always thought was “forever” may not be. The natural world awaits our respect, appreciation and intention to protect it … and ourselves … from harm.

Blessed Equinox, Easter and Spring to you all — blessed restoration to the Earth, her systems and her creatures!

Jude

Not Just the Bees: Bayer’s Pesticide May Harm Birds, Too
Tom Philpott, Mother Jones
Wed Mar. 27, 2013

Once again this spring, farmers will begin planting at least 140 million acres—a land mass roughly equal to the combined footprints of California and Washington state—with seeds (mainly corn and soy) treated with a class of pesticides called neonicotinoids.

Commercial landscapers and home gardeners will get into the act, too—neonics are common in lawn and garden products. If you’re a regular reader of my blog, you know all of that is probably bad news for honeybees and other pollinators, as a growing body of research shows—including three studies released just ahead of last year’s planting season.

But bees aren’t the only iconic springtime creature threatened by the ubiquitous pesticide, whose biggest makers are the European giants Bayer and Syngenta. It turns out that birds are too, according to an alarming analysis co-authored by Pierre Mineau, a retired senior research scientist at Environment Canada (Canada’s EPA), published by the American Bird Conservancy. And not just birds themselves, but also the water-borne insect species that serve as a major food source for birds, fish, and amphibians.

The article isn’t peer-reviewed, but Mineau is a formidable scientist. In February, he published a peer-reviewed paper in PLoS One concluding that pesticides, and not habitat loss, have likely been driving bird-population declines in the United States.

That paper didn’t delve into specific pesticides. For his American Bird Conservancy paper, Mineau and his co-author, Cynthia Palmer, looked at a range of research on the effects of neonics on birds and water-borne insects, from papers by independent researchers to industry-funded studies used in the EPA’s deregulation process and obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

Their conclusion: Neonics are highly mobile and persistent once they’re unleashed into ecosystems, and they pose a serious threat to birds and the insects they feed on. The EPA, they continue, has in some cases severely underestimated the danger and in other cases simply ignored it. The underestimation, they argue, mainly stems from the widespread use of two bird species to judge toxicity, mallards and bobwhites. But many other bird species are more vulnerable to neonics than those two, and Mineau’s paper concludes the EPA, in its risk assessment used to register a raft of neonic products over the past two decades, “underestimates toxicity by 1.5 to 10 fold if the intent of the exercise is to protect most species, not merely mallards and bobwhites.”

For the most vulnerable bird species, they found, consuming even two corn seeds coated with Bayer’s blockbuster neonic clothianidin can have lethal effects. [emphasis added]

The authors point to several instances of EPA scientists raising serious concerns about the ecological impacts of these pesticides, only to see them registered anyway. Back in 2003, when the EPA was first considering registering Bayer’s clothianidin, an agency risk assessment concluded that “exposure to treated seed through ingestion might result in chronic risk to birds and mammals, especially mammals where consumption of 1-2 seeds only could push them to an exposure level at which reproductive effects are expected,” the authors report. The assessment also described the chemical as persistent and mobile, with “potential to leach to groundwater as well as runoff to surface waters.” So what happened to clothianidin? A “plethora of registered uses for clothianidin followed in quick succession,” they report. The pesticide is now used on corn, soybeans, cotton, pears, potatoes, tree nuts, mustard greens, and more.

Mineau’s paper notes in passing that the EPA also identified potential threats from clothianidin to bees as early as 2003, adding, however, that the pollinator issue is “outside the scope of the current review.” I told the sordid tale of clothianidin’s march through EPA registration despite its own scientists’ bee concerns in this 2010 post.

But the most pernicious effect of neonics on birds may be indirect: By leaching into water and accumulating in streams and ponds, neonics also attack a major component of birds’ food supply: insects that hang out in water, what Mineau calls the “bottom of the aquatic food chain.” The EPA has severely underestimated the risk to such insects, they charge. For the neonic imidacloprid, they argue, a “scientifically defensible reference level” to gauge when the pesticide causes harm to insects is 0.2 ug/l. “European regulators acknowledge that acute effects are likely at levels exceeding 0.5 ug/l,” they write. “In contrast, the EPA’s regulatory and non-regulatory reference levels are set at 35 ug/l.”

Based on Mineau’s analysis, the American Bird Conservancy is calling for a ban on the practice of using neonics to treat seed, joining a similar plea from the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. Meanwhile the EPA has been conducting a “comprehensive re-evaluation of these pesticides,” but has taken no action to stop their use, and isn’t expected to complete its review until 2018 at the earliest. Mineau told me that he presented his case on neonics and birds to the EPA last week, urging them to “speed things up a bit” on the review. I asked him how his message went over. “I didn’t get the answer, that, sure, we’ll have it done next year,” he said.

Instead, he added, the agency stressed it would stick to its current process. And that means heavy neonic exposure for the birds and the bees for at least another half-decade. ++

Mystery Malady Kills More Bees, Heightening Worry on Farms
A Disastrous Year for Bees: For America’s beekeepers, who have struggled for nearly a decade with a mysterious malady called colony collapse disorder that kills honeybees en masse, the last year was particularly bad.
MICHAEL WINES, NYT
March 28, 2013

BAKERSFIELD, Calif. — A mysterious malady that has been killing honeybees en masse for several years appears to have expanded drastically in the last year, commercial beekeepers say, wiping out 40 percent or even 50 percent of the hives needed to pollinate many of the nation’s fruits and vegetables.

A conclusive explanation so far has escaped scientists studying the ailment, colony collapse disorder, since it first surfaced around 2005. But beekeepers and some researchers say there is growing evidence that a powerful new class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids, incorporated into the plants themselves, could be an important factor.

The pesticide industry disputes that. But its representatives also say they are open to further studies to clarify what, if anything, is happening.

“They looked so healthy last spring,” said Bill Dahle, 50, who owns Big Sky Honey in Fairview, Mont. “We were so proud of them. Then, about the first of September, they started to fall on their face, to die like crazy. We’ve been doing this 30 years, and we’ve never experienced this kind of loss before.”

[... open the link to read the entire article]

Disappearance of the Monarch
Michelle Werts, American Forests
March 15th, 2013

What’s black and white and orange all over? Probably many things, but I’m thinking specifically of the monarch butterfly. Why? Because earlier this week, Mexico’s National Commission of Natural Protected Areas announced that the wintering population of the monarch butterfly declined by 59 percent this winter. The monarch — which can’t be counted individually, but whose population is measured instead by the amount of canopy covered while they are huddled together in the winter for warmth — occupied more than seven acres last winter and less than three acres this year.

This year’s figure represents the lowest number of butterflies in Mexico in the last two decades, when record keeping began, and the third year of declines. Lincoln Brower, a leading entomologist at Virginia’s Sweet Briar College, tells the Associated Press (AP) that “the report of the dwindling monarch butterfly winter residence in Mexico is ominous. This is not just the lowest population recorded in the 20 years for which we have records. It is the continuation of a statistically significant decrease in the monarch population that began at least a decade ago.”

For years, the monarch’s winter home in Mexico has been threatened by deforestation. At a peak in 2005, logging consumed more than 1,100 acres of areas in Michoacán, Mexico, where the butterfly winters. A year later, American Forests began work to restore oyamel firs in Michoacán to benefit the monarch; we’ve helped plant a million trees for the monarchs since 2006. The AP reports, though, that aerial surveys in 2012 revealed little logging in the monarch’s home, which has left some researchers looking at another culprit for the monarch’s decline: U.S. herbicide use.

During the migration from its summer homes in the northern U.S. and southern Canada to Mexico and back again, the monarch relies on milkweed growing throughout America’s agricultural fields for sustenance. However, herbicide-resistant crops have meant more herbicide use, which means very little milkweed peeking up between rows of corn and soybeans. Add in drought, and there are a lot of missing food sources for the monarch.

Chip Taylor, director the University of Kansas’ Monarch Watch, tells The New York Times that the butterfly migration is at a tipping point. If numbers continue to decline, the butterfly may not be able to readily recover from a natural disaster, such as an extremely harsh winter in Mexico.

The magnificent migration of the monarch butterfly is a wondrous, natural marvel, and its current precarious state is a prime example of how interconnected our natural systems are. Animals, insects, plants and trees flow from one ecosystem and habitat to another more rapidly than we sometimes realize. That’s why we’re focused not only on trees, but on the forests overall. If we protect them, we protect so much more. ++

… and from last spring:

The Fox (Monsanto) Buys the Chicken Coop (Beeologics)
Richard Schiffman, HuffPo
05/ 3/2012

Why would one of the largest purveyors of pesticides, genetically engineered seeds and agrochemicals want to buy a company which has been seeking solutions to the escalating threats to the world bee population?

Monsanto spokeswomen Kelly Powers says it is to give the fledgling company a helping hand. Beeologics has developed a product called Remembee, an anti-viral agent which its boosters claim will help stem the tide of Colony Collapse Disorder, a mysterious plague which has led to the disappearance of the bees in up to a third of the commercial colonies located in the U.S. during the last decade.

The root of the problem, however, may not be the virus targeted by Remembee, a chemical agent which utilizes RNA interference, a mechanism that blocks gene expression, but the herbicides and insecticides that agro-chemical giants like Monsanto, Dow and Bayer have themselves been hawking to farmers around the world.

This is the conclusion of three recent studies which implicate a class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids, or “neonics” for short, which coat a massive 142 million acres of corn, wheat, soy and cotton seeds in the U.S. alone. They are also a common ingredient in a wide variety of home gardening products. As I detail in an article which was published by Reuters last month, neonics are absorbed by the plants’ vascular system and contaminate the pollen and nectar that bees encounter on their rounds. Neonics are a nerve poison that disorient their insect victims and appear to damage the homing ability of bees, which may help to account for their mysterious failure to make it back to the hive.

This was the conclusion of research which came out in the prestigious Journal Science during March. In another study conducted by entomologists at Purdue University the scientists found that neonic-containing dust released into the air at planting time had “lethal effects compatible with colony losses phenomena observed by beekeepers.” A third study by the Harvard School of Public Health actually re-created colony collapse disorder in several honeybee hives simply by administering small doses of a popular neonic, imidacloprid.

While these studies strongly suggest that herbicides are a culprit, scientists caution that colony collapse disorder is a complex phenomenon with multiple causes, ranging from the loss of wild bee habitats to the weakening of bee immune systems as a result of poor diet (commercial bees are frequently fed pesticide-laced corn syrup instead of their own honey) and also the techniques of modern beekeeping, which include the artificial insemination of queens, and the resulting loss of genetic diversity in the bee population.

Some have also pointed the finger at the pollen from genetically modified Roundup Ready corn which bees ingest, and which contains a powerful insecticide within its genetic structure. Roundup seeds are manufactured by Monsanto, and are currently planted across wide swaths of the American Midwest and elsewhere.

So with Monsanto products themselves amongst the key suspects in Colony Collapse Disorder, one might ask: Why has the multinational bought a company which has been a key player in researching this disorder as well as Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus, another scourge of bees?

“We’re absolutely committed to Beeologics’ existing work,” said Monsanto spokesperson Kelly Powers. Yet one has to wonder if owning a firm dedicated to shedding light on the trouble with bees might not serve Monsanto’s interest in allowing it to further cover up their own corporate complicity in the problem.

Let us hope that Monsanto is as good as its word and uses this newly acquired company to boldly get to the bottom of the mystery of the disappearing bees. But if history is any guide, there is little cause for optimism. The health watchdog group “Natural Society” rated Monsanto “the worst in 2011 for its ongoing work to threaten human health and the environment.”

With its acquisition of Beeologic, the multinational has a chance to start improving its record — right? My advice, however, is don’t hold your breath! ++

Woodward and Bernstein, revisited

2013-03-23T00:54:48Z

Every once in awhile I read something … just for readings sake … that puts one of those little light bulb’s up over my head with an audible DING! The first is such a read, regarding my confusion over the reporting style of Bob Woodward. I never could figure out why he lucked out with Robert Redford — or why he was such a dufus when it came to the Bushies. Up until his orgasmic record with Dubby and crew, I’d thought of him as non-partisan. He’s not, good GRIEF is he not!! But HOW he does what he does, by innuendo and word-choice, comes clear in this first … and revealing … read.

Next, just to sweeten the pot, is a wrap-up of Nora Ephron’s last days by her — and Carl Bernstein’s — son. Ephron wrote often for Huffy, which was a pleasure. She was dear friend of the Clintons and enormously talented. You know her via her movie-making, if you can’t place her: When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail, Julie & Julia, yadda.

Ephron was unfailingly progressive. I loved her wit, her whimsy and her dedication to life … even, as this read shows, as she was dying. Her 4-year marriage to Bernstein, immortalized in her screenplay (and movie) Heartburn, is what connects the pieces. That, and the fact that I enjoyed each.

I hope you do too … and that you make some time to read just for the pleasure of it.

Jude

Regrettable
The troubling things I learned when I re-reported Bob Woodward’s book on John Belushi.
Tanner Colby, Slate Magazine
Tuesday, March 12, 2013

A little more than a week ago, during an interview with Politico, Bob Woodward came forward to claim he’d been threatened in an email by a “senior White House official” for daring to reveal certain details about the negotiations over the budget sequester. The White House responded by releasing the email exchange Woodward was referring to, which turned out to be nothing more than a cordial exchange between the reporter and Obama’s economic adviser, Gene Sperling, who was clearly implying nothing more than that Woodward would “regret” taking a position that would soon be shown to be false.

A rather trivial scandal, but the incident did manage to raise important questions about Woodward’s behavior. Was he cynically trumping up the administration’s “threat,” or does he just not know how to read an email? Pretty soon, those questions tipped over into the standard Beltway discussion that transpires anytime Woodward does anything. How accurate is his reporting? Does he deserve his legendary status?

I believe I can offer some interesting answers to those questions. Thirty-one years ago, on March 5, 1982, Saturday Night Live and Animal House star John Belushi died of a drug overdose at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles—which, bear with me a moment, has more to do with the current coverage of the budget sequester than you might initially think.*

Two years after Belushi died, Bob Woodward published Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi. While the Watergate sleuth might seem an odd choice to tackle such a subject, the book came about because both he and Belushi grew up in the same small town of Wheaton, Ill. They had friends in common. Belushi, who despised Richard Nixon, was a big Woodward fan, and after he died, his widow, Judy Belushi, approached Woodward in his role as a reporter for the Washington Post. She had questions about the LAPD’s handling of Belushi’s death and asked Woodward to look into it. He took the access she offered and used it to write a scathing, lurid account of Belushi’s drug use and death.

When Wired came out, many of Belushi’s friends and family denounced it as biased and riddled with factual errors. “Exploitative, pulp trash,” in the words of Dan Aykroyd. Wired was so wrong, Belushi’s manager said, it made you think Nixon might be innocent. Woodward insisted the book was balanced and accurate. “I reported this story thoroughly,” he told Rolling Stone. Of the book’s critics, he said, “I think they wish I had created a portrait of someone who was larger than life, larger than he was, and that, somehow, this portrait would all come out different. But that’s a fantasy, not journalism.” Woodward being Woodward, he was given the benefit of the doubt. Belushi’s reputation never recovered.

Twenty years later, in 2004, Judy Belushi hired me, then an aspiring comedy writer, to help her with a new biography of John, this one titled Belushi: A Biography. As her coauthor, I handled most of the legwork, including all of the interviews and most of the research. What started as a fun project turned out to be a rather fascinating and unique experiment. Over the course of a year, page by page, source by source, I re-reported and rewrote one of Bob Woodward’s books. As far as I know, it’s the only time that’s ever been done.

Wired is an anomaly in the Woodward catalog, the only book he’s ever written about a subject other than Washington. As such, it’s rarely cited by his critics. But Wired’s outlier status is the very thing that makes it such a fascinating piece of Woodwardology. Because he was forced to work outside of his comfort zone, his strengths and his weaknesses can be seen in sharper relief. In Hollywood, his sources weren’t top secret and confidential. They were some of the most famous people in America. The methodology behind the book is right out there in the open, waiting for someone to do exactly what I did: take it apart and see how Woodward does what he does.

Wired is an infuriating piece of work. There’s a reason Woodward’s critics consistently come off as hysterical ninnies: He doesn’t make Jonah Lehrer–level mistakes. There’s never a smoking gun like an outright falsehood or a brazen ethical breach. And yet, in the final product, a lot of what Woodward writes comes off as being not quite right—some of it to the point where it can feel quite wrong. There’s no question that he frequently ferrets out information that other reporters don’t. But getting the scoop is only part of the equation. Once you have the facts, you have to present those facts in context and in proportion to other facts in order to accurately reflect reality. It’s here that Woodward fails.

Over and over during the course of my reporting I’d hear a story that conflicted with Woodward’s account in Wired. I’d say, “Aha! I’ve got him!” I’d run back to Woodward’s index, look up the offending passage, and realize that, well, no, he’d put down the mechanics of the story more or less as they’d happened. But he’d so mangled the meaning and the context that his version had nothing to do with what I concluded had actually transpired. Take the filming of the famous cafeteria scene from Animal House, which Belushi totally improvised on set with no rehearsal. What you see in the film is the first and last time he ever performed that scene. Here’s the story as recounted by Belushi’s co-star James Widdoes:

One of the things that was so spectacular to watch during the filming was the incredible connection that [Belushi] and Landis had. During the scene on the cafeteria line, Landis was talking to Belushi all the way through it, and Belushi was just taking it one step further. What started out as Landis saying, “Okay, now grab the sandwich,” became, in John’s hands, taking the sandwich, squeezing and bending it until it popped out of the cellophane, sucking it into his mouth, and then putting half the sandwich back. He would just go a little further each time.

Co-star Tim Matheson remembered that John “did the entire cafeteria line scene in one take. I just stood by the camera, mesmerized.” Other witnesses agree. Every person who recounted that incident to me used it as an example of Belushi’s virtuoso talent and his great relationship with his director. Landis could whisper suggestions to Belushi on the fly, and he’d spin it into comedy gold.

Now here it is as Woodward presents it:

Landis quickly discovered that John could be lazy and undisciplined. They were rehearsing a cafeteria scene, a perfect vehicle to set up Bluto’s insatiable cravings. Landis wanted John to walk down the cafeteria line and load his tray until it was a physical burden. As the camera started, Landis stood to one side shouting: “Take that! Put that in your pocket! Pile that on the tray! Eat that now, right there!”

John followed each order, loading his pockets and tray, stuffing his mouth with a plate of Jello in one motion.

First off, Woodward wrongly calls the cafeteria scene a rehearsal, when half the point of the story is that Belushi pulled it off without ever rehearsing it once. Also, there’s actually nothing in the anecdote to indicate laziness or lack of discipline on Belushi’s part, yet Woodward chooses to establish the scene using those words.

The implication is that Belushi was so unfocused and unprepared that he couldn’t make it through the scene without the director beside him telling him what to do, which is not what took place. When I interviewed him, Landis disputed that he ever referred to Belushi as lazy or undisciplined. “The greatest crime of that book,”

Landis says of Wired, “is that if you read it and you’d just assume that John was a pig and an asshole, and he was anything but. He could be abrupt and unpleasant, but most of the time he was totally charming and people adored him.”

The wrongness in Woodward’s reporting is always ever so subtle.

SNL writer Michael O’Donoghue—who died before I started the book but who videotaped an interview with Judy years before—told this story about how Belushi loved to mess with him:

I am very anal-retentive, and John used to come over and just move things around, just move things a couple of inches, drop a paper on the floor, miss an ashtray a little bit until finally he could see me just tensing up. That was his idea of a fine joke. Another joke he used to do was to sit on me.

When put through the Woodward filter, this becomes:

A compulsively neat person, O’Donoghue was always picking up and straightening his office. Frequently, John came in and destroyed the order in a minute, shifting papers, furniture or pencils or dropping cigarette ashes.

Again, Woodward’s account is not wrong. It’s just … wrong. In his version, Belushi is not a prankster but a jerk.

Then there’s an anecdote related to me by Blair Brown, Belushi’s co-star in Continental Divide. In that movie, Belushi was cast as Ernie Souchack, a straight-man role in a romantic comedy. On the day they were to film the movie’s love scene, Belushi, not known for his matinee good looks, was terribly nervous. Here’s what happened, in Brown’s words:

If you’ve ever been a part of one of these movie love scenes, they’re just deeply peculiar. … You’re wearing this robe, and all you’ve got under that is this little bitty underwear that you’re going to still be wearing when you do the scene.

I don’t think John had ever done a love scene before, and he was clearly nervous about doing it. He just lay there in bed trying to think up all the funny names for penis that he could: the Hose of Horror … Mr. Wiggly. … We were weeping with laughter it was so funny. It was just like watching a little kid stalling because he doesn’t want to eat his vegetables. “Oh, oh, wait—you know what else? Here’s another one …”

After a while we finally had to say, “Okay, okay, John. Now you have to do the love scene.” He was just stalling and stalling and stalling because he was so nervous.

Here’s the scene as written in Wired:

The script called for a love scene, in bed, in a hotel room. They were to be nude under the covers. John was very nervous preparing for the shooting and kept making jokes, trying to get them to remember all the known names for the male sex organ. They came up with many—“the hose of horror,” “Mr. Wiggly’s dick,” and “one-eyed snake in a turtleneck.” Brown didn’t mind the conversation, but she thought it was an inappropriate prelude to a love scene.

Twenty years later, when Brown told me about the love scene, she was still upset at how Woodward had portrayed it in Wired. “It was my first experience of getting tricked by a journalist,” she said. “Woodward appeared as if he really wanted to know what went on, and I actually had marvelous times with Belushi. But the thing that was depressing when I read the book was that he had taken the facts that I told him, and put an attitude to them that was not remotely right.”

Wired is like that throughout. Like a funhouse mirror, Woodward’s prose distorts what it purports to reflect. Moments of tearful drama are rendered as tersely as an accounting of Belushi’s car-service receipts. Friendly jokes are stripped of their humor and turned into boorish annoyances. And when Woodward fails to convey the subtleties of those little moments, he misses the bigger picture. Belushi’s nervousness about doing that love scene in Continental Divide was an important detail. When that movie came out, it tanked at the box office. After months of fighting to stay clean, Belushi fell off the wagon and started using heavily again. Six months later he was dead. Woodward missed the real meaning of what went on.

Woodward also makes peculiar decisions about what facts he uses as evidence. His detractors like to say that he’s little more than a stenographer—and they’re right. In Wired, he takes what he is told and simply puts it down in chronological order with no sense of proportionality, nuance, or understanding.

John Belushi was a recreational drug user for roughly one-third of his 33 years, and he was a hard-core addict for the last five or six, from which you can subtract one solid year of sobriety. Yet in Wired, which has 403 pages of narrative text, the total number of pages that make some reference to drugs is something like 295, or nearly 75 percent. Belushi’s drug use is surely a key part of his life—drugs are what ended it, after all—but shouldn’t a writer also be interested in what led his subject to this substance abuse in the first place? If you want to know why someone was a cocaine addict for the last six years of his life, the answer is probably hiding somewhere in the first 27 years. But Woodward chooses to largely ignore that period, and in doing so he again misses the point. In terms of illuminating its subject, Wired is about as useful as a biography of Buddy Holly that only covers time he spent on airplanes.

Of all the people I interviewed, SNL writer and current Sen. Al Franken, referencing his late comedy partner Tom Davis, offered the most apt description of Woodward’s one-sided approach to the drug use in Belushi’s story: “Tom Davis said the best thing about Wired,” Franken told me. “He said it’s as if someone wrote a book about your college years and called it Puked. And all it was about was who puked, when they puked, what they ate before they puked and what they puked up. No one read Dostoevsky, no one studied math, no one fell in love, and nothing happened but people puking.”

To get a sense of what Franken’s getting at, here’s a couple of sample entries from Wired’s index:

Belushi, John:
as Blues Brother, 16, 22, 89, 139-42, 146-47, 161-62, 181-82, 186, 206, 334-35

Belushi, John:
cocaine habit of, 15, 17-33, 64-65, 76, 81, 93-94, 100, 103-05, 110, 128, 142-43, 145, 155-56, 159-60, 163-65, 170, 187-89, 193, 205-6, 218-19, 221, 243-44, 247-50, 262, 273, 297, 298, 301, 303, 306-8, 310-11, 316-53, 359, 361-65, 372-74, 385-89, 392-93, 395-400, 413-14, 422

That’s just the coke. It goes on to include “marijuana smoked by,” “mescaline taken by,” and “mushrooms (psilocybin) eaten by.” And those are just the drugs that start with the letter “M.”

Of course, John Belushi did do all of those drugs, and there’s little doubt that the drug stories Woodward uses actually happened. But he just goes around piling up these stories with no regard for what is actually relevant. Just to compare and contrast: At one point, Woodward stops the narrative cold to document a single 24-hour coke binge for the better part of eight pages. Nothing much happens in these eight pages except for Belushi going around L.A. doing a bunch of coke; it’s not a key moment in Belushi’s life, but it takes on an outsized weight in Wired’s narrative simply because Woodward happened to find the limo driver who drove Belushi around and witnessed the whole thing, providing him with a lot of juicy if not particularly important information.

Meanwhile, the funeral of Belushi’s grandmother—which was the pivotal moment when he hit bottom, resolved to get clean, and kicked off his year of hard-fought sobriety—that event is glossed over in a mere 42 words, and a quarter of those words are dedicated to the cost of the plane tickets to fly to the funeral ($4,066, per Woodward, as if it matters to the story).

Whenever people ask me about John Belushi and the subject of Wired comes up, I say it’s like someone wrote a biography of Michael Jordan in which all the stats and scores are correct, but you come away with the impression that Michael Jordan wasn’t very good at playing basketball.

It’s not that Woodward is a manipulator with a partisan agenda. He doesn’t alter key evidence in order to serve a particular thesis. Inconsequential details about rehearsing movie dialogue are rendered just as ham-handedly as critical facts about Belushi’s cocaine addiction. Woodward has an unmatched skill for digging up information, but he doesn’t know what to do with that information once he finds it.

All of which helps explain the recent Sperling affair. What did Woodward do? He took a comment from a source, missed or misinterpreted the subtext of what was being said, and went on to characterize it in a way that bore no resemblance to reality. What’s damning about the Sperling emails—and Wired—is that we can go back to the source and see the meaning and subtext for ourselves; normally with Woodward’s confidential reporting, we can’t.

After Wired was published, Woodward said to Rolling Stone that there was some warmth to Belushi that he “didn’t capture,” but he also passed the buck to his sources, saying he tried to get them to “talk about the good times” but kept getting horrible drug stories or stories that didn’t in his estimation reflect the true Belushi. “When you do something like this,” he told Rolling Stone, “you have to learn that people can’t see reality, especially in Hollywood.”

I spoke to almost all of those same sources myself. Not only did Belushi’s contemporaries from Saturday Night Live and Hollywood offer colorful tales of a beloved if troubled and complicated man, they themselves are some of the greatest writers, performers, and storytellers of the last quarter-century. They tell good stories. The problem was the filter those stories were put through.

Granted, I wasn’t working from the same notes and transcripts as Woodward. People’s memories change. Stories evolve over 20 years of telling. Surely there were people who were mad at Belushi in 1983 who prefer to look back on him fondly today. And if it were one or two people disputing Woodward’s characterizations, you might chalk it up to rose-tinted glasses. You might do the same if it were nine or 10 people. But when it’s practically everyone, when person after person sits down across from you and remembers, specifically, as Blair Brown did, this is what Woodward mischaracterized and this is really what happened, a pretty clear pattern begins to emerge.

It’s also easy to discount Wired by saying that Woodward just doesn’t have a sense of humor and was out of his depth writing about a comedian. And that’s true as far as it goes. But the stories from Animal House and Continental Divide aren’t really about comedy so much as they’re about human beings interacting, which is a lot of what goes on at the White House, too. The simple truth of Wired is that Bob Woodward, deploying all of the talent and resources for which he is famous, produced something that is a failure as journalism. And when you imagine Woodward using the same approach to cover secret meetings about drone strikes and the budget sequester and other issues of vital national importance, well, you have to stop and shudder. ++

*Correction, March 13, 2013: This article originally stated that John Belushi died of a “cocaine overdose”; Belushi had taken a speedball, a combination of cocaine and heroin, the night he died, and the coroner’s report concluded that either drug may have been ultimately responsible for his death

Norah Ephron’s Final Act
JACOB BERNSTEIN, New York Times
March 6, 2013

At 10 p.m. on a Friday night in a private room on the 14th Floor of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital on 68th and York Avenue, my mother was lying in her bed hallucinating, in that dream space people go on their way to being gone.

She spoke of seeing trees, possibly a forest. And she mentioned to Nick, my stepfather, that she had been to the theater where her play was showing and that the audience was full. In reality, she had not left the hospital in a month, and the play, “Lucky Guy,” was nearly a year away from opening.

My brother, Max, and I stood there in disbelief. Though it had been weeks since her blood count showed any sign of improvement, the gravity of the situation had crept up on us. Mom’s housekeeper, Linda Diaz, who had worked for her for 25 years, was in the corner sobbing.

At some point, a team of doctors and nurses arrived to assess the situation, and Mom became slightly more lucid.

“Can you tell me your name?” one of them asked.

“Nora Ephron,” she said, nodding.

“Can you tell me where you are?”

“New York Hospital.”

“Who is the president of the United States?”

At this point, my mother looked annoyed, gave a roll of the eyes and refused to answer the question, which later on was the source of some debate between Max and me about whether her sarcasm and humor remained even as her memory and focus faded or whether she was simply irritated at being treated like an infant.
A few hours later, after falling asleep for a short time, she woke up, ate ice cream with Max and me and was able to talk with some coherence about Jerry Sandusky’s conviction earlier that day.

When Max said, “Mom, I’m going to miss you so much,” she said: “Miss me? Well, I’m not dead yet.”

For most of the next three days, before she entered a coma and died, she was sort of herself, asking for the papers and doing the crossword. On Sunday, one of the nurses arrived to give her medication and innocently asked if she was planning on writing about what was happening to her. My mother simply said, “No.”

I took this more or less at face value until after her death, as plans moved forward with her play “Lucky Guy,” and it occurred to me that part of what she was trying to do by writing about someone else’s death was to understand her own.

Illness, and how a person handles it, was not the first thing on my mom’s mind when she began writing “Lucky Guy” back in 1999. At that point, she wasn’t even sick.

Based on real events, “Lucky Guy” is about a tabloid journalist named Mike McAlary. In the early ’90s, he became one of the highest-paid newspaper columnists in the country. Crime was still rampant in New York, and the Internet had not yet destroyed the economics of the newspaper business. My mother said that she saw his career as “the end of something,” a bookend to a time when reporters could still believe there was power in the job; when Elaine’s was still one of the city’s most glamorous rooms; when much of Times Square still belonged to prostitutes and drug dealers; and when the West Village had not yet been taken over by hedge-fund magnates and Russian oligarchs.

My mother knew a lot about McAlary’s world. She dreamed of being a newspaper reporter from the time she was in high school, and wound up spending much of her 20s working at The New York Post. Moreover, McAlary was what she liked to call “a problematic human being.” And after a decade of writing and directing romantic comedies, a lead character who wasn’t entirely likable seemed like a good way to keep herself from getting boxed in.

The project, however, kept getting sidelined. There was a movie, “Bewitched.” And a play Off Broadway, “Love, Loss, and What I Wore,” which she wrote with her sister Delia. Then another movie, as well as two anthologies of her essays. Another problem she kept running into: She’d conceived “Lucky Guy” (then called “Stories About McAlary”) as a film for HBO, but the structure was unconventional, relying largely on the other characters to tell their versions of what happened to him, essentially breaking the fourth wall. And everyone, including her, was unsure of how it was going to work on-screen.

Then in 2008, Colin Callender, the man guiding the development of “Lucky Guy” at HBO, left the network.

Callender had taken a personal interest in the project because he’d known McAlary. Shortly after striking out on his own as an independent producer, he called my mother with a new idea: What if her script was not a movie but a play, where characters regularly talk to the audience?

Two weeks later, she handed him a new draft. By this time, there was something else pulling her toward McAlary as well.

McAlary got the scoop of his life just nine months after receiving a diagnosis of advanced colon cancer. In 1997, he wrote the story of a Haitian immigrant named Abner Louima who was brutally assaulted by a New York City police officer. In the spring of 1998, McAlary won the Pulitzer Prize for his work. On Christmas of that same year, he died at 41. Shortly before his death, he was quoted as saying: “If you are a doctor or a lawyer, you take the case. If you’re a reporter, you write the story. I didn’t think about being sick.”

When Mom returned to working on the script in 2008, this was something she knew all about, though it was a secret confined to a tiny group of people: my stepfather, my brother, her sisters, a couple of close friends and me.

In late 2005, my mother went to see her doctor because she had been feeling, as she later told me, “punky.” She had always been a little anemic, but now, she appeared to be getting worse, with fevers and inexplicable infections. After years of seeing a trainer two to three times a week and being pretty fit for a woman in her mid-60s, she found herself dreading having to climb stairs.

She eventually made her way to J. Gregory Mears, a hematologist at Columbia University, who quickly gave her a diagnosis of myelodysplastic syndrome, an aggressive blood disorder that destroys the body’s ability to make healthy blood cells and ward off infections. The only known cure for it is a stem-cell transplant, but stem-cell transplants are especially difficult in older patients. Among other potential complications, the body may reject the donor cells or develop graft-versus-host disease, in which the transplanted cells can attack the patient.

This is what happened to Susan Sontag, who also died of acute myeloid leukemia brought on by MDS, and had many of the same doctors as my mother. Discussing the aftermath of her unsuccessful transplant in an article for this magazine in 2005, Sontag’s son, David Rieff, wrote, “To me ‘torture’ is not too strong or hyperbolic a word.”

My mother had seen her closest friend, Judy Corman, go through a series of increasingly painful treatments that didn’t do much but extend her suffering from the cancer that eventually killed her. Between watching this and reading about what happened to Sontag, Mom became unambiguous in her opposition to testing fate, to gambling away comfort for the remote possibility of being cured. She was determined to have a “good death.”

I’m not sure what would have happened had a stem-cell transplant been a viable option — if her sisters had been a match, for instance — but thankfully, it didn’t come to that. Soon after my mother went to see Mears, Jerome Groopman, a doctor at Harvard with extensive experience in treating cancer, was called in for a second opinion. After running a series of tests, he concluded that she quite likely had an unusual variant of MDS, which could be treated with less drastic measures.

Over time, the worry I felt when she first told me about the disease began to fade. We knew the statistics, but statistics — as Alice McAlary recounted to Mom about her husband, Mike — get you only so far. Besides, my mother had never been ordinary.

A moderate dose of prednisone helped stabilize her blood count for a couple of years. When the prednisone stopped working, she went to see Stephen Nimer at Memorial Sloan-Kettering. He put her on Vidaza, a low-dose form of chemotherapy with few side effects. Along with monthly blood transfusions, it effectively controlled the disease for two years.

Then while on a trip in the South of France in 2010, she went swimming and felt something stab her arm. She believed she had been stung by a jellyfish but was not sure. A few weeks later, she wound up in a hospital in Los Angeles with an inexplicable bacterial infection that led to a bump on her arm the size of a tangerine.

Miraculously, when she got out, she was transfusion-independent. Her doctors had no idea what had happened, except to speculate that her bone marrow responded to a threat in an unusually dramatic way and was now producing healthy blood cells and platelets. My mother was not one to go in for superstition or miracles — godlessness was for her a form of religion, a belief in self-sufficiency above all else — but she was near certain her recovery had something to do with the jellyfish.

At various points over the years, she considered coming clean to her friends and colleagues about her illness. But she knew the effect it could have on her career. Certainly, she could continue writing books and essays. But getting a movie made would be impossible, because no insurance company would sign off on it. Arguably, she could do a play, but bringing it to Broadway would be difficult, given that the development process takes years. Beyond that, what my mother didn’t want was to have her illness define her, turning every conversation into a series of “how are you?”s.

All her life, she subscribed to the belief that “everything is copy,” a phrase her mother, Phoebe, used to say. In fact, when Phoebe was on her deathbed, she told my mother, “Take notes.” She did. What both of them believed was that writing has the power to turn the bad things that happen to you into art (although “art” was a word she hated). “When you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you; but when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it’s your laugh,” she wrote in her anthology “I Feel Bad About My Neck.” “So you become the hero rather than the victim of the joke.”

And she applied that maxim everywhere. She wrote a magazine article about The New York Post and her former boss there, Dorothy Schiff (“It is a terrible newspaper. The reason it is, of course, is Dorothy Schiff”); her breasts (“If I had them I would have been a completely different person”); even getting fat injections in her lips (“I looked like a Ubangi, so I never did it again”). There was also an entire book and movie devoted to her divorce from my father. (But never mind that.)

The thing is, you can’t really turn a fatal illness into a joke. It is almost the only disclosure that turns you into the victim rather than the hero of your story. For her, tragedy was a pit of clichés. So she stayed quiet, though clues were sprinkled through much of what she wrote during the six years she was sick.

They were there in “I Feel Bad About My Neck”: “Death is a sniper. It strikes people you love, people you like, people you know, it’s everywhere. You could be next. But then you turn out not to be. But then again you could be.”

They were there in “I Remember Nothing”: “The realization that I may have only a few good years remaining has hit me with real force, and I have done a lot of thinking as a result. I would like to have come up with something profound, but I haven’t. I try to figure out what I really want to do every day, I try to say to myself, If this is one of the last days of my life, am I doing exactly what I want to be doing? I am low. My idea of a perfect day is a frozen custard from Shake Shack and a walk in the park. (Followed by a Lactaid).”

And they were there in her last edits of “Lucky Guy,” the final piece of work she completed.

My mother didn’t know Mike McAlary personally, but she was certainly familiar with his kind. And what details she didn’t know were quickly filled in by his friends, colleagues and relatives, almost all of whom she interviewed.

McAlary was born in Oahu, Hawaii, and he grew up in Goffstown, N.H. After graduating from Syracuse University, he went to work at The Boston Herald American, covering sports, then eventually scored a job at New York Newsday. There, he made a name for himself as a particularly aggressive reporter, covering crime and police corruption. After that he began to bounce back and forth between The New York Daily News and The New York Post, getting bigger and better contracts each time he made a move.

In 1993, he broke his contract with The Daily News to become the highest paid reporter at The Post, with a salary of $945,750 over three years. The Daily News was granted a preliminary injunction that prevented him from making the move, and McAlary wound up with too much time on his hands. After a night out at a Yankees game, he totaled his car on the F.D.R. Drive. His injuries were so serious that he spent several days in a coma and a month in the hospital. Rupert Murdoch, who hired him at The Post, never called or came to see him. But Mort Zuckerman, who owned The News, did. So he stayed at The News.

Not long after McAlary returned to work, he made a career-killing mistake. A woman in Prospect Park had reported being raped, but McAlary’s sources had doubts. He was told that the results of the rape kit had come back negative for sperm, that it was only a matter of time before she was found out. But the most crucial points in McAlary’s stories turned out to be wrong. The woman had been raped. What the source didn’t realize was that no sperm didn’t necessarily mean no semen. McAlary had made no attempt to speak with the victim herself, an act of laziness that his supporters believed was partially attributable to his accident.

The News reduced the frequency of his column. The official explanation was that he was writing his novel. It was around this time that he began to get sick. He was jaundiced and losing weight. In conversations, he seemed dazed.

“He still had these symptoms,” said his widow, Alice, when I went to see her last month. “You have to remember, they put him all back together again. So when he started having issues with his colon, his stomach, all that stuff, we attributed them to the accident.”

By the time McAlary got his diagnosis of colon cancer, it had already progressed to an advanced stage.

“It was a desperate situation,” said Ed Hayes, one of McAlary’s closest friends and the man who negotiated all of his contracts. “The nurse took one look and said: ‘Forget this guy. He’s a dead man. There’s no hope for him.’ ”

Nevertheless, he underwent surgery to remove as much of the cancer as possible, then started chemotherapy in 1997. He was hooked up to the chemo drip when he received a tip that a man had been severely assaulted by a police officer. He drove from his treatment to see Abner Louima in the hospital. He was the first reporter to interview the victim. In horrifying detail, Louima told him how he’d been wrongfully arrested outside a nightclub and taken back to a police station, where one of the cops raped him with a plunger.

In a series of articles, he not only exposed a monstrous incident of police brutality but started the earliest debate about the Giuliani-era approach to law enforcement. In short order, McAlary’s career was rehabilitated.

In the play my mother wrote, there’s a scene toward the end, in which McAlary, sick with cancer, goes to the Poconos to visit his friend Jim Dwyer, then a columnist at The Daily News. It’s a glorious summer day, and McAlary’s 12-year-old son, Ryan, wants to do a flip off the diving board, but he gets scared and can’t do it. So McAlary takes off his shirt, walks to the edge of the diving board and says to him: “When you do these things, you can’t be nervous. If you think about what can go wrong, if you think about the belly flop, that’s what’ll happen.”

And then McAlary does the flip himself and makes a perfect landing.

It’s a metaphor, obviously, for his view about life. And I’ve come to think it might as well have been about my mother. The point is that you don’t let fear invade your psyche. Because then you might as well be dead.

As she saw him, McAlary was a role model not so much in life, but in death, in the way that he used writing to maintain his sense of purpose and find release from his illness. In the six years my mother had MDS, she wrote 100 blog posts, two books and two plays and directed a movie. There was nothing she could do about her death but to keep going in the face of it. Work was its own kind of medicine, even if it could not save her when her MDS came roaring back.

“I’m having a little health crisis.”

That’s how she put it when she called me shortly before Memorial Day weekend.

I dropped everything, got into a cab and headed up to see her at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. While I was en route, the phone rang; it was Max, who told me that Mom’s MDS had turned into leukemia. I think I already knew, even though I hadn’t asked her for specifics. For six months, Mom’s blasts — the bad guys that make it difficult for people with MDS and leukemia to produce healthy platelets and white blood cells — had been creeping back up, indicating that she was developing a resistance to her medication. Now she would need a brutal form of chemotherapy if she hoped to survive. Max and his girlfriend, Rachel, were getting on a plane from L.A.

When I arrived in her room, my mother was crying. She cried a lot that first night, and then, the next day, she cried some more because she was certain Christopher Hitchens had done no such thing, and she was devastated at the thought that she might not be as brave as him about death.

It terrified me to see her cry like that. She loved me, showered me with gifts, e-mailed or called every time I wrote something that made her proud. But even after all the weekly meals, the shared vacations, the conversations about movies and journalism and the debt ceiling and Edith Wharton, I still viewed her with a mix of awe and intimidation. It wasn’t often that I caught a glimpse of her vulnerability.

Now there she was, in her Chanel flats and her cream-colored pants and her black-and-white-striped blouse, looking so pretty and so fragile as she dabbed her eyes with a Kleenex; and I finally understood what she meant when she said she was a bird — that she wasn’t just talking about her looks but something inside as well.

As she explained it that first night, the odds of the chemo working were below 50 percent, and even if it did, it would probably not buy her more than a year and a half or so. “I want to live to be 100,” she said. “I want to see how things turn out for you and Max.” But she wasn’t sure the chemo was worth doing for such a limited upside.

I told her that I hoped she would reconsider, that a year and a half is a lot of time during which something else may emerge as a viable treatment. Still, I said I would respect whatever she wished to do, that it was her body, her life, her choice. I think this is what she needed to hear, that we wanted her to live more than anything but that she was still in control. Because within minutes, she seemed resigned to the idea that she was going to be nuked, as she put it.

Forty-eight hours later, she was hooked up to an IV. Her sadness seemed to lift, and her humor returned. The side effects of the chemo wouldn’t kick in for at least a week, so she spent her days with Delia powering through a TV pilot they were writing for Scott Rudin. At night, Nick brought in Shake Shack or Cuban-Chinese, and we watched episodes of “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” Binky Urban (Mom’s book agent and one of her closest friends) and Ken Auletta (a writer for The New Yorker) were there frequently as well. So was Richard Cohen, the Washington Post columnist and one of her oldest friends. Because of my mother’s tremendous sense of will and a modest dose of steroids, the script was finished before the chemo was.

At first, there were some encouraging signs. She wasn’t in remission, but the blasts were below 20 percent, which is considered the threshold for being fully leukemic. Then, about a week and a half later, she got pneumonia. As her doctors explained it, the body often takes three weeks or so to begin producing neutrophils after chemotherapy of this type. And neutrophils are the good guys that defend the body from infections. One day, she would seem to be getting better; the next, worse. At night she was experiencing heart palpitations. It was confusing to all of us, including my mother.

So we waited.

We waited as she went on and off oxygen. We waited as her appetite left her. We waited as she lost her hair, and this I remember vividly, because I did not see her cry at all. Crying, I believe, is a sign that there’s still hope. Instead, she seemed sort of numb.

My mother loved looking good. She had her hair blown out weekly. She wore makeup. She had a closet filled with Prada and Armani. When she realized that she might be too old to wear a very expensive dress by Azzedine Alaïa that she bought in Paris, it was like a little arrow to the heart.

She had fallen in love with and married a man who was as fastidious about presentation as she was. Even in the hospital, day after day, Nick arrived looking impeccable in his fancy slacks and his beautiful loafers, because getting dressed up was a way to say to her that things were still normal, that he hadn’t lost hope. All sorts of men had rejected her when she was younger as cute but not beautiful. She wrote about it, turned it into a comic riff — everything is copy — but privately, it was heartbreaking for her until this noble man came along and made her feel that she was as fabulous to look at as she was to talk to.

And now, here she was without her hair, confined to a bed, using a nurse to help her go to the bathroom. It was the beginning of her losing her dignity. It was the beginning of a bad death.

In the days that followed, conversation became harder, and the silences grew longer. People who live thousands of miles from their parents often express regret at not being able to say goodbye, or about having spent too little time with them during their final days. But being there every day, as I was, produced its own kind of sorrow. It wasn’t just the big things we were avoiding saying (although there were certainly some of those). It was the sadness of having run out of news to deliver, gossip to report, new books and movies to discuss. I actually believe that had Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes announced their separation a week earlier, we might have kept her smiling one more night.

On June 18, four weeks after my mother went into the hospital, the Public Theater held its annual benefit to raise money for Shakespeare in the Park. For more than a decade, my mother attended the gala every year, considering it the unofficial beginning of summer. Often it would start to rain in the middle of the show, and everyone would pull out their umbrellas and wait for it to pass. But it didn’t matter. It was an evening when her favorite park in her favorite city turned into an enchanted forest.

The night before the benefit, my mother was able to get out of her hospital bed, but she couldn’t really speak. She wrote down the names of all the people she had invited to sit at her table that year and organized the seating arrangement for me. When I got to Central Park the next evening, it was a mess: two of her guests had canceled; others knew she was in the hospital but not why; some appeared not to have been told anything at all and looked puzzled when I informed them that she and Nick weren’t going to make it.

I was too discombobulated to ask a waiter to please remove the two empty chairs from the table. I just sat there helplessly, hands clasped underneath the table, trying to avoid the concerned looks of nearly a dozen people who suddenly knew that something was rotten in the state of Denmark but were too polite to say it.

After I got home, this admittedly trivial detail gnawed at me. How useless I was, how incompetent. I spent nearly 34 years at the foot of one of New York’s best hostesses and I could not even figure out how to ask a waiter to take away two chairs. I had failed to pay adequate attention all those years, and could not even be trusted to do this one small thing for my mother as she neared the end.

Did she know she was dying that final week, that she was not ever going to leave the hospital?

Richard Cohen, who spent much of the final weeks in the hospital with us, says: “She knew. There wasn’t a moment of confusion. I’m certain of that.”

I go back and forth.

Absolutely, she planned for it. She redid her will earlier in the spring when her blood counts were going the wrong way, typed an exit letter on her computer, spelling out what she wanted after she died: a party in the apartment with Champagne and cucumber sandwiches from William Poll; a memorial held days after. “Get it over with” was the gist of her instructions. She even supplied the speaker list.

Nevertheless, as she ran out of time, she chose not to acknowledge, at least explicitly, what was happening to her. One of the last e-mails she sent went out five days before she died. It was addressed to her film agent, Bryan Lourd. “I am as sad as you can imagine to report that I have leukemia. Early reports are not particularly hopeful but not hopeless either.”

The weekend before she went into a coma, Jerry Groopman called her from Boston. If she wanted to know, he was prepared to tell her that she had entered the terminal phase of her illness. She chose not to call him back.

And then there was that conversation with Max, the one in which she said, “I’m not dead yet.”

In “I Feel Bad About My Neck,” my mother wrote of turning 60: “Denial has been a way of life for me for many years. I actually believe in denial. It seemed to me that the only way to deal with a birthday of this sort was to do everything possible to push it from my mind.”

Some part of me would like to believe this is what she was doing at the end as well, because it would indicate that her hope remained as she left the world. But it’s just as likely that she felt too sad to have this conversation with me. Or that I was too sad to have it with her.

Sunday, June 24, was a pretty good day. The sun was shining, and Mom spent most of the afternoon on a couch in the front of her room, doing the crossword puzzle with Max. Binky was there, as was Richard Cohen and his companion, Mona. Amy stopped by with her husband, Alan. “We’re going to the Guggenheim,” Amy said. “Do you want anything from the outside world?”

“Sure,” my mother said. “A de Kooning.”

Another thing she requested was a pineapple milkshake, so Max brought one from Emack and Bolio’s, made from fresh pineapple. But as far as my mother was concerned, a milkshake is one thing that’s actually better with crushed pineapple. Dole.

“When I get out of the hospital, I’m going to go home and I’m going to make a pineapple milkshake with crushed pineapple, pineapple juice and vanilla ice cream, and I’m going to drink it and I’m going to die,” she said, savoring the last word. “It’s going to be great.”

On this day, I told her some things. After she moved to her bed, I said that sometimes, I thought of the possibility of her not being around and wondered if I’d ever be able to write again. If I’d even want to. And she told me that I would, that I would find it within me, and that whatever happened, she hoped my brother and I would lead the kind of lives where we did stuff big enough to occasionally say, “Wow, I wish Mom was around for this.”

We stared out at the 59th Street Bridge and tried to remember all the others that connect Manhattan to the rest of the world. The Brooklyn Bridge. The Williamsburg Bridge, the Queensboro Bridge, the Triboro Bridge. We got about halfway before she began to doze off.

On Monday, Nick called to say she’d had another tough night. I got to the hospital, and there was more blood work, none of it good. The blasts were everywhere. She didn’t have a single neutrophil.

Hours later, she began to drift in and out of consciousness. We took turns holding her hand. Delia would come, then Max, then me, then Amy, then Binky, then Richard. Nick sat beside her and wept.

“In, out, in, out,” she said, waving her hands at the windows. Also: “This is it,” which she said in a tone that seemed to be half-question, half-declaration. It occurred to me later that it might have been the first uncertain moment she’d had in her entire life.
I started calling her friends to explain what was going on, that she was shutting down, that we were sorry for not having told them sooner. They were startled and confused, but gracious.

I told several of them that they would be speaking at her memorial, that she actually requested it in writing and that she’d also requested that they try to keep it to under five minutes.

Over and over again, they said to me, “This must be so hard for you.” But making those calls wasn’t. It was strangely beautiful. The people I called told me stories about great advice she’d given them; e-mails she’d sent that they’d loved; and occasionally, what a total pain she could be. Those were funny to hear. They were real.

While I did phone duty, Max relaxed and took off his button-down shirt. Two sleeves of tattoos ran down his arms. Mom had seen one of them years before and had not reacted favorably, so when he went in to get the other arm done, he decided that she would never see it. Never again did he wear a short-sleeve shirt in her presence.

“Wow, Max, look at those tattoos,” Binky said.

“Shh!” he said, flashing her a smile.

My mother’s eyes popped open.

“Mom, I’m so sorry about my tattoos.”

“You. Aren’t. Really,” she said, her eyebrows raised in a kind of resigned indignation. And then she fell back asleep. ++

Don’t miss ‘The Makers: Women Who Make America’ … TONIGHT

2013-02-26T18:06:43Z

Charlie Rose featured a short discussion with Gloria Steinem and Amy Richards last night about the state of feminism and their thoughts on the PBS special airing tonight, The Makers: Women Who Make America. You’ll find Betty Dodson in the preview, shown ‘faking an orgasm.’

This is a Don’t Miss, dearhearts … from what I can tell, it is an encouragement and that’s very good news for those of us worrying about the future of women’s rights!

Jude

Make Way for the “Makers” — Meet the Warriors of the Women’s Movement
Marlo Thomas via HuffPo
02/26/2013

Billie Jean King. Condoleezza Rice. Ellen DeGeneres. Hillary Clinton. Barbara Walters. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg.

We see their names and instantly picture their faces. We know their achievements and have grown to admire them. We think of them as “doers.”

But they’re more than that, actually. They are “Makers” — those who, early in their careers, had the determination and intuition to survey the cultural landscape and recognize not only what was there, but what wasn’t. And then they helped provide that missing piece.

This evening (7:00 to 10:00 PM), PBS will premiere “MAKERS: Women Who Make America,” a television special that tells the compelling saga of the American women who led the march to equality over the past half-century. It is inspiring to watch their stories on the special — and on the Makers website — and discover how their wildly different trajectories would eventually converge in the crucible of the women’s movement — whether they were reporting from a battlefield overseas, like Christiane Amanpour, or waging a different kind of war here on the home front, like Gloria Steinem.

I attended a screening of the film earlier this month, and, well, here’s a spoiler alert: You will be moved to tears, as many people in the audience were.

When my pal Nancy Armstrong — a tireless force behind Makers — asked me to be part of the project, I was honored, flattered and instantly in — because I knew that the project would mean so much to today’s younger women, as they witnessed the battles that were waged — battles that paved the way for the rights they now enjoy. And even more, I knew they would be inspired to discover how they needed to be ever vigilant to protect those rights, just as we must be with our democracy.

I have vivid memories of those exciting days: Gloria leading us on marches down city streets and through the great mall in Washington, her fist in the air, her ponytail whipped by the wind, a megaphone to her mouth as she announced to the gathered crowds that our nation was squandering half its resources — its talent, its productivity, its humanity — by not recognizing the equality of women.

I remember the wit and wisdom and steely determination of Bella Abzug, and how her anti-war organization, Women Strike for Peace, helped catapult her to the House of Representatives — and to President Nixon’s enemy list. (I don’t know which she was prouder of.) Her feminist zeal — and hilarious word-spin — never waned. It was Bella who said, “True equality will come not when a female Einstein is recognized as quickly as a male Einstein, but when a female schlemiel is promoted as quickly as a male schlemiel.” Classic Bella.

And I remember the smarts and dynamism of child actor-turned-adult activist Robin Morgan, whose political and theatrical savvy inspired a headline-grabbing demonstration against the Miss America pageant on the Atlantic City boardwalk in 1968. Live sheep were paraded about and crowned in mockery of the pageant, as protestors tossed artifacts of women’s oppression — false eyelashes and mops and bras — into a large “Freedom Trash Can.” In her Makers interview, Robin notes that no bras were actually burned — that became a media-made myth, she says — but she credits the high-profile demonstration as a turning point in the women’s movement. And she’s right.

Looking back on it all, you might wonder: What did all of us have in common? At face value, not a whole lot. Gloria was from Toledo, and spent much of her childhood as a caretaker to her mother, who suffered bouts of mental illness. Caretaking became a skill that Gloria has called on time and again throughout her life, as she has met other women in need.

Bella grew up in a strict Jewish community in New York, where women weren’t recognized. When her father died, she was forbidden from saying the mourner’s Kaddish for him in synagogue, because that privilege was reserved only for sons. But because her father had no son, Bella defied the law and said the sacred prayer for her dad. It was this sense of right that she brought to the women’s movement.

Me, I was a Beverly Hills kid raised in the spotlight of show business. But I came from a family of Lebanese immigrants — a rich culture, to be sure, but one in which marriages were arranged and women had no say in their lives. It was this need to be heard that inspired me to create a TV series, “That Girl.” The concept of the show — an independent working girl living in New York, with absolutely zero interest in marriage — rattled the male execs at the network; and I was given a green light on the project only after loaning my copy of Betty Friedan’s feminist manifesto, “The Feminine Mystique,” to the executive who made the decision –convincing him that change for women was inevitable.

And so all of us arrived at the women’s movement not because of where we’d come from, but because of what we carried inside of us — our stories, our histories. And though they were very different histories, they somehow made us the same.

And so my question to you is: What is your story? What is your history? What do you carry inside you — from your mothers and grandmothers and great aunts — that made you who you are? Because the real and most exciting point of this Makers project is, yes, to celebrate how we got here, but more important, to aim at where we’re going.

And it’s up to you to seize the work that lays before us — like claiming an equal voice in our political system, or demanding equal pay for equal work, or taking leadership roles in big business. You are among the mighty group of Makers just ahead who can help make new history.

I truly hope you’ll watch the film on PBS this evening. In the meantime, [open the link for] a slide show of a few of the inspiring women you’ll learn about. Many of their names may not be as familiar to you as Steinem and Billie Jean, but each and every one of them has provided their own chapter in a rich and evolving story. I can’t wait to hear from you. ++

“I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. That is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.”
~ The Reverend Martin Luther King

Cliff Diving

2013-01-02T05:23:12Z

Oh, what an exciting [yawn] few days it’s been, as first, the House diss’d John Boehner’s symbolic Grand Bargain vote, refused to discuss any deal and went home; then the President went on Meet the Press and told the world the Pubs were holding us all hostage [they were!] and pissed everyone off, so they all came back to the Hill to yell at one another.

Next, the Prez went back on television and announced that everyone was closer to a deal, smirking just a tad as he poked at the Pubs [he really did!] and put such a crimp in the Baggers sensibilities that the Senate vote that passed fell flat as the goad to the House, Baggers putting their fingers in their ears and chanting, “Lalalalala.” [Just kidding -- you thought it was possible though, didn't you?]

As HuffPost Hill had to say:

Senate Republicans voted to raise taxes on most American households and added trillions to the deficit, proving they truly are the party of Reagan. Now it’s up to the House to win one for the Gipper

And darned if they didn’t. Eric Cantor [in what I think is a double-down bid for Boehner's job as speaker, the vote is Thursday when a NEW Congress is sworn in and let's hope it's better than the last!] railed against the “deal,” voted against it and won points with the Baggers but to no avail. It’s all too late now.

I have mixed emotions. Me, I’d have been pleased to go over this cliff because the Prez .. yet again … caved at the last minute to get this bargain and, although the deal itself is bad [you realize it was ALWAYS going to be dreadful, no matter how good it was, right????] it wasn’t as bad as it might have been [they got Social Security off the table] although, as usual, we blinked first in raising the $250,000 threshold. Bad Biden! Bad! {{sigh}}

I’ve been schizophrenic about this, anyhow. Yes, we needed to keep the discretionary funding [3-5% that keeps environmental and nature organizations, veterans benefits and unemployment payments, education and nutrition delivery, all kinds of government pledges and programs going] in the worst damn way AND we needed to prove to the world that we’re more stable than we appear, which all begs an agreement …

BUT…

changing the numbers on taxation from $250,000 to $400,000, allowing the ‘death’ tax to only jump a bit instead of a bunch and making these changes permanent, does not raise enough revenue to get closer to those numbers we seem determined to meet … which means the money will have to come out of spending and that always hurts the weakest of our citizens. Pub pundits are already saying they’ve done their part, now it’s all about entitlement reform.

As well, the boons the left has made — unemployment renewal, etc — are temporary and we’ve only begun the process, kicking the can on the other aspects of budget down the road two months … which means that rather than begin gun control or immigration legislation, we’ll be tied up with this fiscal nonsense again.

Bottom line? Labor is always the target, the little people picking up the pricetag for the well-heeled. That simply HAS to stop. And if we solidly win an election, have public opinion on our side and every advantage and STILL can’t get a fair bill through Congress, what will happen in a few months when the “political capital” is used up? Those who think we still need some kind of bi-partisan agreement — including the Prez, in my estimation — have NOT been paying attention to the ideology of those making movement impossible.

This is … always was … an assault on entitlements. The Pubs really don’t care if they self-destruct in their attempt to turn back the clock. They’re Kamikaze’s and public welfare is in their cross hairs.

Open the links for the reads, good ones including Reich and Krugman. At minimum, read the Levin piece, it’s ‘different’ … echoes with that new energy, new conversation we must accustom ourselves to.

The bigger picture? Government function is at an impasse, barely operating. It’s time we had a MUCH bigger conversation about how all this works and we’d better get to it quickly. We got high-toned moral apoplexy about earmarks (thanks, John McCain!) which removed the traditional carrot/stick trade-offs that greased the skids of political cooperation — we gerrymandered ourselves into quicksand, making the House almost impossible to move out of Pub hands — and, as John Friedman wrote for Huffy, regarding this cliff smack down:

We’re so busy expressing outrage and pointing fingers that we are not accepting responsibility for our own part in reelecting the same fiscal-cliff-creating, legislation-stalling, economy-risking people that we gave the lowest approval rate in history

The first read below is from Marianne Williamson about spiritualizing our political stand in the coming months; something we Waver’s are very comfortable with. It is specific to women — but if we understand the Goddess function of this time frame, it’s for ALL of us. The second article is a 2012 wrap up from the Washington Post — a fun read, a grand tour through one of the most absurd, delusional and frustrating political years in recent history.

Still, even facing all this mess and mayhem, this is going to be a productive year, can you feel it? Not politics as usual [whatever that means, anymore] but perhaps politics with some actual meaning, from personal to panoramic and back again! Politics that expands our vision and moves us through our hearts and into a brighter future.

Happy New Year to each of you dearhearts!

From me to you, hang in there — the best is yet to come!

Jude

Welcome to the Fiscal Blip. Demand More in 2013
Adam Levin, HuffPo
12/31/2012

Lousy Deal on the Edge of the Cliff
Robert Reich, his blog
Monday, December 31, 2012

Perspective on the Deal
Paul Krugman, The Conscious of a Liberal blog — NYT
01/01/13

Democrats’ Cliff Compromise Is Bad; But the Strategic Consequences Are Disastrous
Noam Scheiber, The New Republic
December 31, 2012

Reject the Deal
Jeffrey Sachs, HuffPo
01/01/2013

Fiscal cliff deal first day of Biden presidency
Presidents Obama’s effort to sabotage his own last-minute deal with the Senate reveals who is the real adult in the White House.
Jonah Goldberg, USA Today
January 1, 2013

SISTER GIANT: Women, Non-Violence and Birthing A New American Politics
Marianne Williamson, her blog
October 20, 2012

America keeps trying to fix itself by moving around the deck chairs on the Titanic. Clearly this isn’t working, and people in the consciousness movement have some important clues why — and what to do about it.

People involved in the inner journey discover the value of the feminine, or spiritually receptive and inclusive, aspect of human consciousness. Everyone archetypally is a parent to future generations. And a motherly love – putting the care of children before every other consideration — is the ultimate intelligence of nature. Yes, women are homemakers — and the entire earth is our home. Yes, we are here to take care of the children — and every child in the world is one of our own. We have evolved to a point to be ready to say these things, in a meaningful way and with a collective voice. Making money more important than your own children is a pathological way for an individual to run their affairs, and it’s a pathological way for a society to run its affairs.

But people often say to me, “I don’t want to get involved with politics because it makes me upset. What am I supposed to do with the anger, the rage, the cynicism?”

Well, I know what we shouldn’t do. We shouldn’t use our own upset as an excuse for not helping. We shouldn’t come up with a pseudo-spiritual excuse for turning away from the pain of the world. There is nothing spiritual about complacency.

These are very serious times, and serious people need to be doing some serious thinking. The last thing we should do is allow ourselves to be infantalized by a counterfeit version of enlightenment. No true search for enlightenment ignores the suffering of other sentient beings. Ever.

Albert Einstein said we would not solve the problems of the world at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them. We need more than a new politics; we need a new worldview. We need a fundamentally different bottom line. We need to shift from an economic to a humanitarian organizing principle for human civilization. And women, en masse, should be saying so.

The US incarcerates more of its people than any nation in the world, or any nation in history. Our military budget is almost twice that of all other nations of the world combined. At 23.1 per cent, our child poverty rate is so high that it is second only to Romania among the 35 developed nations of the world. 17,000 children on earth die of starvation every single day. We are the only species systematically destroying its own habitat. And two billion people – almost a third of the world’s population – live on less than 2 dollars a day. There’s a lot more to those statistics than a simple “To Do” list can fix. Those facts will only change when we bring to our problem-solving a far more committed heart.

Currently, the U.S. Congress is comprised of 16.8 per cent women. Our State legislatures are comprised of 23.6 per cent women. Would our legislative priorities be what they are today – tending always in the direction of serving those with economic leverage first — were those legislative bodies anywhere near gender equal? Would the “war on women” exist as it does now? Would child poverty – or poverty, period – be given such short shrift? I like to think not.

Yet there are understandable reasons for the lack of female participation in our electoral politics, not the least of which is that the entire political system is contrary to everything a feminine heart stands for. It lacks inclusion. It lacks poetry. It doesn’t nurture. It doesn’t love. And without those things, the feminine psyche disconnects.

Where does that leave us though, if we simply shudder at the thought of politics and then ignore it altogether? Talk about being co-opted by a patriarchal system! We will have gone from men telling us condescendingly to not bother our pretty little heads about important things like politics, to not bothering our pretty little heads without even being told not to! The suffragettes struggled and suffered so much on our behalf; what a travesty of everything they stood for, if we simply look away as though we can’t be bothered.

And yet we should be bothered. Our challenge is to not look away, but rather to transform the field; to create a new political conversation, our own conversation, out of which we can speak our truth in our own way.

My hope and intention is that Sister Giant will be an incubator for the emergence of that new field of political possibility, entailing a new conversation about America and a serious sense of sisterhood. It will cover everything from psychological and emotional issues to a spiritual perspective on politics, to actually training women how to run for office. I want to be a cheerleader for women who have never considered running for office or being involved in a campaign, but who in the quietness of their hearts might think, “Why not me?”

As we awaken individually, we will act more powerfully collectively; legislation and political campaigns will embody a new kind of thinking only if we engage en masse. In the absence of our engaging the political system, we allow it to become something other than what we are. That in fact is what has happened, but it’s also what we can change. For what we engage, we transform. And what we engage with our hearts is transformed forever.

Martin Luther King, Jr. said that the desegregation of the American South was the political externalization of the goal of the Civil Rights movement, but that the ultimate goal was the establishment of the beloved community. He said it was time to inject a new dimension of love into the veins of human civilization. He wasn’t called a New Age nutcase or considered an intellectual lightweight for saying such things, and neither should we be. I don’t think making love the new bottom line is naïve; I believe that thinking we can survive the next hundred years doing anything less, is naïve. Sister Giant is a place for anyone who agrees with that – male or female, from the political Left, the political Right or the political Center. It will, I hope, contribute to a new conversation, a new America and a new world. ++

Sister Giant

Dave Barry’s Year in Review 2012
1/01/13
Dave Barry, WaPo

It was a cruel, cruel year — a year that kept raising our hopes, only to squash them flatter than a dead possum on the interstate.

Example: This year the “reality” show “Jersey Shore,” which for six hideous seasons has been a compelling argument in favor of a major Earth-asteroid collision, finally got canceled, and we dared to wonder if maybe, just maybe, we, as a society, were becoming slightly less stupid.

But then, WHAP, we were slapped in our national face by the cold hard frozen mackerel of reality in the form of the hugely popular new “reality” show “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo,” which, in terms of intellectual content, makes “Jersey Shore” look like “Hamlet.”

Another example: As the year began, the hottest recording artist was the brilliant singer-songwriter Adele, whose popularity made us think that maybe, just maybe, after years of rewarding overhyped auto-tuned dreck, we were finally developing more sophisticated musical tastes, and then …

WHAP, we were assaulted from all sides by the monster megahit video “Gangnam Style,” in which a Korean man prances around a variety of bizarre Korean settings riding an imaginary Korean horse and shouting a song that, except for the words “Eh, sexy lady,” is entirely in Korean.

It was that kind of year. Remember back in 2011, when the big sex scandal involved Anthony Weiner, the ferret-like congressperson who committed political suicide by tweet? We all thought, “Oh, well, another Washington politician who wants to regulate everything except his own personal ding-dong. At least there are SOME institutions, such as the Secret Service, the CIA and the Army, where males in positions of responsibility can control their …”

WHAP.

Did anything good come out of 2012? Maybe. Just maybe.

Consider: For years now, Washington has been paralyzed by bitterly partisan gridlock, unable and unwilling to act in the face of a looming, potentially disastrous economic crisis. But this year, we, the people, finally did something about it. We went to the polls, and we made our decision. Which is why now, as the year ends, we can look forward to a future in which Washington is …

WHAP.

So, okay, basically we need to forget about 2012 as soon as possible. But just so we can remember exactly what it is we need to forget, let’s pour ourselves a stiff drink and take a look back at the train wreck we’re staggering away from, starting with …

January

… in which President Obama, in the State of the Union address, boldly rebuts critics who charge that his economic policies have been a failure by displaying the scalp of Osama bin Laden, which a White House aide carries in a special briefcase.

Meanwhile the race for the Republican presidential nomination, which began in approximately 2003, continues to be a spicy political gumbo of excitement. The emerging front runner is Mitt Romney, who combines a strong résumé of executive experience with the easygoing natural human warmth of a parking meter. Still in contention, however, is Newt Gingrich, whose popularity surges briefly, only to wane when voters begin to grasp the fact that he is Newt Gingrich. This opens the door for Rick Santorum, whose strong suit is that he has a normal first name, and who apparently at one point was a senator or governor of Pennsylvania or possibly Vermont.

Abroad, an Iranian nuclear scientist is killed in a suspicious bomb blast. Responding to accusations that the United States was behind the killing, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declares “we had nothing to do with it,” adding that if any more Iranian nuclear scientists are killed, “we will have had nothing to do with that, either.”

In the new year’s first major disaster, the Mediterranean cruise ship Costa Concordia goes way off course, hits a rock and sinks. The captain, Francesco Schettino, is immediately relieved of command and placed in charge of the Italian economy.

The economic news remains bad in …

February

… as American motorists struggle to afford ever-higher gasoline prices, prompting a pledge from President Obama to do “whatever it takes” to bring relief at the pump, “including killing Osama bin Laden again.” Mitt Romney responds that he, more than any other candidate, understands the consumers’ pain over this issue, since he owns “at least 45 cars.”

In Spain and Greece, hundreds of thousands of people take to the streets in protest against government-imposed austerity measures necessitated by the fact that for the past five years pretty much nobody in Spain or Greece has done anything except take to the streets in protest.

Tensions between the United States and Pakistan mount after eyewitnesses in Waziristan claim that an unmanned U.S. Predator drone robbed a convenience store. Meanwhile, in what international observers see as a red flag, Iran places an ad on Craigslist stating, “WE PAY CASH FOR NUCLEAR BOMB MATERIALS.”

In sports, a little-known athlete named Jeremy Lin scores numerous points in a professional basketball game despite having graduated from Harvard. Instantly, he becomes a bigger international star than all of the Kardashians combined. His image appears everywhere — on TV, magazine covers, T-shirts, etc. — and for a brief period, he is the leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination. Then, suddenly — Poof! — he vanishes without a trace. Looking back on it, we’re not 100 percent sure that “Jeremy Lin” ever really existed.

In other sports news, Indianapolis, shedding its “hick town” image, shows that it is truly a world-class city as it hosts Super Bowl XLVI, in which the Giants seal a dramatic 21-17 victory when Ahmad Bradshaw, with 57 seconds left, reaches the end zone by vaulting over a cow that wandered onto the field.

Speaking of dramatic, in …

March

… the endless slog for the Republican presidential nomination reaches “Super Tuesday,” with voters going to the polls in 12 states, including New Hampshire and South Carolina, which have already held primaries but can no longer remember whom they voted for. It is now clear that Romney has won the nomination, but Gingrich vows to continue his campaign, lurching gamely onward despite the tranquilizer darts fired into his neck by his own advisers.

In Florida, the shooting death of Trayvon Martin sets off a passionate, weeks-long national debate among politicians, journalists, pundits, talk-show hosts, activists, celebrities, bloggers, anti-gun groups, pro-gun groups, Al Sharpton and millions of ordinary citizens, not a single one of whom knows what actually happened.

In Europe, the economic crisis continues to worsen as the government of Greece, desperate for revenue, is forced to lease the Parthenon to Hooters. Meanwhile Moody’s Investors Service officially downgrades the credit rating of Spain to “putrid” after an audit reveals that the national treasury consists entirely of Groupons.

In the Middle East, tensions rise between the United States and Pakistan after an unmanned Predator drone destroys the only working toilet in Waziristan.

In sports, the National Football League imposes stiff penalties on the New Orleans Saints following the shocking revelation that some Saints players might have deliberately committed acts of violence against opposing players for monetary gain, which is of course totally contrary to the spirit of professional football. Commissioner Roger Goodell states that the NFL is also investigating disturbing allegations that players sometimes deliberately knock their opponents to the ground via a violent tactic known as “tackling.”

The scandals continue in …

April

… when the U.S. Secret Service acknowledges that agents sent to Colombia to provide security for President Obama at the Summit of the Americas allegedly engaged in some unauthorized summiting, if you catch our drift. The agents are immediately recalled to the United States and reassigned to former President Clinton.

Abroad, a closely watched attempt by North Korea to test a long-range rocket capable of carrying a nuclear warhead ends in an embarrassing failure when, moments before the scheduled launch, the rocket is eaten by North Korean citizens.

Meanwhile in Waziristan, tensions continue to mount when an al-Qaeda safe house is destroyed by an unmanned Predator drone missile that apparently gained access by pretending to deliver a pizza.

In finance, Moody’s downgrades Spain’s credit rating from “putrid” to “rancid” when the Spanish government, attempting to write a check, is unable to produce a valid photo ID.

Meanwhile the Greek parliament, meeting in an emergency session on the worsening economic crisis, votes to give heroin a try.

In domestic business news, Facebook, a company with a business model that nobody really understands, spends $1 billion to buy Instagram, another company with a business model that nobody really understands. Since everybody involved is about 19 years old, Wall Street concludes this must be a good idea.

In golf, Bubba Watsonwins a dramatic Masters tournament in a sudden-death playoff when Louis Oosthuizen, attempting a putt on the par-4 10th hole, suddenly dies, thereby incurring a three-stroke penalty. Elsewhere in sports, NFL Commissioner Goodell vows to investigate reports that some members of the New Orleans Saints have, during games, deliberately called opposing players bad names, which Goodell notes “could cause low self-esteem.”

On a sad note, beloved entertainer Dick Clark passes away, although he will continue to host his popular New Year’s Eve special.

Speaking of sad, in …

May

… Newt Gingrich finally suspends his presidential campaign, despite an emotional plea to keep fighting from his base of supporters, namely Mrs. and Mrs. Elrod Pomfurter of Oklahoma City, who, after months of deliberation, had just invested in a bumper sticker.

In other political news, President Obama, who supported same-sex marriage when he ran for the Illinois Senate in 1996 but opposed it when he ran for the U.S. Senate in 2004, clarifies his evolving position, which is that he once again fully supports same-sex marriage, for now.

Mitt Romney reaffirms his long-standing position on the issue, which is that he is in favor of sex during marriage, but only at night.

Voters in the French presidential election, rejecting the austerity program of incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy, choose, as their new leader, Charlie Sheen. In other European economic crisis news, Greece, seeing a way out of its financial woes, invests all of its remaining money in the initial public offering of Facebook stock, which immediately drops faster than Snooki’s underpants.

In sports, Usain Bolt, running in his final tuneup race before the Olympics, wins the Kentucky Derby.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, having dealt with all of the city’s other concerns — disaster preparation, for example — turns his attention to the lone remaining problem facing New Yorkers: soft drinks. For far too long, these uncontrolled beverages have roamed the city in vicious large-container packs, forcing innocent people to drink them and become obese. Mayor Bloomberg’s plan would prohibit the sale of soft drinks in containers larger than 16 ounces, thereby making it impossible to consume larger quantities, unless of course somebody bought two containers, but the mayor is confident that nobody except him would ever be smart enough to think of that.

Another major health-related story breaks in …

June

… when the U.S. Supreme Court, handing down its much-anticipated ruling on Obamacare, decides by a 5 to 4 vote that the Affordable Care Act is constitutional. Moments after the decision is announced, the justices discover that, because of a clerical error, the document they have spent the past three months reviewing is actually the transmission-repair manual for a 1997 Hyundai Sonata. By a 9 to 0 vote, they decide to say nothing more about this.

In other domestic news, San Francisco, not wishing to be outdone by New York in the field of caring about the public welfare, bans beverage containers altogether, requiring restaurants to serve soft drinks by pouring them directly into their customers’ mouths.

Abroad, England celebrates the 60-year reign of Queen Elizabeth II with a massive Diamond Jubilee blowout bash lasting several days, at the end of which members of the royal family are found wandering around naked as far away as Croatia. Also many of the Crown Jewels are covered with what appears to be Vaseline.

In the worsening European economic crisis, Greece announces a new bailout plan that hinges on persuading Germany to buy what Prime Minister Lucas Papademos describes as “a buttload of Tupperware.”

Tensions in Waziristan mount still higher amid reports that an unmanned Predator drone missile has been roaming the province engaging in unprotected sex.

In sports, major league baseball fans are treated to an unusual spate of no-hitters, all thrown by Usain Bolt. Roger Goodell announces that the NFL is investigating disturbing allegations that some members of the New Orleans Saints do not sing during the national anthem.

Speaking of disturbing, in …

July

… the Mexican presidential election — won by Enrique Peña Nieto of the wonderfully named Institutional Revolutionary Party — is tainted by allegations of voting fraud after independent observers note that the “optical scanners” used to count ballots are in fact Sunbeam toasters. Mexican election officials conduct a recount and conclude that PeñaNieto has indeed won the election fair and square, as well as the election that will take place in 2018.

In Moscow, three members of the Russian all-woman punk-rock group Pussy Riot go on trial for engaging in an anti-government protest. Their cause is adopted by a variety of concerned organizations, including Amnesty International and the U.S. Secret Service.

A tragic fatal drama plays out on the streets of New York City, where police officers fire 183 bullets into a man who, according to witnesses, was about to take a sip from a Big Gulp, which he apparently obtained in New Jersey. The shooting is defended by Mayor Bloomberg, who notes that if the officers had not acted quickly, the man “could have placed himself in very real danger of becoming obese.”

In science news, a group of physicists announces that, after decades of research costing billions of dollars, they believe they have confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson, which according to them is an extremely exciting tiny invisible thing next to which all the other bosons pale by comparison. This is breathlessly reported as major news by journalists who majored in English and whose knowledge of science is derived exclusively from making baking-soda volcanoes in third grade. Back in the lab, the physicists enjoy a hearty scientific laugh, then resume the important work of thinking up names for exciting new invisible things they can announce the discovery of.

In London, the Olympics get under way with a spectacular opening ceremony, climaxing in the dramatic lighting of the Olympic torch by an unmanned Predator drone, which also takes out the entire Pakistani team. The only glitch in the ceremony occurs when a streaker runs onto the track and passes out. He is identified by police as Prince Philip, still in Diamond Jubilee mode.

The partying continues in …

August

… when Hurricane Isaac fails to dampen the mood in Tampa at the wild and crazy spontaneous wacky funfest that is the Republican National Convention. The Republicans — eager to disprove the stereotype that they are the party of old, out-of-touch rich white men — give their highest-visibility prime-time TV spot to: Clint Eastwood. Clint wows the delegates by delivering a series of fascinating sentence fragments to a chair that he either does or does not realize has nobody sitting on it.

In other convention highlights, the Republicans declare their support for the Middle Class and pass a platform calling on the nation to get the hell off their lawn.

Tensions continue to rise in the Middle East when Iran unveils a new surface-to-surface ballistic missile named “Conqueror,” which, according to an Iranian spokesman, will be used for “agriculture.” Elsewhere in the troubled region, an unmanned Predator drone hacks Waziristan’s Twitter account and posts pictures of itself naked.

In the European economic crisis, an increasingly desperate Greece offers to have sex with Germany.

Closer to home, suspicions that the Mexican military may be involved with drug trafficking are heightened when a U.S. surveillance satellite photographs a Mexican army convoy transporting what appears to be a 200-foot doobie.

In space news, NASA scientists cheer as the Curiosity Mars rover, which was launched from Cape Canaveral in November 2011, finally makes a safe landing. The cheers quickly fade, however, when an analysis of images transmitted back by Curiosity indicate that because of a glitch in the navigational software — which coincidentally is the same type used in the soon-to-be-released iPhone 5 — the Rover has actually landed in Waco, Tex.

In sports, Usain Boltdominates the London Olympics, picking up gold medals in three sprint events and winning a world record eight seats in the House of Lords. Great Britain’s team ignites a national celebration of patriotism, winning medals in many events, including rowing, paddling, pedaling, croquet, darts, skiffles, whist, the pudding toss, the 50-meter lawn rake and the men’s umbrella furl.

Speaking of celebrating, in …

September

… the Democrats gather in Charlotte, N.C., for their convention, during which they declare their near-carnal passion for the Middle Class and celebrate the many major achievements of the Obama administration, including the killing of Osama bin Laden, solar energy, the winning of the War on Terror by killing Osama bin Laden, the Chevy Volt, bold presidential leadership in the form of making the difficult decision to order the killing of Osama bin Laden, wind power, and many, many other major things that the administration has achieved, such as killing Osama bin Laden. The Democrats acknowledge that the economy is not totally 100 percent “there” yet, but promise to continue moving steadfastly forward with their relentless attacks on the root cause of economic stagnation and continued high unemployment, namely, George W. Bush.

Abroad, the big story is a deadly 9/11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. It soon becomes apparent that the attack either was or was not a spontaneous protest to a movie that either does or does not actually exist, or possibly it was an organized terrorist attack that either did or did not involve al-Qaeda and either could or could not have been prevented if there had been better intelligence, which maybe there was, or maybe there was not, although if there was, it was not acted on, possibly for political reasons. Or not. But beyond these basic facts, little is clear. The White House issues a strong statement assuring the nation that President Obama was not in any way involved in this, “or anything else that may or may not become known.”

In European economic news, Greece abandons the euro in favor of a new currency, the gyro, which is backed by some kind of grayish meat.

In labor news, Chicago teachers go on strike over controversial proposed contract changes that would allow the school board to terminate teachers who have passed away. Meanwhile, the NFL comes under increasing pressure to settle the referee strike following a game between the San Francisco 49ers and the Tennessee Titans in which the replacement refs call four balks and three traveling violations, and ultimately declare that the winner is the Green Bay Packers. At the end of the month the strike is settled, and the replacement refs move on to their new role as Florida elections officials.

In other sports labor action, the National Hockey League locks out its players, lending credence to rumors that there is still a National Hockey League.

In space news, NASA scientists remotely analyze a soil sample collected by the Curiosity Waco rover and report that it contains “an alarmingly high level of spit.”

Apple releases the much-anticipated iPhone 5, which receives some criticism for its glitchy map software and the fact that it uses a different connector from all the other iPhones and iPhone accessories. Also, it can neither make nor receive telephone calls. Nevertheless it is a big hit with Apple fans, who line up to buy it even as they eagerly anticipate the forthcoming iPhone 5S, which, rumor has it, will require 3-D glasses.

Speaking of criticism, in …

October

… President Obama is widely faulted for his performance in the first presidential debate, during which he appears moody and detached, several times stopping in mid-answer to go outside to smoke a cigarette. The debate moderator, veteran PBS newsman Jim Lehrer, at first seems a bit overwhelmed by the task, but after a few minutes he falls asleep. This leaves the field wide open for a confident and assertive Mitt Romney, who, in a span of 90 minutes, manages to explain his five-point economic-recovery plan a total of 37 times, running up an indoor record presidential-debate score of 185 points. Romney also demonstrates his understanding of the issues facing ordinary Americans by promising to cut federal funding for Big Bird.

Stung by the defeat, Obama closets himself with his advisers, who coach him on debating techniques such as smiling, pretending to listen and forming complete sentences without a teleprompter. Obama is much more aggressive in the next two debates, at one point pulling out his BlackBerry on-camera and ordering a missile strike against Syria.

In the vice presidential debate, Joe Biden gives Paul Ryan a noogie.

With polls showing a very tight race, the final weeks of the campaign are a textbook example of what this great experiment called “American democracy” is all about: two opposing political parties, each with valid positions, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on comically simplistic radio and TV ads designed by consultants to terrify ill-informed half-wits.

But the month’s big story is “superstorm” Sandy, which devastates a large swath of the Northeast despite the courageous efforts of hundreds of TV news reporters standing on the beaches telling people to stay off the beaches. New York City is hit hard, but Mayor Bloomberg responds swiftly, ordering police to arrest anybody suspected of taking advantage of the disaster by consuming soft drinks from containers larger than 16 ounces, which could potentially cause them to become obese.

Fidel Castro, for what is believed to be the 17th time in the past eight years, dies.

In the month’s most inspiring story, Austrian daredevil Felix Baumgartner jumps from the Red Bull Stratos helium balloon 24 miles high and breaks the sound barrier in free fall, reaching a speed of 834 mph and thrilling a worldwide broadcast audience before being shot down by a Predator drone sponsored by Monster, a competing energy drink.

In entertainment news, Walt Disney purchases Lucasfilm and releases a trailer for the forthcoming “Star Wars Episode VII,” in which Darth Vader is a talking penguin.

Speaking of surprises, in …

November

… after an election cycle in which an estimated $6 billion was spent on races for the presidency and Congress, the American voters — who by every account are disgusted with Washington and desperately want change — vote to keep everything pretty much the same. President Obama wins all the key battleground states except Florida, where, after a week of ballot-counting delays caused by denture adhesive in the scanners, election officials finally announce that the state’s 29 electoral votes will be awarded to the Kansas City Chiefs.

With the election finally over and the federal government headed toward a “fiscal cliff” that could plunge the nation back into a recession, Congress, realizing the urgency of the situation, rolls up its sleeves and gets on with the crucial job of remaining gridlocked, while President Obama heads for Burma, a vital U.S. strategic partner located somewhere abroad.

In other election developments, voters in Colorado and Washington approve the legalization of recreational marijuana use, and also order $257 million worth of delivery pizzas.

Speaking of nutrition: A bankruptcy court grants Hostess Brands permission to close its business, posing a serious threat to the nation’s strategic Twinkie supply. Fortunately, an agreement is worked out under which Twinkies will be produced by a new entity.

Unfortunately, that entity is: Iran.

In other disturbing national security news, David Petraeus, director of the Central Intelligence Agency and retired four-star general, is embroiled in scandal for engaging in unauthorized covert action with his official biographer, Paula Broadwell, who, according to the FBI, sent threatening e-mails to Tampa social event planner Jill Kelley concerning both Petraeus and four-star general John Allen, who, while serving as U.S. commander in Afghanistan, found the time to exchange more than 20,000 pages worth of communications with Kelley, which means that either they were e-mailing a Stephen King novel to each other, or they were planning some kind of social event, if you catch our drift. Petraeus resigns and is immediately placed in charge of the U.S. Secret Service. The White House issues a statement assuring the nation that President Obama knew nothing about any of this and was “unaware of the existence of any so-called Central Intelligence Agency.”

In the World Series, a team with a payroll $65 million lower than that of the Yankees is defeated by a team with a payroll $80 million lower than that of the Yankees, leading to the inescapable conclusion that the Yankees need a bigger payroll.

Toward the end of the month, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is dispatched on an urgent mission to try to bring peace to one of the world’s most troubled spots: the Moultrie, Ga., Walmart, where mobs of crazed Black Friday shoppers are viciously assaulting each other over discounted cellphones. Clinton soon realizes the futility of her mission and heads for the Middle East, where people are more reasonable.

Speaking of troubled, in …

December

… there is much fiscal-cliff drama in Washington as Congress and the White House — after months of engaging in cynical posturing and political gamesmanship while putting off hard decisions about a dangerous crisis that everyone knew was coming — finally get serious about working together to come up with a way to appear to take decisive action without actually solving anything.

On a brighter note: Two months after superstorm Sandy ravaged New York, electrical power is finally restored to all areas of the city. It is immediately turned back off by order of Mayor Bloomberg, on the grounds that electricity can be used to watch television, which the mayor notes is a leading cause of obesity. In retaliation, the San Francisco City Council bans molecules, noting that they are “a key ingredient in sugar.”

Speaking of consumer danger: In the largest product recall ever, the Food and Drug Administration orders supermarkets to pull 148 million of the new Iranian-made Twinkies off the shelves after one of them explodes, obliterating most of Cleveland.

In science news, physicists announce that they think they might have discovered a totally new tiny invisible particle, named the “Weems foomple,” which the scientists say could be even more important than the Higgs boson, although to be absolutely certain that it truly exists they say they are going to need, quote, “billions more research dollars,” as well as “a large boat.”

On a more troubling note, NASA scientists announce that their analysis of data transmitted back to Houston by the Curiosity Waco rover shows conclusively that Earth is uninhabitable.

As the year finally draws to close, a festive crowd gathers in Times Square for the traditional New Year’s Eve illuminated ball drop, counting down the seconds and cheering the magical moment when, at the stroke of midnight, the ball is destroyed by an unmanned Predator drone. This seems to be a bad omen. Yet, as 2013 dawns, there is hope that maybe, just maybe, the new year will be better; that this will be the year when we finally break the cycle of perpetual idiocy, the year when, at long last, we find a way to …

WHAP. ++

Correction:

The article incorrectly described baseball’s World Series as ending in November. The San Francisco Giants defeated the Detroit Tigers to win the World Series on Oct. 28.

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