Politics Wednesday

Decisions, Decisions

2014-07-31T11:28:00.000-04:00

I started this blog in 2008, about a year before I retired from federal service, and I didn't really apply myself to it until 2009. It evolved from something I called "My Musings" to "Politics Wednesday." It served as both my political blog and my writing blog until I split the two a couple of years ago.

I've had a lot of fun poking barbs at "Rethugs," "Repugs," "RWNJs," and various other epithets I've used for the modern Republican Party. I've always had a political voice; rather, working for Uncle Sam meant I couldn't be partisan. Once I retired, all the stops were out, and it was so cathartic.

I looked back at the posts I've done over the past four years, and where my voice improved and some of my posts were, I think, HuffPo-worthy, I also recognized not much has changed--not that I thought my little blog would change the political climate or anything. I keep writing about the same things--the war on women (yes, it's real), the disrespect of a sitting president (which never stops), the do-nothing Congress (which continues to do nothing except oppose that sitting president), etc.

There are issues I didn't address, which perhaps I should have--the gun debate in this country (I may have touched on it once) and the conflict between the Occupied Territories and Israel. Why? I didn't want the blog to blow up with negative comments, which I received very few of. My positions on both of these issues are outside the "mainstream," whatever that is. Maybe I should set the record straight now.

I believe in responsible gun ownership, where the person is trained and tested, where you don't need mock assault rifles to hunt, where you don't need high-capacity magazines, where people don't equate masculinity (or femininity) to the number and types of guns they own and the caliber of those weapons;, and where spouse-abusers and mentally disturbed people do not have access to guns; I do believe, strongly, in gun ownership for personal self-defense, and where I've never harbored the thought I need a gun to fight my government, I do want a gun to defend myself against the Tea Bagger, open-carry idiots who hide behind masks and scare children at our border or in the grocery store. How Balkanesque of them.

I believe that the Israeli government--not Jews as a whole--learned a great deal about oppression, segregation, and genocide from Nazi Germany and South Africa under apartheid. And 'nuff said on that.

So, let's wind this up to the purpose of this post, which is a farewell to Politics Wednesday. As I said, little has changed, and even though as a writer I can come up with new and inventive ways to say the same thing, the process of continually writing about issues no one wishes to compromise on is disheartening. And there are plenty of better, stronger voices out there who have wider audiences and get the message across to more people.

For a few weeks, this post will remain; then, I'll shut down the blog. Thanks to everyone who followed the blog, read the blog (some 60,000 of you!), and who commented on or re-blogged or re-Tweeted or shared the posts on Facebook.

And I'm not being quiet about politics--local, state, or national--and you can find that if you follow me on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/maggie.duncan1.

It's been a great ride, I had fun, and, who knows, maybe things will change to a point where my voice begs to be heard again. Hey, call me a cockeyed optimist.

Memorial Day

2014-05-26T11:14:00.000-04:00

Today isn't intended for crass commercialism, even if that's what it has become. Today we need to remember those men and women who were drafted or who volunteered (like my dad) to defend this country. I may not agree with the reasons for going to war, especially recently, but as a citizen I have to acknowledge their sacrifice.

Acknowledge in your thoughts, if not your actions, those in the military who have paid the ultimate price. That is what today is for. Acknowledge as well, those in the military who returned home altered--the wounded, the amputees, those with PTSD.

And if you see a member of the military in uniform, thank them for their service. It's the least you can do for the most they have done.

The More Things Stay the Same

2014-05-21T09:32:00.002-04:00

I believe I've said before I'm of mixed emotions about Hillary Clinton running for president again. Oh, don't get me wrong, I think she'd make an excellent president, and I want to see a woman president before I shuffle off this mortal coil. Not just any woman president; I will, for example, never vote for Half-Gov. Sarah Palin or Wild-Eyed Michelle Bachmann. For me it has to be a woman with progressive views, and I want Elizabeth Warren to percolate a little more. In 2008, I was a Hillary supporter, but when she left the race and endorsed Barack Obama, I shifted loyalties. I've rarely regretted that decision.

My qualms, such as they are, about Hillary is that I remember the crap the rightwing nut-jobs put her through when she was first lady. From vilifying her for not wanting to bake cookies to outright accusing her of murdering White House counsel Vince Foster, there was not a day in her eight-year tenure where some controversy or another arose. Even her own husband contributed to the vitriol heaped on her: Even though he knew he'd dallied with an intern, he sent her out to the TV studios to complain about the "vast rightwing conspiracy." Now, that part was true, but after Bill admitted to his affair, Hillary was the one with egg on her face.

Only in rightwing dreamland can a woman be castigated by so-called pro-family proponents for working to keep her marriage and family intact. When a couple of male, conservative politicos were caught, almost literally with their pants down, and their wives stuck with them, they were lauded for the same action for which they skewered Hillary Clinton.

Now that 2016 is only two years away, the nuttiest rightwing nut-job, Karl Rove, has began to chip away at Hillary Clinton. In 2012 when Hillary, ill with the flu, fainted and struck her head, ending up with a concussion, the rightwing accused her of faking it so she wouldn't have to answer questions about Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi. Rove recently raised the issue that perhaps she has traumatic brain injury and is, therefore, incapable of being president. The shrill call for medical records has begun.

The rightwing loonies have also raised the issue of her age. On election day 2016, she will have just turned sixty-nine years old, the age she will be two and a half months later on Inauguration Day (actually six days short of sixty-nine years and three months old). On Inauguration Day 1981, Ronald Reagan was seventeen days shy of being seventy years old. Reagan has been deified by the rightwing, and in fact when questions about his age rose in the 1980 elections, they bit back with accusations of ageism.

Smells like a double standard to me.

A few years ago when the venerable New York Times hired Jill Abramson as its first woman executive editor, those of us (women) in journalism did a little fist pump. So, when she was fired last week, we were puzzled and dismayed. Now, I don't know Abramson personally, but when bits and pieces about her firing came out, it had a certain ring of familiarity to it, especially the "too pushy" report.

I worked for most of my career in a predominantly male arena--aviation. Women have always been part of aviation history, but they were, and still are, a minority. When I became a manager midway through my career, all my mentors were men--simply because there were few women role models available. Those who were turned out not to be the kind of manager I wanted to be. They operated from position power--just like some men, by the way--and tended to bully employees--just like some men, by the way.

In nearly seventeen years as a manager/supervisor (including managing a newsroom), I found I was criticized for "trying to be like a man" and/or "not being assertive enough." Yet, when I was assertive, I would be knocked down for being too aggressive. When I was meek and mild (a huge acting job for me, to be sure), it was said I didn't have what it took to be a manager. It took me about five years to find a happy medium where my employees could thrive and my own supervisors could be happy. Did I put up with sexist, misogynistic crap? Oh, yeah. In spades. The difference was I pushed back and perhaps educated some people in the process.

Even though I have no clue how Jill Abramson was as a manager, I have experienced having male employees complain (whine) about my management style. (My style, by the way, is treat people the way you want to be treated, and don't ask anyone to do anything you wouldn't do.) When confronted about that, it really came down to their egos had a hard time dealing with being managed by a woman, even a woman whose knowledge and technical background was similar to theirs.

Fortunately, that wasn't every male in my workplace. I had superb male mentors who looked past gender and wanted the best public servant possible, and as the years progressed I not only found great female mentors but I became one as well. I paid it forward.

Now, this isn't to say I didn't make mistakes. I did. I tend to have a soft spot for hard-luck stories, so a few of my employee selections weren't the best. I'm sure Jill Abramson made mistakes; I'm sure Hillary Clinton made mistakes. Here's where the double standard rises again: Even today, when men make mistakes they're lauded for "learning from them," but women are made an example of. A generalization, yes, but I am speaking from experience.

Are we ready for a woman president? The vast majority of us are, but there are the few, the same few who have disrespected President Obama, who will make her life hell--again. Hillary can handle it.

#BringBackOurGirls

2014-05-07T19:19:00.000-04:00

A spate of horrific school shootings aside, attending school in America is fairly routine. We have an incredible public education system (undercut by standardized testing, a rush to charter schools, and homeschooling by non-educators). You leave home, you spend a day in classes, and you go home. You do that, day after day throughout the school year, and not once do armed men barge into your school, set it afire, and kidnap you.

Would that were the case elsewhere.

An Islamic terrorist group did just that in Nigeria. And let's get this straight: There are Christian terrorist groups and Jewish terrorists groups and [insert name of religion here] terrorist groups. Today I'm talking about a group calling itself Boko Haram, which apparently translates to "Western education is against Islam." The problem is, the Quran doesn't say that. (Yes, I've read both the Bible and the Quran cover to cover.) When scribes wrote down the alleged words of Mohammed, there was no west in the minds of those scribes; it hadn't been discovered yet. The opinion that western education is sinful came from an ignorant mullah, or, in this case, a self-styled "holy man" who may have escaped from a mental institution in the 1990s and who now holds sway over a growing group of armed men who want an Islamic state in the north of Nigeria.

The absolute worst thing about this is the fact that these schoolgirls, believed to range in age from nine to fourteen, are only slaves to the members of Boko Haram, and their leader, Abubakar Shekau, bragged on a video about selling them for twelve dollars apiece. Although he has declared girls shouldn't go to school and should be married by nine or ten, his morality stops at the almighty dollar: Some girls may have been sold as brides, but probably the majority have been sold to sex traffickers.

Last year, Boko Haram attacked a boys school and set fire to it--with the boys inside. They died. So, there's the choice you get from Boko Haram if you want an education to get you a way out of poverty: slavery or death. They are both death in different ways, death of the body or death of personal freedom. Neither is acceptable.

Nigeria's government, led by a man with the improbable name of Goodluck Jonathan, seems powerless against the rabid Boko Haram and didn't even acknowledge the kidnapping had occurred for days. The parents knew, and they used social media to alert the rest of the world. In the days before Twitter we might never have learned of this cowardly act in the name of religion.

The U.S. has offered "experts and intelligence" to aid in the search for the girls, but old Goodluck has to make the request. He should say yes. Boko Haram just attacked a village, which was the base of operations for the Nigerian army's search for the kidnapped girls, and killed more than 300 soldiers and villagers. I, personally, hope there is a drone somewhere with Abubakar Shekau's name on it. I'd happily push the button for that Hellfire missile launch.

What do I care about girls thousands of miles away who are caught up in an internecine, religious dispute? I care a lot. I'm the person I am today only because I had the opportunity for an education. No one, anywhere in the world, should be yanked from a schoolroom and sold into slavery because someone's "religion" dictates it. And I look at the anti-education, anti-science, anti-woman rhetoric spewed by our own religious terrorists, and I worry it could happen here in a dystopian future closer and more possible than you want to think.

The other thing that pisses me off? No Islamic country has condemned this act. To me, that means they give it tacit approval--much like our own Supreme Court did this week when it ruled that Christian-only prayers are okay at government gatherings. How do I make that leap? It's easy. I'm educated. I know how to look at facts and reject imposed ignorance.

I'm educated. I'm an educated woman. Exactly what religious terrorists fear.

#BringBackOurGirls

The Right Kind of Attorney General

2014-04-30T10:09:00.000-04:00

I'll open this post by saying I actively worked for the election of Mark Herring as Virginia's attorney general, as in sending monetary support and attending campaign events for him. Having lived in Northern Virginia, I was aware of Mr. Herring as a moderate-to-liberal voice in a heavily red part of NoVA--the Loudoun County area. But, let's face it, I'd already decided any Democrat would be a better AG than the Cooch was. (Ken Cuccinelli was the Virginia attorney general for the past four years. He ran for governor and, thankfully, lost.)

For four years we'd watched as the commonwealth's attorney general imposed his personal religious views on the state. He went after scientists who supported climate change, he strong-armed the state health board into enforcing egregious regulations which no Virginia abortion-provider could meet, and tried to revive anti-sodomy laws long ago struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court. In the meantime, he looked away as the then-governor, Bob McDonnell, accepted tens of thousand of dollars in gifts from a company in which Cuccinelli owned stock.

So, you see, someone who'd just crawled from the ooze would have been a better attorney general than we'd put up with for too long.

I met Herring at a typical campaign trail meet-and-greet where I live now, and he was very personable and sincere. He and I talked about a limit on the gifts state employees, i.e., governors, could receive, and I explained that the federal limit of $20 had worked pretty well for me for thirty plus years. He could have said, oh, good idea, and moved on, but he asked questions, pertinent questions. I knew I was already going to vote for him, but that attention to detail sealed it for me.

His record in his first four months in office has lived up to that faith I placed in him--rare for me and politicians. First, he decided the state would not argue against the challenge to the legislature's ban on same-sex marriage. As a lawyer, he looked the recent precedents and decided Virginia would lose the case anyway, so why expend state funds defending an indefensible law, which would probably be deemed unconstitutional. However, his motivations weren't just mercenary. He sincerely believes in marriage equality and admitted his position had evolved, like most of us, on the issue. In other words, he made his decision based on the rule of law, not on his personal religious beliefs.

(That's a common misconception about us atheists--if you want to believe in a particular religion, we wholeheartedly support your choice in that; just don't impose your beliefs on us or substitute them for secular law.)

Of course, the right-wing nut-jobs in the legislature and around the state immediately called for his impeachment on the grounds that as the commonwealth's chief law enforcement officer, he had to uphold the law, even if he personally disagreed with it. Oh, the irony. These are descendants of the same folks, including government officials, who refused to obey anti-segregation laws in the 1950s. No one got impeached then.

This week Herring decided that the Dreamers (children of undocumented immigrants as defined in the languishing federal Dream Act) in the commonwealth should only have to pay in-state tuition at state schools. This can mean tens of thousands of dollars difference in student debt upon graduation from college. In one sense it's not a bold move because other states have done this, but it's a pretty bold move for a Virginia attorney general, considering the actions the previous four years would have portended had Herring's Republican opponent been elected. (What was his name again?)

Thanks, AG Herring, for restoring a bit of the sheen on the commonwealth's image and for living up to the faith many Virginians put in you.

And he still has three and two-thirds years to go.

It's Been a While

2014-04-26T13:30:00.001-04:00

It's not Wednesday, but after almost three months without a Politics Wednesday post, I thought perhaps a re-vamp of the page's look might generate some enthusiasm on my part to start blogging again.

What do you think? It takes a bit of getting accustomed to, but it's rather cool that you can pick how you want to view the content. And, seriously, I would be interested in the feedback.

It's not like there hasn't been plenty to rant about, but here's the thing: It's the same old crap packaged differently. People still hate President Obama. People still say the most crudely racist things, things at which even my prejudiced grandmother would have shaken a finger. People still want to relegate--no, relegate is the wrong word--keep women as second class citizens. People still think women ask for rape because of the way they dress. Etcetera, ad infinitum. In looking back over my posts from the last couple of years, I'm amazed at the sameness.

Don't think I've left politics behind. I've been busy at the local level working to get out the vote, since this off-year election is critical to the make-up of the Senate. It will mean the difference in finishing President Obama's agenda where education reform, climate change, and immigration reform are concerned or whether he spends the last two years of his term twiddling his thumbs and taking more selfies.

We have a critical city council election here--three seats open and eight people running. In my city, candidates for council don't run by party, but it becomes clear when people open their mouths where they stand. Right now for a small city in the middle of a huge rural area, we pay taxes and fees on a par with what I paid in Northern Virginia, but our city services are excellent. The minute I hear a candidate talking about privatizing so we can ease the burden on the city residents, I know not to vote for him or her.

We had a great candidate seeking the Democratic nomination to run against our village idiot in the U.S. House of Representatives, but he had to bow out because of serious health issues. No one stepped up to replace him, and now that Republican congressman, who promised to serve six terms and is now past ten terms and who became a frakking millionaire while IN congress, has no one to oppose him. Now that, more than anything the President has done, is communistic.

Never wiser words were said than those uttered by the late, great Tip O'Neill: All politics is local. We can see this in state legislatures everywhere. As the country has tilted more to the center left, state legislatures have gone over the cliff into right-wing extremism. Hence, the anti-woman, anti-voter, anti-immigrant, Shi'ite Baptist legislation which has been enacted the past few years around the country. Many people think the only important elections are national ones, but the President doesn't reach down into your day-to-day life and assure the trash gets picked up regularly. Local government does.

Don't sit on your buttocks for any local election. Learn the candidates, see where they stand, ask the pertinent questions, but most importantly when the day comes, go vote.

Imperfect Disharmony

2014-02-05T11:07:00.002-05:00

In 1971 a commercial took America by storm because it spoke of peace in a time of war, harmony in a time of disunity, and it stuck with us so well all you needed to hear was the first few chords to bring the entire ditty to mind. And it was a Coca-Cola commercial, adapted from a song by The New Seekers. The commercial was filmed on an Italian hillside and featured children and young people from all over the world. The opening words are:

I'd like to buy the world a home

And furnish it with love

Grow apple trees and honey bees

And snow white turtle doves.

But it's the first couple of lines of the chorus which resound with us still:

I'd like to teach the world to sing
In perfect harmony
I'd like to buy the world a Coke
And keep it company
That's the real thing.

I remember loving the commercial and the song, and I don't remember any particular negativity associated with it, other than my father muttering that TV stations showed it too much and he'd grown tired of it. It would pop up on occasion over the years, and it would be mimicked and parodied. A few years back a new version aired, which was truly global, filmed in countries around the world and cut together.

Now, I'm not holding Coca-Cola up as some enlightened capitalist. They're in the business of selling Coca-Cola, and they're exploiting our desire to feel good to achieve it. Disclaimer: I drink Diet Coke a couple of times a week.

This past Sunday as part of the Super Bowl commercial blitz, Coca-Cola aired a brand-new commercial. The company must have kept it under total wraps because there was no pre-Super Bowl glimpse of it, unlike Anheuser-Busch's Puppy Love spot. This commercial was shot in America, using Americans to sing Katherine Lee Bates' poem set to music, "America the Beautiful."

Bates, a Massachusetts English professor who died in 1929, was inspired to pen the poem during a summer teaching English in Colorado Springs, CO. Many of the images in the poem/song ("purple mountains majesty," "amber waves of grain," "enameled plains," the latter changed to "fruited plains" because no one knew what enameled meant in this case) came from her train trip from the northeast to Colorado. Bates was a Republican who left the party because she believed in the League of Nations and the Republicans didn't. She also lived with a woman, a fellow professor, for many years, and her letters to that woman are on the soft side of steamy. Some have characterized it as a "Boston Marriage," an arrangement where two unmarried women share a house and nothing more, but Bates is on LGBT History Month's list of 31 LGBT icons.

I think it's safe to say, Ms Bates would not be a Republican today, either.

Her poem-turned-song has often been suggested as a new national anthem, replacing that other poem-turned-song penned by Francis Scott Key, "The Star-Spangled Banner." Proponents of "America the Beautiful" as national anthem say it's easier to sing (it is), that it represents all of America, not just a flag from a specific battle in a specific war (it does), and that it is less martial than "The Star-Spangled Banner" (it is).

I think when Coca-Cola used "America the Beautiful" for its Super Bowl commercial, in addition to its capitalistic ends, it was also celebrating that America is beautiful because of its diversity. You see, in the commercial, native Americans, English speakers, and immigrants sing the song in their native languages. You see Polynesian-Americans at sea, native Americans on land, people in yarmulkes and hijabs, white people, black people, Asian people, gay people, and, of course, as I predicted in a Facebook post right after the commercial ended, the right-wing nut-jobs went, well, nuts.

Tweets from people who can't spell and don't know "America the Beautiful" isn't the National Anthem, overwhelmed Twitter, where they vowed never to drink Coke again because "America the Beautiful" should be sung by Americans in English, conveniently forgetting that those of us who don't speak a native American language are the real outliers here. The racist ranting reached a level which went beyond disturbing to disgusting, so much so, I'm not repeating or linking to them here. You can find them easily enough, if you want to get nauseated.

As a local anchor from an Atlanta, GA, television station--a surprise in and of itself--reminded us all, "The Statue of Liberty doesn't say, 'give me your English-speaking only, Christian-believing, heterosexual masses yearning to be free.'" Well said, and in sharp contrast to the hate spewed because Americans sang "America the Beautiful" in languages other than English. Sometimes, it's embarrassing to be an American.

The commercial, crass commercialism that it is, is America at its most beautiful, and you can see it by clicking here. Katherine Lee Bates, the supporter of a world-wide organization for peace and harmony, would be proud her poem was used in this way.

Much Ado About Executive Orders

2014-01-29T13:50:00.004-05:00

My first adult profession was a history/government teacher, so I'll reach back to that persona for today's post about [insert drum roll or ominous music here] executive orders.

To hear the right-wing nut-jobs, which now consist of just about every Republican member of Congress, President Obama has issued enough executive orders to qualify him as King Obama or, as a Congressman Tweeted last night, "Kommandant in Chef" [sic; he likely meant chief]. Why, the right-wing media is just abuzz with this flaunting of the Constitution and the increase in the powers of the executive branch.

Oh, the horror.

What is an executive order, anyway? It is, over simply put, an order issued by the executive branch to assure that a department of the government does its job. Cabinet secretaries and heads of federal agencies in the executive branch also issue executive orders to offices within their departments or agencies to clarify how to enforce a regulation or even to limit the enforcement of a regulation. I'll give you an example from my former employment at the Federal Aviation Administration.

In the 1980's there were a number of midair collisions in general aviation and many more near-collisions between general aviation aircraft and airline aircraft. Our administrator, under pressure from Congress and the Department of Transportation, issued an executive order that all airspace violations had to result in an automatic sixty-day suspension of the pilot's certificate. Before that, the severity of the enforcement action was left up to the aviation safety inspector investigating and an agency lawyer. If the incursion were inadvertent or because of bad weather, for example, a pilot might only get a warning letter. Now, with a stroke of the pen by our Administrator, that changed. He could do that because our regulations allowed us to take action against a pilot who violated our rules and the punishment could include suspension or even revocation of a pilot certificate.

A presidential executive order is somewhat similar, though its basis of existence is a bit vaguer. The Constitution does not specifically mention executive orders; however, in Article II, Section 1, Clause 1, the Constitution gives the president "executive power," which it then does not define. Also, Article II, Section 3, Clause 5, states "...he [the executive, i.e., the president] shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed...."

Yeah, vague, but history (and the U.S. Archives) shows us that all presidents from George Washington on (except for William Henry Harrison, but that might have been because he died after thirty-two days in office) have issued executive orders. Yet, the government didn't formalize their form and structure until just over sixty years ago. However, all executive orders, whatever their form, have been stored in the U.S. Archives. (Only the EOs from Franklin Roosevelt on are searchable.)

Washington in his eight years as president issued eight executive orders. The least amount, one each, goes to Adams, Madison, and Monroe. Lincoln, in the midst of the Civil War, issued just forty-eight in just over four years.

So, Obama's issued the most, right? Nope, that distinction goes to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who issued a whopping 3,522 executive orders in twelve years. Well, you might say, he was dealing with a financial crisis like we'd never seen before.

Of the presidents since Franklin Roosevelt (cousin Teddy issued 1,081, by the way), here's the roll call:
Eisenhower 484 in eight years, Kennedy 214 in just under three years, Nixon 346 in five-plus years, Ford 169 in just around three years, Carter 320 in four years, Reagan 381 in eight years, George H.W. Bush 166 in four years, Clinton 364 in eight years, and George W. Bush 291 in eight years.

President Obama has issued 167 executive orders in five years, and if he continues at the same rate, at the end of eight years he'll still have issued fewer than Reagan, Clinton, and the second Bush in their two terms. Obama has averaged just over thirty-three per year, so, again if he maintains that pace, he could issue 267 by the time he leaves office. If you look at the two-term presidents since Roosevelt, two Republicans have issued the most executive orders: Eisenhower and the right's beloved demi-god Reagan. Obama has issued the fewest.

Surely, if executive orders have such a sketchy grounding in law, the courts have overturned dozens, perhaps hundreds of them. Nope. Only two: a 1952 order by Truman federalizing the steel mills and a 1995 order by Clinton which forbade the government from contracting with organizations using strikebreakers.

Congress overturned executive orders from 1939 to 1985 by passing legislation which contradicted the executive order, the so-called legislative veto. The Supreme Court overturned that. Presidents can cancel a previous president's executive order by issuing an executive order declaring it no longer in effect.

Executive orders have done some egregious things. Franklin Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066 authorized the removal of people from a military zone in the time of war. This was the basis for removing people of Japanese and German descent, most of them U.S. citizens, to internment camps during World War II. George W. Bush issued an executive order in 2001 restricting public access to all presidential papers. At the time many thought he did it to cover up his father's possible contravention of the law while he was vice president under Reagan (Iran-Contra Affair). Historians and archivists protested, but Bush left it in place for his entire presidency; however, President Obama issued an executive order when he took office rescinding it. Bill Clinton took military action in Kosovo in 1999 by executive order.

If you're an information geek as I am, you could spend hours going through the National Archives online. Just enter "executive orders" in the search box, and you'll find all sorts of interesting, and sometimes trivial, subjects for those executive orders. You might even discover that executive orders aren't as scary as the rightwing makes them out to be.

###

Here are a couple of graphs, courtesy of MSNBC and The Rachel Maddow Show, which perhaps show briefly what I just told you in a lot of words:

Loving the Haters Defeats Their Purpose

2014-01-22T06:00:00.000-05:00

Whenever we took a long, driving vacation when I was a kid, my dad always used the back roads. That made the trip--and the time spent sharing the backseat with my PITA little brother--a lot longer, but we saw some interesting small towns up and down the east coast. If there was a local museum, whether a dedicated building or a side room in a small store, we would stop and go in, likely why I'm so enamored of museums now.

On one such trip we rolled through Athens, GA, turned onto the main drag and found ourselves confronted by a KKK march. This would have been in the mid-1960s, but it wasn't the first time I'd seen Klansmen. During the school desegregation era, they were seen often in my hometown of Culpeper. My father pulled the car over to let them go by. My brother, maybe six or seven at the time, was scared, as was my mother. My father just stared straight ahead. I glared out the window at them. My mother said, "Turn around! Don't look at them! They'll drag you out of the car!" My father locked the doors.

Now, my father had his own prejudices, a source of adolescent conflict between us, but he was a warrior who'd grown to detest violence. He knew where the Klan walked, trouble usually followed.

In five or ten minutes, the parade was over, and we got back on the road. It was the last time I saw, in person, a Klan group march in its full, sheet-wearing regalia, and that was a good thing. I hate the Klan. I hate everything it stands for and represents. It is an unfortunate part of our southern history, but I don't believe in suppressing knowledge of it nor do I believe their free speech should be stifled. Let's put their hate out in the open where reasonable people can see what it is.

Living for thirty-plus years in Northern Virginia, it was easy to forget there'd ever been such a thing as the KKK. Morris Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center had pretty much sued them out of business in the 1970's. People had begun to drop their old prejudices, and people dressed in sheets and shouting racist slogans seemed pretty silly and backward. Every now and then, you'd get a news report of Klan flyers being left in mailboxes--never in NoVA, usually out in the countryside.

The Klan, however, never fully went away.

Monday of this week was Martin Luther King Day, a national holiday long in coming but significant in

its celebration. Most localities follow Dr. King's example and have a service day on the holiday, but here in the Shenandoah Valley a group of idiots calling themselves the Loyal White Knights of the KKK (out of Abingdon, VA) decided to do some "service" of their own. In and around my adopted city of Staunton, they left flyers on Martin Luther King Day. The one to the right they left at the business of a friend of mine. He placed the quote from Dr. King atop the contact information on the flyer and posted this photo on Facebook. He was far kinder than I would have been had this shown up on my doorstep.

For those of you who don't know--and consider yourself lucky you don't--ZOG stands for "Zionist Occupational Government." These cretins aren't just racists; they're anti-Semites, too. Add in homophobes and "our women know their place," and you've got your all-around haters.

That's exactly what they are: haters. They fear those who are different, and they express that fear through hate. My friend chose to respond to this act of hate with love, and, believe me, loving the hater is hard; it goes against our instincts; but it is the only thing which negates their hate.

What bothered me almost as much as the delivery of these flyers was the reaction of some people when my friend posted this on Facebook, i.e., "we need to respect others' opinions," or "it's a contrivance; the Klan doesn't exist around here," or "it's a hoax." I'll try to convince myself that those people just want to think the best about everyone, but I'm far more cynical than that.

I won't be running out to embrace any of these jerks, but if I see something like this or hear that any of my friends have been subjected to it, I'll remember those words of Dr. King's at the bottom of the photo above.

But if I catch one of them on my porch leaving me one of their hateful missives-- Well, I'd rather keep that as a surprise.

If you're still not convinced there are hate groups like the Klan anymore, go to the link on the Southern Poverty Law Center above. They have an interactive map where you can search by state. You'll be shocked.

Serendipity on the Hudson

2014-01-15T11:49:00.000-05:00

On Thursday, January 15, 2009, I was probably still experiencing some post-holiday ennui. That year was going to be a big one for me--in October I would retire after thirty-plus years of serving the people of the United States of America in various capacities in the Federal Aviation Administration. Naturally, I was hoping the year 2009 would be a quiet one where aviation safety was concerned.

That particular Thursday we were in some meeting--we were always in meetings, it seemed--and as the dutiful chief of staff I was, I was making notes on all the IOUs my boss would need to address. A little after 1530, everyone in the room reacted to our phones vibrating. Someone even cracked a joke: "Must be a plane crash." We looked at our messages. It was a plane crash--a USAirways Airbus A320 with 155 "souls on board" (A bit of aviation trivia: that's how crew and passengers have always been referred to, after an accident.) had ditched in the Hudson River after taking off from LaGuardia Airport.

At the time, we didn't know it had been a bird strike. Ever since September 11, 2001, the knee-jerk position for an aviation incident is terrorism. The meeting, whatever it was about, ended, and we geared up our usual routine for responding to accidents.

Water landings are iffy. Every pilot knows he or she is at the controls of a giant brick when all the powerplants cease functioning. Yes, every aircraft has a glide speed, but with both engines out, full of fuel and passengers, and a large transport aircraft to boot, there wasn't much cause for optimism in that room full of aviation safety professionals.

However, horrid regulators that we are, we require the aircraft to be built to specific and stringent standards, including staying afloat for a specified amount of time after ditching (Another bit of aviation trivia: aircraft not designed to land on water ditch in water, never crash.). We require that the pilots be trained to yet another specific and stringent standard and to re-demonstrate their competence on a regular basis. We require them to be in the best of health, which is also checked periodically. We even require them to know how to ditch a multi-ton aircraft in water if that rare occasion should arise. We require that the flight attendants meet training and competency standards to evacuate everyone from an aircraft in distress within a specific timeframe and without thinking about their own safety.

And it all worked. Just as we horrid regulators had in mind when we set those aircraft certification, pilot training, and cabin safety standards and enacted all those regulations the airlines bitch and moan about. It all worked because all 155 of those souls survived, something none of us expected. Landing in water when you're not a seaplane is dicey, but with an aircraft and crew meeting standards, we discovered, as the hours went by, that what started out as a dark afternoon in aviation became a miraculous evening. Because so many boats came to the scene where that multi-ton aircraft floated (and continued to do so for days), it took hours for the FAA to know everyone had survived. In all, there were five injured passengers and crew, three with minor injuries, two with serious injuries.

I've always objected to the term "miracle on the Hudson." I've always attributed it to an experienced captain, a first officer who understood crew resource management, and a cabin crew who took their jobs as aviation professionals seriously, not to mention a stolidly built aircraft that didn't come apart on impact. Despite what you might think, water isn't soft. If you've ever belly-flopped you know it's like smacking onto a concrete slab.

Miracle to me implies some sort of divine intervention, and I'm a rationalist; however, Serendipity on the Hudson just doesn't have the same ring as Miracle on the Hudson.

That day was my proudest day as a regulator, because it all worked, all the things we'd worked hard for over the years--crew, aircraft, aviation environment--all came together synergistically, and 155 souls returned to their families. It was a good day to be an FAA employee, to be a pilot, and, yes, to be a regulator.

Flight 1549 should have been a disaster--perhaps in some alternate universe it was--but it wasn't. Once we knew everyone was safe, it was damned satisfying.

In the interest of full disclosure, one month later, we did have a disaster, one that shouldn't have happened, when Colgan Air Flight 3407 crashed outside Buffalo, NY, killing all fifty souls on board and one on the ground. That's another story.

Where the Buck Didn't Stop

2014-01-09T19:17:00.000-05:00

For two hours today New Jersey Governor Chris Christie (R) declared himself a victim. He felt betrayed, disillusioned--not yet angry--but betrayed. He announced he'd fired the aide who sent the smoking gun email declaring that Fort Lee, NJ, needed to have some traffic problems. Not once did he acknowledge that, as the state's chief executive, he was ultimately responsible.

This all stems from the closing of two access lanes to the George Washington Bridge in New Jersey, allegedly as political punishment for the mayor of Fort Lee not endorsing Chris Christie for reelection. That would have been a long-shot, since Fort Lee's mayor is a Democrat. Emails provided by a Christie political appointee in the New Jersey Port Authority show a top aide to Christie instructed him to make traffic problems for Fort Lee. He obeyed and exchanged further emails with the Christie aide laughing over the traffic problems he had created. School buses were in hours-long back-ups, and emergency vehicles couldn't get through. But these charming individuals explained in their email exchange that it didn't matter because they were children of people who supported Christie's Democratic opponent.

When word got out that the closings might have been politically motivated, Christie's office first lied and said they were doing a traffic study. When it became obvious that wasn't the case, Christie's office adamantly denied it was behind the orders to muck up traffic at a key intersection during morning rush hour. Now, we know that's not the case either, and the orders did come from a Christie aide who has the ear of Christie 24/7.

Do I think Christie directly ordered his aide to shut down those two access lanes? No, I think he was more like Henry II lamenting to his knights, "Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?" Those knights then sped to kill Thomas a Beckett. It may have gone something like this:

"Yo, Brigit, dat guy in Fort Lee, he's troubling me, youse know. He won't endorse me. Whadda we gonna do about it?"

"Don't worry, sir. I'll take care of it."

"Yeah, sure, just, uh, youse know, make sure there's no blow-back."

"Of course, sir."

Except the blow-back is dripping off Christie right now from head to foot. He can be as sad and disillusioned and upset as he wants, but if he'd come out and said, "This happened in my office, on my watch. I fired the persons in question, but ultimately it was my responsibility. The buck stops with me," I might believe he had nothing to do with it. He did none of that, though he did spread the blame around. And he did a great imitation of a victim.

The real victims are school kids stuck on a bus for hours, the people who couldn't get emergency services, the commuters who languished all because Christie didn't get the endorsement of a politician who likely wouldn't have endorsed him anyway.

Politics can be petty, and this is certainly an example of political pettiness at its utmost.

State lawmakers and the federal government are looking into the whole sordid mess, but the biggest consequence may be Christie's presidential ambitions. When President Obama said of the problems with the Affordable Care Act web site that ultimately he was responsible, the Rabid Right basically called him an apologist and a sissy--at the same time they were accusing him of dropping the ball. The President not only held onto the ball, he scored in accepting responsibility, something Christie didn't do, perhaps couldn't do.

People will remember in 2016 that pay-back was SOP for the Christie Administration in New Jersey and that he threw people close to him under the bus without acknowledging the obvious: They did it for him, knowing he'd heartily approve.

Happy New Political Year!

2014-01-01T19:23:00.000-05:00

In the past decade or so, it seems every election has become critical, sometimes off-year elections more so than Presidential election years. This year, 2014, is just such an off-year election, not to be confused with the off-year election we had in Virginia in 2013, of course.

(BTW, we had a Democratic sweep here in Virginia--governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general all Democrats, as are both of our Senators, the first time in a long time. Politicos are calling the Commonwealth officially a Blue State, but our Congressional representatives are still mostly Republicans. So, we have some work to do there.)

For most of 2013, the talking-head pundits went on and on about how the Repubs had so badly flubbed the 2012 election, how some Repubs had made such egregious statements about, well, just about everything, that the Democrats stood a good chance to keep the Senate and take back the House in the 2014 elections. Then, just this morning, many of those same talking-head pundits had declared the Democrats had "blown it" and that it was all the President's fault. Why? Because of the snafus with the Affordable Care Act web site.

Admittedly, I've said very little about the horrible job done by some contractor for the roll-out of that web site. The conspiracy lover in me says the contractor was paid to make it fail, but I've since tempered that--somewhat. I wasn't disappointed in the President for the failure of the web site, but I felt the responsible contracting officer in Health and Human Services screwed the pooch big time.

In 2002, my boss tasked me to create a team to develop standards and specifications for a web site for guidance material for our safety inspector workforce, which would transition them from a shelf-full of paper handbooks to a fully searchable electronic handbook, which they could use on their government-issued laptop or tablet. Our team of safety inspectors came up with a long list of must-haves and a just as long list of nice-to-haves. We worked them into a specifications document, and the major must-haves were things like, advanced search capability, an interactive tutorial, an interactive help feature, 24/7 availability, program maintenance on off hours, etc.

I had a two-year deadline to produce a beta copy, which meant I had a lot of time for testing and fixing the glitches, and there were glitches. I didn't have lawsuits trying to block implementation or a Congress voting dozens of times to repeal my project. Even if I had, we would have still moved forward with development and testing until we were ready to implement. I can't quite fathom why HHS didn't do the same, and it's beyond unbelievable a cabinet department could let a President down that way.

My electronic handbook? Delivered on time with minimal roll-out problems, and it's still in use to this day. Granted, this was a system for less than 10,000 people to use actively every day, but we also had to make it available to the public, which meant 300,000,000 potential users, and it had to be able to support that. It isn't an absolute or direct analogy to the ACA web site, but it serves as an example of how a system like that should have been developed and implemented.

But to say a web site will now cost the Democrats the Senate and increase the majority for the Republicans in the House is just talking-head nonsense. The Democrats have a great issue for the 2014 elections--an increase in the federal minimum wage. Democrats need to push that and to push the fact the Republicans oppose it with the exact same force and energy the Republicans used to lie about the ACA.

I've always said instead of trying to stake out a high ground Republicans have shat on, we need to take a few pages from their playbook. Counter their lies with facts. Trot out the people who have to work two or three or four minimum-wage jobs to support themselves and their families. Remind people just which party thwarted the President's jobs bill, the same party which voted nearly 40 times to repeal the ACA and which can be rightly called the "do nothing" Congress. Bring up the government shut-down and just who orchestrated it.

There is a clear and distinct difference--probably the most clear and the most distinct difference there has ever been--between our two major political parties. For me the choice is easy, but the road to victory is hard. I won't be letting up on the Repubs, and you shouldn't either.

Happy New Political Year!

Happy Holidays!

2013-12-16T09:37:00.002-05:00

Yeah, I'm saying "Happy Holidays" because 1) it covers all the holidays happening this time of year (Remember, big shocker, Christianity isn't the only religion.) and 2) I'm not a Christian. Yes, I have a Yule tree in my house. Yes, I've bought presents for friends and family. All those traditions transcend Christianity, and, hey, seeing the grandkids get excited for the holiday makes my day. Besides, to paraphrase Neil DeGrasse Tyson, the word "holiday" comes from "holy day," so get over it.

That being said, Politics Wednesday will take a break for the rest of the year and start again on January 1, 2014.

Happy Holidays!

Family Feuds

2013-12-04T12:05:00.001-05:00

I'll wager it was an interesting Thanksgiving at the Cheneys this year. Liz Cheney, candidate for the Republican nomination for Senate in Wyoming (to where she made a hasty move after living most of her life in and around DC), recently came out (heh, heh) vocally and vociferously against marriage equality.

Ah, so what? Who cares?

Well, normally, I distance myself as much as possible from anyone named Cheney, except to do some research to plug into a fictional character based on the Dickster (and, oh, have I had fun with that!). The aspect which makes this a curiosity to many is that Liz's sister, Mary Cheney, has been out of the closet for a long time, at least since before the 2000 election wherein the Supreme Court appointed her father as Vice President.

It seems Liz's new-found advocacy against marriage equality stunned Mary's wife, Heather Poe, who did what everyone now does--she posted on Facebook about Liz's hypocrisy. The normally private Ms. Poe has a point, though. If you're truly anti-marriage equality, why would you attend someone's big, fat gay wedding? Liz Cheney attended her sister and Ms. Poe's wedding in DC in June of 2012; however, before that blessed event, Liz had spent time in Mary and Heather's home and enjoyed their hospitality and their children.

Heather Poe can't understand why a person who always seemed so accepting of her relationship with her sister now, suddenly, makes a big, vocal stand against marriage equality.

Well, I can. Some people will do or say anything to get elected, but the apple doesn't fall far from the tree where Liz Cheney is concerned. After all, her father did or said anything (i.e., lied) to make certain we spent billions on an elective war in Iraq, a war, from which, by the way, his blind trust stood to benefit. But I digress.

Liz took a look at very conservative Wyoming and apparently decided her sister and her sister's wife were now liabilities and families ties could be sacrificed to winning an election. Now, I suppose I could say the one thing Dick Cheney and I agree about is that it's time for marriage equality, but I think the senior Cheney was politically expedient in his "support" of marriage equality as well. Yeah, I'm sure gay people voted for him and Bush in droves because he allegedly supported his daughter's right to marry her partner. (And if you believe that...)

That, in itself, doesn't disqualify Liz Cheney as a candidate for office. Show me the rare politician who doesn't say what he or she thinks the particular audience wants to hear (don't forget Romney's 47% moment), and I'll show you a rare bird indeed. To me, what disqualifies her is her lack of compassion for her own sister for the sake of political expediency and that she thinks the Wyoming electorate is too stupid to figure her out.

Liz Cheney is an ambitious person (nothing wrong with that) who wants to win political office at any cost (big something wrong with that). She will throw her own sister under the bus to achieve her goal. What does that say about how she'll govern as a Senator? All we have to do is look at a new, self-serving crop of Tea Bagger senators like Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, or Marco Rubio to foresee just how Liz Cheney would represent Wyoming. Right, not a pretty thought at all.

Every family has its differences, exacerbated by forced interaction during the holidays, but the Cheneys have their family feud exposed to the public. But, hey, if it shows up a hypocrite for what she is, then, keep posting, Heather Poe. Don't let Tricky Liz get away with it.

Happy Thanksgiving and Channukah!

2013-11-27T21:17:00.001-05:00

Happy Thanksgiving to those of you who celebrate a meal, which probably never took place, and several years after which the Pilgrims slaughtered the native people who helped them survive their first winter. But, hey, who am I to judge. Happy Channukah as well.

Politics Wednesday will be back next week, after the intrepid blogger emerges from a triptofan coma.

Drive safely.

A Sharp, Distinct Clarity

2013-11-22T06:00:00.000-05:00

When I was, albeit briefly, a teacher, the unspoken rule was the class you got after recess was nuts. One particular Friday afternoon when I was a student, not a teacher yet, that was very true. Add in the fact we had math right after recess, and we were pretty much bonkers. However, Mrs. Kelly, who was so proud of her Irish heritage she wore green every day, would brook no nonsense. Within seconds of entering the room, she always had us settled down, ready to do math.

But not that day. First, she was late coming in, and the noise in the room rose to a decibel level that had to reach the nearby houses. When she did come in, she was crying. She sat at her desk and said nothing, just dabbed at her eyes with the handkerchief she always wore tucked in her belt. She was pale beneath her make-up, and we knew something was very wrong. One by one, without being bidden, we quieted down until we all sat, facing forward, hands folded in laps. Then, we could hear Mrs. Kelly's soft sobbing.

Static crackled from the intercom, and Mrs. Ross, the principal, of whom we all lived in fear, said, "Attention, students." Her voice quavered, wasn't the brisk, no-nonsense bark we normally heard. "This afternoon in Dallas, Texas, President Kennedy has been shot and killed." She paused, and for a moment there was no reaction. Then, a half-dozen or so students shouted, "Yay!" and started applauding.

Mrs. Kelly was on her feet then. "Stop it! Be quiet!" she shouted. She was stern, but she had never raised her voice, ever. Silence took over the classroom again, and Mrs. Ross finished her announcement about the fact that school had been canceled and that we should go get in line for our buses.

I hoped the cheering had been for the fact those kids had figured out we'd be let out of school, but this was a rural, conservative part of Virginia. I suspected the cheering had been in response to horrible things they'd heard their parents say, that President Kennedy was a traitor and a nigger-lover. Even in my own house, where, after the election of 1960, the first one I remember, we'd gone from my father's near-worship of Kennedy because he was a World War II vet like him to irrational dislike because of Kennedy's policies and actions having to do with racial integration.

My father was still in the Army then, and Kennedy was still his commander in chief. Dad would express dislike for the policy, but he also understood his duty and would fulfill it without question. He had already said that if Kennedy were reelected in 1964, we wouldn't be going to the Inauguration as we had in 1961, that frigid, snow-covered day, where his uniform got us close to the Capitol and he put me on his shoulders so I could see and hear history.

The school bus driver, a man who seemed impossibly old to us then but who was probably only in his fifties, cried the whole way from school to the last stop, which happened to be mine. My mother, who had a fondness for Jackie Kennedy's pillbox hats and big sunglasses (my dad would teasingly call her Jackie when she wore those sunglasses), waited for me at the top of the hill, something she never did. I could tell she'd been crying too. In silence, she walked me down the hill to our house, and she held my hand, something she also never did.

When we turned the television on, she was a little miffed her "stories" weren't on, but the grousing lasted only seconds. In those days, we got four channels, all out of Washington, DC--NBC, ABC, CBS, and WTTG. I sat on the floor before the television and went from channel to channel. My father managed to call us from where he was stationed--Indiantown Gap, PA--to tell us he was on "alert," that no one was sure what this meant. I remember my mother asking if we were at war, and he answered he didn't know. He did tell us he might get shipped to Europe, which is where he'd been deployed during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

I remember the phone ringing a lot. I suppose because my father was in the military people thought my mother might know more of what was going on. My uncle brought my grandmother to stay with us because she didn't want to be alone. My grandmother was Irish, though not a Catholic, but a picture of an Irish-American president adorned a wall in her apartment. My cousin, I discovered later, would clip every newspaper article she could find about the assassination--a new word we'd all learned--and paste them into scrapbooks. She filled three of them on the assassination, the lying in state, and the funeral.

I remember feeling sad, more sad than I'd ever felt in my life. I remember watching all the news I could, often sneaking to watch more television after my mother fell asleep. It was likely the beginning of my being a news junkie, which I am to this day. I remember watching as the airplane came back to DC with now President Johnson and the President's casket. I remember seeing Mrs. Kennedy and remarking that her dress was dirty. "That's blood," my grandmother said. "That's the President's blood." Television back then was black and white, and it wasn't until I used my allowance money to buy copies of Look and Life magazines that I saw that beautiful pink suit stained with red blood.

I remember feeling so sorry for Caroline and John-John. I still had my daddy even though he was away most of the time, but they would never see theirs again. I couldn't imagine what that would be like, and I cried myself to sleep for days, scared that someone would "assassinate" my father. I remember watching live television when Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald, again the black and white muting the bloodiness of it.

In subsequent years I read everything about President Kennedy, good and bad. I even read the entirety of the Warren Commission Report, asking my father questions about guns and rifles. At first he was skeptical one man had done this, but then he took me to a firing range and managed to fire three rounds from an old rifle similar to the Carcano (yes, I even knew the name by then) in under two seconds and convinced himself otherwise.

A year after President Kennedy's death, I decided I was going to be a Catholic (I'd been going to both a Catholic church and a Baptist church before the assassination), partly to piss my Protestant mother off but mostly because the President had been Catholic. I took more of an interest in politics, to the point where on June 5, 1968, I was supposed to leave with a family friend to go to Chicago and volunteer for the Robert Kennedy presidential campaign.

There are a lot of things that happened fifty years ago I can't tell you because I don't remember, but I remember November 22, 1963, and the next few days after that, with a sharp, distinct clarity, as if it were yesterday or this morning. That senseless act of narcissism robbed people of my generation, the baby-boomers, of hope and optimism. It colored everything that happened afterwards--Vietnam, subsequent assassinations, terrorism foreign and domestic. Anything could happen and we could handle it because we lived through those few days at the end of November 1963. Anything could and did happen, and we were jaded about it because of those few days at the end of November 1963. We never looked at this country or the world the same way again, and each of us left a little of ourselves behind in Arlington Cemetery when the eternal flame was lit.

For me, I will always remember that voice, resounding, resonating, sure, and certain, urging us ever forward to the future, the voice which gave a nine year old the course for the rest of her life: "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country."

Politics Wednesday Takes A Break

2013-11-06T19:29:00.001-05:00

Politics Wednesday will be on hiatus for the month of November while its intrepid blogger participates in National Novel Writing Month. The column will resume on December 4.

Not Shocked and Un-awed

2013-10-30T09:57:00.001-04:00

In the alternate universe of "we must criticize President Obama for every breath he takes" the latest "issue" is the disclosure we have, gasp, spied on world leaders. From the reaction of some of those world leaders, you'd think the United States was the only country who ever spied on anyone, anywhere, anyhow. You notice who's staying quiet about it? Oh, Russia, China, for example.

Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, is apparently the most outraged, and, in a way, I can understand some of her concern. Just say the word "Stasi" to a former East German and watch him or her cringe. They certainly know enough about an intelligence-gathering service gone mad. After the Berlin Wall fell and the Stasi opened its files, its scope and breadth of operation within Germany was staggering. Just about every other person had sold information to the Stasi on a family member or a neighbor, sometimes for the reward of a better apartment or job.

A little minor disclaimer here: I'm not a member of any intelligence organization, but I have a lot of fun writing stories about espionage, particularly the balance of what some may see as unethical behavior done for the greater good.

But, let's get a grip here. As many intelligence experts have said in the past few days, "everybody spies on everybody else." Or, a bit more snidely, as James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, and John Miller, former Deputy Director of National Intelligence and now CBS correspondent, have both said, quoting Capt. Renault from the movie Casablanca, "I'm shocked--shocked--to find that gambling is going on in here."

The fact of the matter is that intelligence organizations of allied countries quite often exchange information--I'll cue you in on a possible attack in your county, and at some point you'll cue me in on one in mine. However, because of the NSA's association with this issue, it has now become part of the evil-Spock universe I mentioned above.

Espionage has been around since at least 2400 BC when Moses ordered Joshua to recon the city of Canaan. Joshua sent two spies into Jericho to determine its weak points, but, and I suspect because this type of covert recon was new, the spies are found out and have to flee, conveniently to a brothel. A prostitute there, Rahab the Harlot, hides them and tells the Canaanite soldiers "they went thataway." When Joshua's forces invade the city, Rahab, by prearrangement, hangs a scarlet ribbon from her window so she and her family will be spared. It could almost be a le Carre novel--or, because a woman of questionable character is involved, a James Bond romp.

George Washington used spies in the Revolutionary War, and probably after. Some believe Jefferson sent Lewis and Clarke off with intelligence gathering as an additional duty. The history of Russian spying goes back to at least Ivan the Terrible. Espionage has a long history in the world, and it isn't likely to end because Angela Merkel is pissed her personal cell phone may have been listened to.

For those of you who think no one spies on us, think again. Every major world player has a governmental or quasi-governmental entity to spy on its enemies and its allies. The US has agreements with some of its allies not to spy on them, but as I mentioned above there are ways around that. Do you honestly think if a NATO member has information from Great Britain crucial to the internal security of the US, that NATO member isn't going to turn it over, especially when that NATO member wants to assure a continuous stream of intelligence from the US? Of course they will, any US-Britain non-spying pact notwithstanding. The US can say, "I didn't spy on Great Britain," because in a time-honored espionage gambit, they had someone else do it. Spying happens. Move along to the next false issue.

My concerns have always been when a country turns its intelligence-gathering might onto its own citizens. We thought we'd taken care of that when Congress in the 1970's limited the CIA's ability to operate inside the US. The result was the FBI beefed up its intelligence-gathering apparatus, and it has no such limitations. And we see now even large, urban police departments spy on the people they're supposed to protect and serve. Then, after 9/11 we got the Patriot Act which gave the NSA a license to eavesdrop on anyone at anytime for almost anything. Whose administration asked Congress for that and had the Congress falling all over each other to agree to it? Right, the Bush Administration. And how many times has the Congress had the opportunity to change that and have they done it? Several and no.

So, methinks Merkel doth protest too much because I'm sure looking over the personnel in the Germany Embassy in DC would uncover a spy or two or several. The same with the French, and, let's face it, the British. Espionage has long been a tool of national security, ours and everyone else's, and it's not going anywhere. I don't really want to imagine a world without intelligence-gathering especially in the face of how terrorism has evolved in the 21st century.

But, I forget. It's all Obama's fault. That's what at the bottom of this, and it doesn't take a spy to find that out.

Beyond the Pale

2013-10-23T10:39:00.000-04:00

Update: Although Sen. Dick Durbin stands by his statement, the White House has issued a report indicating there was a "miscommunication" about whether someone actually said what I describe below. Click here to see a news article about the White House statement. However, there have been plenty of examples of egregious and disrespectful behavior by Republicans, that I stand by the sentiment I expressed in yesterday's blog post (below).

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During my career as a regulator, I engaged in some pretty adversarial negotiations--airmen who didn't want to lose their certificates, airlines who didn't want to be fined for a safety infraction, flight attendants who didn't understand why having an updated manual was necessary for the flight to leave the gate. Sometimes, voices were raised, people left rooms in a huff, but we always got back together because regardless of which side we were on, we were all safety professionals. We understood what the regulations were for--the safe movement of people and cargo from point A to point B in an environment allowing for business growth. Not once did I have an adversary tell me they couldn't negotiate because he or she couldn't stand to look at me. You leave that behind in junior high, right?

Well, some don't. Over the weekend, Sen. Dick Durbin (D.-IL) posted on his Facebook page that, during a negotiation over the government shutdown/debt ceiling between the President and Republicans from the House of Representatives, a Republican "House leader" told the President, "I cannot even stand to look at you."

To me, who was no where near the event and really has no dog in the fight, that felt as if someone pole-axed me. You have a duly elected Congress person (Durbin wouldn't identify who it was) looking at the President of the United States and telling him he can't stand to do that.

Oh, you say, they were just at a heated moment in the discussion, and people sometimes say things they regret. But Durbin doesn't indicate that any apology or "excuse me" was offered nor, apparently, was any censure from his colleagues issued. (I'll concede that perhaps on the drive back to Capitol Hill maybe there was a figurative knuckle-rapping, but I doubt that happened.) For me, this proves what I've said all along--rightwing nut jobs cannot abide the fact a black man is in the White House as something more than a butler. Much like the Congressman from the Old South who shouted "You lie!" at this President during a State of the Union address, there is a undercurrent among some that this President deserves no respect because he is black. Do I have empirical proof of that? No, all I have is a gut feeling, but my intuition is rarely wrong; and, well, I grew up in the South.

I've always respected the institution of the Presidency. In my thirty-plus years as a public servant, I served under six Presidents, three Democrats and three Republicans, which sounds pretty even, but it isn't really. I came in the last year of President Carter's term, saw all eight years of Clinton's term, and had nine months of Obama's first term, so around ten years of Democratic Presidents compared to twenty years of Republicans (Reagan's eight and the Bushes' twelve). Even though it was hard, I kept my political feelings about a particular president out of the office, and I certainly only said disparaging things about a President in private, among friends. I did my work, the work of the people, knowing that Presidents change and, with them, the policies you have to uphold. Anyone who knows me knows I abhorred George W. Bush and everything he stood for and did, but I made it through eight years of him without publicly humiliating the man. Because the office deserves the respect, even if the man doesn't.

For some reason people who have continued to be bigots, who used to whisper the n-word or keep it within the family, now believe that having a black President means it's all right to express their bias openly. Frankly, I don't want to stop them from doing that. Not only is it their first amendment right, but I like it when idiots show themselves to be just that. Rather, they are the same people who, if Nancy Pelosi had said to President George W. Bush, "I cannot stand to look at you," would have demanded she be impeached, tried for treason, hung from the Capitol Dome, etc. The silence is, if not deafening, then discouraging.

As disturbing as the knowledge is, I'm glad Durbin posted what happened. I wish he'd have named names. Better yet, the rude prick who said that to the President should own up to it, but he won't because, well, he's a yellow-bellied coward. The difference between his insult and mine? I own mine, I acknowledge it, and I won't hide it behind propriety.

All for Nothing

2013-10-16T20:45:00.000-04:00

I waited until later in the day to post because it appears we have a deal to fund the government (for a few weeks) and to not default on our debt (also for a few weeks). The Rethugs and Tea Baggers are crying in their tea--or perhaps bourbon in the Speaker's case--and speaking platitudes about having fought the good fight. Trust me, nothing about this hissy fit was good.

Not only did the Republicans not get the Affordable Care Act defunded during the debacle of the past two weeks, they may have also seriously damaged their brand. Okay, so they got income verification for people whose health care gets subsidized by the government through the ACA. Big whoop.

This wasn't about the ACA, which isn't the government controlled health care they proclaimed; that only sounds good to their "base," those slavering, Confederate-flag waving morons who actually thought they could make a citizen's arrest of the President this past weekend. Yes, a so-called man of god admonished the President to "put the Quran down, get up off his knees, and come out with his hands up." I wonder if that Tea Bagger "patriot" knows about Thomas Jefferson's Quran? (You see, the Founding Fathers are big heroes to the Tea Baggers, who claim to know their innermost thoughts even though they've all been dead for nearly 200 years, but the truth is they know zilch about the FFs or the Constitution.)

I've seen plenty of demonstrations, having worked for many years in Washington, DC, but the sight of Confederate flags with the White House as a back-drop sickened me--and I've seen the worst of the "pro-lifers" signs. The symbolism was obvious: there's a black man in the White House, and this is what the Tea Baggers think of that. And lest you think I exaggerate, the self-proclaimed "Joe the Plumber" of 2008 election infamy flat-out said what we need is a white, Republican President again.

I caught a little (very little) flak last week for saying that today's Tea Baggers secretly admired Timothy McVeigh's terrorism back in 1995, but take a look at the people who waved those seditious flags over the weekend. They stood beneath the flag of a group of people who wanted to tear down the government, the union, the country, but they want you to think they're saving it. They'll "save" it all right, only for the people who think, look, and believe as they do. Everyone else is expendable in their dystopia.

The Tea Baggers in Congress staged this attempted coup for the sole reason that our President is a black man. That is such an anathema to them that they'd trample this country's laws, principles, and history to make his life miserable. They toss the word "impeachment" around as if it were something we do every day, as if it were a viable solution to their invented problem.

No, this was about bullying the duly elected President of the United States, who, thankfully, stood firm and refused to give ground. And, no, news media, he wasn't being partisan, he doesn't share the blame, when he refused to negotiate with our home-grown terrorists. This was about an attempted coup, which they tried back in 1998 when they impeached Bill Clinton for getting an oval office blow job, as if that's the first time that ever happened there.

What they didn't learn from that experience and from the previous government shut-down is that Americans--real Americans, not the pseudo-patriots who carry the Confederate battle flag or the Gadsden flag--are pretty protective of our democracy. We don't like it when our supposed elected officials, who take an oath to "preserve, protect, and defend" the Constitution, decide to ignore it for their own whim.

If anything good comes of this, it'll be a repudiation of the former "Grand Old Party," which should go ahead and rename itself since it is no longer the party of Lincoln or Teddy Roosevelt. Even the B movie actor they've deified wouldn't fit in among the Tea Baggers now. Reagan had a streak of compassion, which popped up now and then, but that would only earn him derision from our in-bred objectivists. After all, Reagan got Social Security, earned a pension from a union (gasp), and had been the president of a decidedly left-wing union.

I hope this is truly the end of the Tea Baggers. Oh, I'm certain they'll front a lot of candidates in the 2014 election. Many of those will probably became the candidates for those elections. However, Americans have seen them in action now, have first-hand experience with their bigotry and ignorance, and Americans also have very long memories, especially when you've pissed us off.

The Anarchists Among Us

2013-10-09T13:41:00.002-04:00

I know several people who have taken a break from Facebook since the government shutdown because that action by a small group of seditious Tea Party goons seems to have brought out the worst in even moderate people. There has been defriending and blocking--I've done the latter but not the former--and innocuous posts get overtaken by trolls. And I thought it was bad during election season.

What has amazed me is that people, who before were willing to engage in honest conversation about issues, have suddenly become strident and, even worse, resistant to the truth. The meme which pisses me off the most is the one declaring the Republicans and the Democrats equally responsible for the shutdown.

The reality is this government shutdown has been well-planned and well-funded by the likes of the Koch Brothers, and, no, Virginia, they are not Democrats. Try Oligarchs or Autocrats. Yet, they're clever. They've convinced some Americans--most but not all poor and undereducated--that the Tea Party is out for them. In truth, the Kochs could care less about America or Americans; it's the money lining their pockets they're most interested in; that and the fact they could make more money without those pesky government safety and security regulations in place.

No, the Tea Bagger Republicans in the House and the Senate--and Republicans who are scared crapless to face a Tea Bagger candidate in a primary--brought this on the country. Not the Democrats, not the President. The Tea Baggers are holding the country hostage in a manner that borders on terrorism, and I agree with the President. We don't negotiate with terrorists. Put down the gun of defunding the Affordable Care Act. Defuse the bomb of not raising the debt ceiling. Then, we'll talk.

Twenty years ago, the people who comprise the Tea Party lurked in private Internet chat rooms where they secretly admired what Timothy McVeigh did to a government building and government employees but were savvy enough to understand you just didn't talk about such things openly. Then, the country elected, gasp, a black guy, twice, and their crazy came into the light of day, giving us birtherism and a dangerous penchant for anarchy.

In the Tea Baggers warped world view, no government is a good thing. Like Ayn Rand proposed, we all just take care of ourselves and screw our neighbors--the complete and total opposite philosophy to the Christ they claim to worship.

I have said and will continue to say, the Tea Party, in whatever iteration, is the single most significant domestic threat to our democracy. Now, I don't mind that the Constitution allows them to spout their hateful garbage. I want people to hear and understand just what they are--scoundrels who wrap themselves in the flag of a country whose history and founding they don't understand. However, they have shown they have moved beyond mere ignorance toward anarchy. The scary part? They'd likely be the ones to survive anarchy because they're the paranoids who have amassed all the guns and ammo.

Many of my liberal friends--I'm proud to be a liberal, by the way--toss out things like "treason" and "sedition." I do consider the people in Congress who have perpetrated this shutdown to be unpatriotic, but traitors? Well, I'm getting closer to considering them that. Sedition has had a mixed and mostly negative history in this country. Sedition laws have been enacted and then abused to disallow the natural voices of dissent a democracy needs. Dissent, by the way, simply means a different opinion; however, in the dystopia desired by so many Tea Baggers, only one opinion will be allowed--theirs.

There is talk of trying Congressmen and Senators for treason or sedition, but we have a much more effective and peaceful tool to get rid of their strident voices of irrationality--the ballot box. For that to work, the electorate needs to understand that surrounding yourself with the trappings of patriotism doesn't make you a patriot, that mouthing platitudes about small government doesn't make you an expert on governing, that using code words like "welfare queen" or "takers" doesn't mask your bigotry.

In 2014, we can make a difference. We can send these seditious rats back to their compounds and sewers. We can vote them out of office and then show them what a real patriot can do in a democratic republic.

#FireTheGOP

2013-10-02T09:43:00.001-04:00

In 1995 Newt Gingrich, then the Speaker of the House of Representatives, was the Grinch Who Stole Christmas. And it all started with a plane ride.

President Bill Clinton went to the funeral of Itzak Rabin, who had been assassinated on November 5, 1995. Clinton included a contingent of congresspersons, including Gingrich, on the flight to and from Israel. When Air Force One arrived back at Andrews Air Force Base, Gingrich assumed he'd exit the aircraft with Clinton from the front air stairs. Typically, that's where the media sets up to capture any tidbits from a President returning from a trip. I'm sure Gingrich thought lumbering down the stairs at Clinton's side would make him look Presidential, but Clinton adhered to protocol, which has the President and his family or the President and his closest advisors exit the front of the aircraft. Gingrich and the other congresspersons, the media, the President's staff, i.e., anyone who isn't the President, exited from the rear air stairs.

Gingrich was furious and because he couldn't physically attack the President--the Secret Service frowns on that--he decided to shut down the government at the earliest opportunity. He believed this act, couched in the rubric of a balanced-budget law, would send Clinton into a downward spiral and vault Gingrich into the position of the Republican frontrunner for the upcoming Presidential election in 1996.

You see, 2012 wasn't the first time Gingrich overestimated his own electability.

There was a brief, five-day shutdown in November, during which Clinton agreed to a balanced budget law. (To this day, Republicans cite that as the fact they "won.") But that didn't satisfy Gingrich's bruised ego. When talks about how to implement the balanced budget requirement broke down at the time another continuing resolution was about to expire, Gingrich pushed the shutdown. This one lasted twenty-one days, from December 15, 1995, to January 6, 1996.

I was a relatively newly minted branch manager in an administration in the Federal government then. I had a half-dozen employees ranging from a GS-2 (low end of the pay scale) to a GS-12 (approaching the upper end of the pay scale). It turns out we missed no pay because Uncle Sam pays you not for the pay period preceding the pay check but for the pay period before that. The dispute was resolved, and we all got back to work before we suffered a pay loss--Congress voted to pay us for the time it gave us off.

However, I'll never forget the look on that GS-2 secretary's face when she came into my office and asked me to explain what it all meant, and I had to tell her about the possibility that if the shutdown went on for weeks, she wouldn't be paid.

"How am I going to feed my kids?" she asked, and I had to struggle to keep my own emotions in check. I had a cushion, after all. I had a savings account, I had some family money, and I could manage for several weeks. Not everyone had that luxury.

It's generally accepted that Gingrich's actions and attitude, his "temper tantrum" as some called it, was the end of the highly touted "Republican Revolution" of 1994, when the Republicans won a majority in the House for the first time in forty or so years. Gingrich was hailed as a genius, a rising star, the savior of the party (Any of this sound familiar?), and then two years later it all fell apart because he didn't get to exit an aircraft through the same door as the President.

And the American people didn't forget. In 1996 Clinton was re-elected, and, despite the manufactured Monica Lewinsky crisis in 1998, he never went down in the polls again. Amid an ethics scandal, Gingrich resigned from Congress in 1999. (Just an aside here, while he orchestrated the impeachment trial in the House, Gingrich was also having an affair with the woman who is now his third wife. When his then second wife pointed this out, Gingrich told her what he did didn't matter so long as people believed what he said.)

There are many Republicans in Congress today who remember that downfall quite well, but not well enough to resist Tea Party idiocy. True to the previous experience, the American people won't forget, and the Tea Party "revolution" will go the way of Gingrich's ego--off a cliff and into a cesspit, where it belongs.

Remember this hashtag in 2014: #FireTheGOP . We'll be a better country for it.

Defying a Ban

2013-09-25T08:00:00.000-04:00

Written work has probably been banned since the beginning of written communication. I'm sure some Cro-Magnon shaman who disagreed with the way a hunt was depicted on a cave wall forbad his or her tribe to view it. And, as it's always been, forbidding someone from seeing something usually results in an overwhelming desire to see the forbidden thing.

Religion and political power always seem to raise their heads in these disputes. You can't read this book because it goes against the Bible. Only if you've read the Old Testament do you appreciate that irony. People who look to the Bible as their moral guide in deciding which books you should and shouldn't read conveniently overlook the fact that particular book is rife with rape, murder, infanticide, lust, political corruption, and incest among other distasteful things, which go largely unpunished. Governments have banned works--Stalin's successors didn't like the way Boris Pasternak portrayed the Soviet system and banned Doctor Zhivago; the Nazis held massive book-burnings designed to expunge the Reich of anything with a Jewish or Communist taint; Salman Rushdie had a fatwa issued against him by Islamic fundamentalists for The Satanic Verses.

Of course, Pasternak received a Nobel (for his poetry) two months after Doctor Zhivago was published outside the Soviet Union. The Nazis met their inevitable end in the spring of 1945. Rushdie, after being guarded in undisclosed locations for years, has a long (a very long) list of awards, including the Booker. All, as well as countless other examples, are testaments to the power of the written word and the fact people don't like being told what they can and can't read.

And lest you think this is a thing of the past or only occurs in regressive dictatorships, think again. A county in North Carolina recently banned 1952's The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. Considered one of the best books about racial identity and prejudice, The Invisible Man won the National Book Award in 1953 and has been a mainstay on high school reading lists since. Just not in a particular county in North Carolina, where a school board member said, "I didn't find any literary value." (Translation: Our precious white boys and girls do not need to read about the problems with racial identity; it might make them tolerant.) After that county's decision, sales of The Invisible Man shot up, for which, I'm sure, the Ellison estate is truly grateful.

When we write--at least when I do--we don't think about whether or not our work will be banned by some religious prig or overbearing politician. Self-censoring is just as bad as government or church censorship. It inhibits our craft. Do my fingers hesitate over the f-word when I'm writing? No, because if I drop the f-bomb, it's because it's central to the character using it. We have to write the story that's in us. Anything we do to alter that means it's not the right story and that we're not truly writers.

This last week of September is the American Library Association's Banned Books Week. Libraries around the country highlight books, which have been banned for various reasons, putting them on display and encouraging people to check them out. Librarians are quite often at the forefront of complaints about books, and it's the courageous ones who stand up to the book-burners, whether literal or figurative. (Click here for a list of ALA's most challenged books from 2000 - 2009. Some won't surprise you; others will shock you.)

If you don't want your child to read the Harry Potter series or R. L. Stine or Toni Morrison or Ralph Ellison, then don't buy those books. Tell your child they're not to be read. (Understand, though, that forbidding something makes it ever so much more desirable.) You'll end up with an intellectually stunted child who won't be able to handle the real world, but that's your choice.

However, don't tell me I can't read them or that my child can't read them. Is that limiting your First Amendment rights? No, because you're free to opine all you want about what you find objectionable about a particular book, but you can't force your narrow-minded opinion on others whose minds are open to knowledge.

There is no irony in the fact that the books people seek to ban are the ones which expand our knowledge, which challenge facts we shouldn't accept on face value. Trust me, I never would have learned about the real facts of life (and not the confused mess my mother told me because she found sex disgusting) had one classmate not circulated a much-thumbed copy of Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask. I never would have learned to question authority without Animal Farm or 1984. I never would have understood the horrors of war if not for The Red Badge of Courage or All's Quiet on the Western Front. I never would have learned about the negative aspects of letting money rule your life if not for The Great Gatsby or Bonfire of the Vanities. I would have followed my family into intolerance had I not read To Kill a Mockingbird or, yes, The Invisible Man. And, I never would have learned bout the dangers of banning books if I hadn't read Fahrenheit 451. Somewhere in America, at some point, all those books I mentioned have been banned, and, thank goodness, those bans didn't work.

Even now, when I hear some puritanical school board has banned a book, I want to read it. I want to know what they're afraid of so I can emulate the author. Yes, that's how I'll know I've "made it" as a writer--when some troglodyte bans a book I've written.

Celebrate Banned Books Week--read a banned book in public and piss off a book-burner. You'll feel better for it.

The Cooch's Struggle

2013-09-18T20:39:00.000-04:00

Just when you think the Virginia Republican Party, after its takeover by the Tea Party, can't be any more crass and prejudiced, it shows itself to be more crass and prejudiced.

We know the Virginia Repubs consider women second-class citizens--The Cooch, who is running for governor, himself wants to restrict any kind of abortion, even for rape and incest, and doesn't believe the government should be "involved" in birth control issues. Except when it comes to rats, apparently. He has criticized the D.C. government (yeah, go figure) for trying to slip the rodent equivalent of the pill to its rat population rather than organizing a mass rat killing. Mark Obenshain, running for attorney general, once tried to get the Virginia legislature to pass a law requiring a woman who had a miscarriage while not in a medical facility to report that miscarriage--to the police. E. W. Jackson, running for lieutenant governor, has compared Planned Parenthood, which provides free or low-cost health care (not just reproductive services) to women, to the Ku Klux Klan.

We know the Virginia Republican ticket doesn't think much of immigration reform or voting rights or getting the citizens of Virginia access to health care or people who are gay. We know they enslave themselves to business and other special interests.

We know as well that the Virginia Republican ticket believes the only true religion is Christianity, their narrow, restrictive version of it. Jackson believes that yoga and meditation allow the devil entry to our bodies, and he has been a keynote speaker for an organization, which believes that we don't need a Constitution to establish our government, just the Bible.

I've been a Virginian all my life. I've studied its history. We have had a long, unfortunate flirtation with the Klan, in its various iterations. Just nine days ago, residents in a neighborhood near Richmond, VA, found Klan flyers in their mailboxes. In addition to its noted racism, the Klan was also virulently anti-Semitic. However, that has never seemed to be its focus in Virginia.

This past Tuesday at a Cuccinelli rally in Virginia's 10th District, its Republican district committee chair, John Whitbeck, decided to warm up the crowd with a little humor. Happens all the time on the rubber chicken circuit. Whitbeck opened by saying, "I'm a Catholic," then proceeded to describe a meeting between the newly elected Pope Francis and the "head of the Jewish faith." During the meeting, the "head of the Jewish faith" hands the Pope a "ceremonial paper," which the Pope reads then hands back to the "head of the Jewish faith." One of the Pope's aides asked what it was, and the Pope responds, "Oh, it's a bill for the Last Supper."

Yeah, ha, ha, yuk, yuk. The crowd laughed it up, though you can hear maybe a single "boo" among them. (You can watch a video of the joke by clicking here.)

Cuccinelli's spokesperson said that in no way reflected The Cooch's opinions. (Of course, he didn't say "The Cooch;" that's my editorializing.) But it took The Cooch a day or so to declare what Whitbeck said was wrong. Whitbeck himself responded by saying the joke wasn't anti-Semitic because he heard it in church. From a priest.

[Face palm]

Mr. Whitbeck, devout Catholic that he is, doesn't know there is no single head of the Jewish faith. It has several chief rabbis, but no one, single head of the faith like the Pope. I'm about as shiksa as you can get, and I know that. And in all my years as a Catholic, I never heard a priest tell a joke like this during Mass. Now, that's not to say there aren't priests who do this. I'm sure there are. It appears Mr. Whitbeck's narrow mind gets even more narrowed by a narrow-minded priest.

Despite Cuccinelli's distancing himself from Whitbeck's "joke," his and Jackson's and Obenshain's previous statements demeaning women and gays and other religions have allowed, even implicitly encouraged, such behavior. When Cuccinelli recently complained about D.C. not allowing rats to be killed, here is what he said, "So, anyway, it is worse than our immigration policy. You can't break up rat families. Or raccoons, and all the rest, and you can't even kill 'em. It's unbelievable."

When you lower the bar that far--and I won't even elaborate on the immigrants as rats analogy or remind that there is a racial pejorative which is a truncation of the word 'raccoon'--it becomes acceptable to the average Republican to hear anti-Semitism at a political rally.

Now, where was it the last time that happened?

A Rock and a Hard Place

2013-09-04T18:46:00.001-04:00

I don't know where I stand yet on the matter of taking military action in Syria. I'm still looking at both sides, but mainly I'm shaking my head listening to the people who followed President Bush into war in Iraq with blinders on now demanding a strategy and an end-game from President Obama. I don't think it's speculative to say they would be behind Bush if he'd decided Syria was the next neo-con goal.

On the one hand, if someone doesn't do something, Bashir al Assad will likely use chemical weapons again, and, sorry, Sen. Rand Paul, we do know that. What? You think once, and he's out? He's desperate to hold onto power, and he's already shown the wholesale slaughter of innocent civilians doesn't plague him much. Hey, you're both optometrists. Why don't you go have a sit-down with him, doctor to doctor, and explain that he's a murderer? I doubt seriously if you have the gonads for it, but why don't you do something other than mouth off on TV?

On the other hand, are we confident enough in our guided missile technology to assure we won't be killing civilians as well? Thanks to Pvt. Chelsea Manning, we know of friendly fire incidents in Iraq, and we know also about drone strikes which weren't as surgical as we wanted them to be. "Collateral damage" are two words the military needs to take more seriously. The most recent surgical strike bombing we could even term successful was the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999. Led by the U.S., we took out strategic targets with a minimum of civilian casualties, and even then a smart bomb hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing several Chinese nationals. That missile didn't go astray; rather, we were using an old map of Belgrade. Let's hope we have better maps of Damascus. (And just an aside here: That bombing pissed the Serbian people off so much, they voted Milosevic out of office.)

On another hand, if we do nothing, Iran will go ahead with its nuclear program, having decided we're a paper tiger. However, I'm not too worried about Iran because Israel will do what it needs to do, regardless of how Iran perceives our strength. Then, there's North Korea, but Dennis Rodman has that well in hand. (I joke.)

On the final hand, do we really want to give shirtless Vladimir Putin an excuse to go KGB on us?

The President is damned if he does and damned if he doesn't on either moral high ground. However, I think his decision to go to Congress was a stroke of genius. If Congress votes to allow limited military action, he's covered. If they don't, he can say he tried and the people spoke.

Yet, having researched probably far too much about ethnic cleansing and genocide in the Balkans, I was deeply affected by the video from Damascus of people killed by and exposed to what we now think is sarin gas. Like Milosevic's ethnic cleansing, this wasn't done by an outside enemy; these people were gassed by their own military. Now, I'm not terribly sympathetic with the rebels, either, who base themselves in civilian areas and expose the populace to Assad's retaliation. The rebels are rife with hard-line Islamists and al Qaeda elements, likely backed by Iran. If they win, as a couple of young, Syrian women recently said, "we'll all be in burqas."

Civil wars, as we well know since our own some 150 years ago still plagues us, are the absolute worst situations to involve ourselves in--quagmire is too mild a description. I'd like to think our military could keep that infamous "collateral damage" to a minimum, but what happens when we complete our surgical strikes and Assad remains in power and in a position to take revenge on his own people because he can't reach us?

The glitch for me is Assad agreed to have U.N. weapons inspectors in the country and allowed them to inspect the areas, which had been gassed. Somehow, that doesn't seem like something a man guilty of gassing his own people would allow. Yet, Assad is crafty--we in America tend to think of leaders we don't like as slavering idiots, but he's not. Letting the weapons inspectors in might just be Assad's PR stunt. Then, I wonder how a doctor, a man trained to heal, doesn't flinch at the deaths of his own people, done at his orders.

One day I think we need to stay away from Syria; the next, I think about nearly 1,500 people killed by sarin gas, and someone has to pay. Actually, being between a rock and a hard place would be preferable. This is a Solomonic situation, but the problem is both sides want to divide the baby.