Reading at the Crossroads

“Someone has to read his bullshit” file--Part 2

2012-01-26T18:19:00.003-05:00

The Teachings of Speaker Gingrich
The New York Review of Books
August 10, 1995
Joan Didion

1945
by Newt Gingrich and William R. Forstchen
Baen Books/distributed by Simon and Schuster, 382 pp.
To Renew America
by Newt Gingrich
Harper Audio, 260 pp., $17.00 two cassettes (abridged, approximately three hours)

Go Here
________________

Way back in 1995 Joan Didion skewered Newton Leroy Gingrich’s stylistic formula: it’s made up of intellectual pretensions linked to self-help, make-a-million, step programs. Alas, some Americans uncritically embrace these qualities with a tenacity of spirit akin to those green and yellow greasers, naked to the waist, Green Bay Packer football fans we see on TV every mid-December.

The heroes Gingrich dances around but never quite understands or engage with on the intellectual pole of his puffed up resume include Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Franklin Roosevelt, Isaac Asimov, Alexis de Tocqueville, Tom Clancy, Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent, Robert Walpole, William Gladstone, Gordon Wood, Peter Drucker, Arnold Toynbee and even, with qualifications, Gore Vidal for his Lincoln.

Ray Kroc’s Grinding It Out is high up the Newtster’s How To Make the Big Bucks pole. And serendipity provides a name we all recognize in 2012, though it was new to Didion in 1995:

“‘the great leader of Coca-Cola for many years, Woodruff,’ an Omaha entrepreneur named Herman Cain (‘who’s the head of Godfather Pizza, he’s an African-American who was born in Atlanta and his father was Woodruff’s chauffeur’)”. [You heard it here: Herman Cain is in a great position to become Newton Leroy Gingrich’s running mate in 2012. After all, does anyone really remember the Republican’s Palin fiasco?]

Finally, still drawing on Didion’s perceptive reading of these two books (She is the masochist “Someone” in my “Someone has to read his bullshit” title.) we come to fully understand why no Republican Gingrich served with in Congress has much good to say about the man.

Forget stabs in the back, forget embarrassing conversations about family (you know, those “How’s the wife, Newt? stuff), forget the pain of having to look into Newt’s sweaty, snarling, dough boy face for more than two minutes. In the final analysis, the man’s conversation must be the Mount Everest of verbose tediousness. Try listening to this stuff for very long:

[Didion on To Renew America] There were “Seven key aspects” and “Nine vision-level principles” of “Personal Strength” (Pillar Two of American Civilization), there were “Five core principles” of “Quality as Defined by Deming” (Pillar Five), there were “Three Big Concepts” of “Entrepreneurial Free Enterprise” (Pillar Three). There were also, still under Pillar Three, “Five Enemies of Entrepreneurial Free Enterprise” (“Bureaucracy,” “Credentialing,” “Taxation,” “Litigation,” and “Regulation”), which would have been identical to Pillar Four’s “Seven welfare state cripplers of progress” had the latter not folded in “Centralization,” “Anti-progress Cultural Attitude,” and “Ignorance.”

The only thing I can imagine being worse than listening to this clap-trap is listening to it while Newton Leroy Gingrich is in control of a Power Point magic wand and Herman Cain is standing next to him smiling.

From the “Someone has to read his bullshit” file

2012-01-25T12:55:00.004-05:00

Tweets (of a speculative nature) quoting from Newton Leroy Gingrich’s specutaltive fiction oeuvre are twittering here:

http://twitter.com/gingrichfiction#

Our least favorite history professor, last seen eating an unripened lemon somewhere in the bowels of Florida, has worked hard on his “alternative history” works. And judging from the sales and his tax returns, it’s paid off. Book Scan reports two titles have sold 100,000 copies. Never Call Retreat: Lee and Grant: The Final Victory is part of a series which has the South winning the Civil War. Newton is shoring up his base, I guess. And you have to love that double colon in the title. Pearl Harbor: A Novel of December 8 undoubtedly allows the Stars and Stripes (Or is it the Stars and Bars?) to fly through the smoke of that dark day after. Haven’t read it (I’m not about to be the “Someone” of this post’s title.) but it’s a good bet that Newton has FDR arranging that entire Pearl Harbor thingy.

Dennis Johnson of Mellville House collects some John Stewart worthy excerpts.

Well, Gingrich himself may be shy [sic] about these books, but thank God an anonymous fan isn’t: Someone has started a Twitter page called @gingrichfiction to celebrate the revealing nature of these masterful works.

For example, it gives this “excerpt” from one of his World War II books:

    “His Satanic rituals complete, President Roosevelt resumed work on the architecture of The New Deal.”

Then there’s this one, which must be from one of the Civil War books:

    “With the Confederate army marching toward Washington, cowardly president Lincoln shouted ‘every man for himself!’ and fled to France.”

Gingrich Fiction also includes helpful anouncements, such as this one:

    due to popular demand, Newt’s novel “Brown v. Board of Education, Overturned?” is in its sixth printing. thanks, readers!

Mostly, though, it’s just classic excerpts, such as this one, which must be from one of his — well, from a more modern tale of some kind:

    “‘If the Soviets get to the moon first,’ Nixon intoned gravely, ‘they’ll have the rights to all the moon gold for the next 400 years!’”

Newton Leroy’s use of historical poetic license is breathtaking. And this from a man who always gives the impression, physically and emotionally, of having trouble breathing the same air most people in this country do.

Is Attacking the N.C.A.A. a Head Fake?

2012-01-25T00:34:00.000-05:00

January 20, 2012
Guilty Until Proved Innocent
By JOE NOCERA

In America, a person is presumed innocent until proved guilty. Unless, that is, he plays college sports. . . . [Go Here]

And Nocera feels his tale of injustice requires a second column:

Living in Fear of the N.C.A.A.
By JOE NOCERA
Published: January 23, 2012

It was early in the evening of Jan. 13 when Ryan Boatright, the freshman basketball player at the University of Connecticut, learned that he was being suspended from the team for the second time this season. Earlier that day, he had flown into South Bend, Ind., with his teammates for a game against Notre Dame. The 19-year-old point guard was excited because some 400 people from his hometown, Aurora, Ill., were coming to see him play. . . . [Go Here]

______________________

“The columns," Nocera concludes, "have also prompted e-mails, mostly from parents of college athletes, with their own examples of N.C.A.A. injustices.”

Fine. Ryan Boatright and his loving, supportive mother, appear to have been subjected to overwrought abuse by college athletic watchdog authorities But a few questions about the efforts of Joe Nocera and his Inspector Jarvet crusade against the N.C.A.A. need to be asked. Some thoughts beyond the relentless pettiness of the N.C.A.A.’s investigative procedures and the personal tribulations of the Boatright’s are in order. Nocera is turning his justice seeking into a vendetta that blinds more than it illuminates.

Why is Nocera wasting his time beating this mean but very lame horse, the NCAA? He drums up misdirected indignation and in doing so deflects attention from the realities of College Sports, Inc. His exercise is akin to blaming wardens for the bulging populations in their prisons, pill salesmen for the lack of health and safety standards in India's drug factories, and the cop on the beat for the punk kids without jobs or an education who turn to drugs and crime.

It is sad when good kids and their good mothers are done wrong by this small part (the N.C.A.A.) of a very large corrupt and corrupting system. But Nocera’s energy and outrage is misplaced. The foundation stones of the untouchable Big Buck Program’s edifice of the college sports entertainment industry consists of plutocratic boosters, cowed university presidents, witless boards of trustees, and the public's passive support (as hypnotized TV game time couch potatoes, fantasy league fanatics and all around jock sniffers).

What is ignored by Nocera and most is that college sports have nothing, nada, to do with the educational and research mission of institutions of higher learning.

Nocera, Mr. Boatright's mother, and every college athlete's parent, and every college student should not be overly concerned with pesky, unfair, outrageous rules the N.C.A.A. enforces with little real effect. They should ask how many hours does the athlete-student spend in the weight room? How many classes do athlete-students miss when the team is on the road? What monies, in student fees and tax support, go into maintaining and growing The Program that could and should be going into educational resources? How many elite athletes get scholarships while elite math, language, science students scrape by on loans and part time jobs?

In the end, Nocera is throwing stones into a small and personal pond of injustice. He feels good about this. He has chosen an easy target. He should be aiming at the large cesspool that is College Sports, Inc..

The Fog Clears, The Smog Remains

2012-01-22T17:54:00.005-05:00

Let's give some credit to the Republican primary exercise and the debates without number we have been made to endure.

Thanks to the "process" we can be certain of Gingrich's views on food stamp fueled African Americans, open marriages and wives with medical problems. His trade mark snarl will forever live in our memories. And it's clear that Newt's pontificating resonates with a certain strain of voters. Newt manages to make the Pope speaking ex cathedra appear to have the gravitas of a Chinese fortune cookie pronouncement. Look for Gingrich's next step into respectability: It's out with the "Newt" and in with the formidable Newton Leroy.

Romney has agreed to open his miserly tax payments up to public scrutiny. (I'm betting on less than a 15% rate payment. You don't run Bain for years and not come away with a suitcase full of good tax loophole tricks.) Besides overcoming the stiffness of privilege, the main problem Romney has left to squarely face is (Thanks to Gail Collins's deep and thorough investigative reports.) why in the hell he insists on duck taping (or something) his dog to the roof of his car when he goes on family vacations. I'm NOT saying it's a Mormon thing.

Also achieved, Cain, Bachmann, Huntsman and Perry, the low lying vegetation in the Republican's wide and wild weed patch, have been unceremoniously removed from the Republican base's riddled thoughts. True, this means the loss of some comic relief, but the politicos on the Right see smiles as akin to going off message. Such responses reveal weakness in their stern Crusade against the Obama apocalypse.

And now we see that Trickster Santorum will go with those sweater vests and playing his "holier than thou" card to the bitter end. Or at least until he can make a deal with the clear front-runner. He stares out at diminishing crowds and dreams of getting a Veep deal, ideally running next to the uber rich guy with all those kids. "Bain Rhymes with Pain" Romney is just the kind of guy the Rickster learned to serve so well in Congress. And speaking of potential Veeps, wouldn't Cain be the logical choice on a Gingrich ticket? They both like pizza, have similar views on unemployed black people, and respect women--exactly in that order.

Ron Paul is an honorable man hobbled by a deplorable, dated and sclerotic ideology. He will survive to the end in hopes of influencing a meaningless Republican Platform document. The stalwarts of the Republican party laugh behind his back. As they see it, who needs a platform when you can attack the "liberal" media, the socialist Obama, and Greece's retirement program?

Not to be ignored in this review, the candidate for President of South Carolina, Stephen Colbert, has thrown egg in the faces of the Supreme Court Justices who further enabled corporate money and bloated plutocrats to run wildly through the veins of democracy in their "Citizens United" ruling. Hopefully his Super PAC will live on beyond the primary results in the Palmetto State, home to slavery, Strom Thurmond and a wide variety of racist nuts.

Finally, who can wait for the counting of votes in FLORIDA? No one can seriously think that Iowa will be allowed to get away with their distinctly minor league, vote counting incompetence. Personally, I'm confident Florida has the experience to hold on to their title of Poll Prank Powerhouse.

Martin Luther King, Jr. and the 1%

2012-01-16T23:02:00.000-05:00

Martin Luther King, Jr. was well aware of growing income inequality and the evils following in its wake in 1967. This was when the 1% Club was only a gleam in Scrooge McDuck's eye. At that time, King wrote this:

"The contemporary tendency in our society is to base our distribution on scarcity, which has vanished, and to compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle [ah, those were the days] and upper classes until they gag with superfluity. If democracy is to have breadth of meaning, it is necessary to adjust this inequity. It is not only moral, but it is also intelligent. We are wasting and degrading human life by clinging to archaic thinking."

Try this on for size. If being super rich is at least partially relative to your surroundings, is it better to be in the 1% in, say, Clarksville, TN or Terre Haute, IN.? . . . Times up. It's Terre Haute, hands down. If you're raking in $241,000 per in The Haute, you are in the 1% and you're income is 8 times the median income of your neighbors. By contrast, Clarksville is a land of 1% opportunity and near equality by comparison. It _only_ takes $201K to enter the 1% golden circle and that is _only_ 4 times Joe/Jane Blow's median income.

Scout out the inequalities in your own community here:

What Percent Are You?

Let's Get Blunt

2012-01-09T12:17:00.001-05:00

Here’s a pointed comment currently banging through sport journalism’s echo chamber:

Indiana State [as reported by the Associated Press] offered a more blunt assessment [of the NCAA Rules Reform Package], suggesting the change could “create some real nightmares.

The problem is, many coaches, especially at the (Football Championship Subdivision) level, in all sports, are usually not around for five years and when the coach leaves, the new coach and institution may be “stuck” with a student-athlete they no longer want (conduct issues, grades, etc.) or the new coach may have a completely different style of offense/defense that the student-athlete no longer fits into. Yet, the institution is ‘locked in’ to a five-year contract potentially with someone that is of no athletic usefulness to the program.

ISU’s “blunt assessment” speaks directly to a portion of proposed NCAA reforms: “Individual schools,” it reads, “can choose to award multiyear scholarships. Scholarships may not be revoked based on athletic performance.”

When you’re against reform it usually means that you think things in their present state are just hunky-dory. You be the judge.

The blunt truth is athletic scholarships now work within a business model that dominates Big Buck College Athletics. There’s nothing personal, let alone educational, about this. In practice, the withdrawal of an athletic scholarships is a four step retooling process.

1. Coach $$$$ comes to the conclusion that a student-athlete recruited last year, or two or three years ago (and now a full-fledged athlete-student), is not producing on game days.

2. Worse yet, this athlete-student is not responding in a positive or acceptable level to The Program’s system. (Those long, long hours in the weight room, reviewing film, and on the practice field or court.)

3. And/or, Coach $$$$ may be one of those “many coaches” who (as stated in ISU’s candid, hammer-style argument) “are usually not around for five years” and s/he didn’t recruit this loser. Management asks: Why, oh why, should Coach $$$$ pay for this egregious recruiting error?

4. And so it’s the end of a scholarship for this athlete-student. A shiny replacement part is inserted. The Program rolls on.

As for the athlete-student who failed to read the fine print or ask the right questions during their much ballyhooed signing ceremony, s/he has been introduced to the dark downside of signing up with The Program. For the point guard without quickness, the nose guard without a nose for the ball, the student without a degree, it’s off to play security guard back home.

None of this is to say that the “blunt assessment” put forward by an anonymous source at ISU is something to be denied or disowned. Their assessment was not a twitter-truth, something thumbed today, regretted tomorrow. Their assessment was simply and bluntly a business-as-usual truth. And in reality, ISU was speaking for schools from Boston to Boise. In fact, 75 institutions of higher learning have joined ISU in dissent against the tepid NCAA reform proposal on multiyear athletic scholarships.

So I propose cheers to those who manage ISU’s Program — the coaches and the athletic director, President Bradley and the Indiana State University Board of Trustees. It is a good thing to be blunt in word and deed when it comes to college athletics. Hypocrisy and emotional fog have hidden College Sports, Inc. from view far too long.

[Letter published in Terre Haute Tribune Star, Jan. 9, 2012]

The Flag of Totalism Rightists Fly

2012-01-06T18:00:00.000-05:00

I spend some time each day frustrating myself by responding to blog and forum comments posted by Rightists. The silly, not deserving a response, issues they raise have the one redeeming element of requiring me to ask: Why might these people think along these crooked, foggy lines?

A strain in modern day Conservatism is traditionalism. This is a strength (see Edmund Burke) and a weakness (see most Rightists today). Here, for example, is the obvious weakness in arguments put forward supporting the proud display of the Confederate flag. With neither a cough or a blush, Rightists hold that the Stars and Bars stands for something more, something, hmmm, more noble, than the symbol of the slave holding states’ war on the United States and the Constitution. Their urgency toward historical purification of the putrid Lost Cause can’t be achieved without misrepresenting the historical record.

And why would Rightist conservatives of today be interested in this sorry, doomed to failure, flag enterprise? Think states rights dogma. Think Red states/Blue states. Think the sanctity of property, even human beings as property. Think the “underdog,” put upon, self-image Rightists hold and cultivate. Given these battles, past and present and all raised to the level of a World Wrestling Entertainment Global Smackdown struggle, Rightists require a traditionalism with no loose ends, no past failings, a totalism that any reading of history shows is beyond the reach of mere human beings acting over time.

This forced reading of history must be peopled by good guys and bad guys, stances that are clearly right and clearly wrong, questions and issues drawn in stark black and white terms. This is the dynamic of analysis in the Rightist conservative world historical view. Thus the weird propensity of Rightist conservatives to embrace conspiracy theories-- “birthers,” “deniers,” “Agenda 21,” “9/11 ers,” “Clinton body count,” . . . the list goes on–provides an insight into their cheesy traditionalism. They tightly grip irrationally in their clenched fists and call it Truth with a capital T. For Rightist conservatives the past is not just another country, the past is an alien planet they visit looking for support of their fears and curdled imaginations.

See "The Artist"

2012-01-04T21:36:00.002-05:00

It's not hard to love "The Artist." It's got everything (a dog, humor, meeting cute, even a kind of car chase) and most of all it has a heart that isn’t a hackneyed pitch “with edge” cooked up for a five minute meeting with the money boys. The "heart" I speak of is in the recognized Great Depression dynamic of the traditional male power holder being overtaken and surpassed by the soft power of women. Economic stress has a way of doing this to sexual roles. It resonates with audiences. Noticed any economic stress around lately?

On audience response, at the Indianapolis matinee I attended the half-filled theater broke into applause at the end. (The last time I did this was in mock approval of “Avatar.) I’m certain many left the theater dancing--at least in their imaginations. After all, the happy ending of "The Artist" is a dance scene, a man and a woman sharing the stage, accepting (with a sincere smile) to keep on keeping on, together. This is what audiences asked for and got from the industrial studios of Hollywood in the dirty thirties. Doesn’t this French import with its cultural-historical smarts coming to us in the third year of the Bush Depression fulfill a similar need?

College Sports Mess Deeper than Penn State

2011-11-16T14:46:00.004-05:00

November 16, 2011
READERS' FORUM: Nov. 16, 2011

The Tribune-Star The Tribune Star Wed Nov 16, 2011, 06:23 AM EST

Sports mess deeper than just Penn State

Let’s not turn Penn State and JoePa into something unique to Happy Valley, Pa. It’s a special breed of fans who bestow cult status on Big Buck college sports across America. No stadium parking lot, no 1,000-channel dish TV, no sports bar, is without ritual and sacraments in evidence on game day. Some of these fans make the Taliban look like two-hour-a-week Christians.

And neither are the presidents and trustees at countless schools unique. Long ago many/most traded in or seriously compromised the mission of higher education for a Final Four or bowl game mission. They exact fees from students to pay for entertainment that has nothing to do with education. They sniff at or ignore gray ethical areas. In royal coronations covered in smiling detail by the media, athletic scholarships are bestowed on many, many kids who could care less about earning a degree.

Administration leaders and involved alums pat themselves on the back for offering up these educational opportunities. Meanwhile, the opportunity to fill heads in classes are out of the reach of poor, smart kids who read and are quick with math concepts but can’t bench press two large, heavy pieces of iron on the end of a bar.

These bright, hungry students are left to scramble for financial aid/loans/a scintilla of recognition and hope.

It’s disgusting. And next weekend millions will turn on their TVs, nod gravely about the mess at PSU, make excuses for JoePa and go back to checking their bets and cheering for ol’ Siwash U.

— Gary W. Daily
Terre Haute
________________

Read more:

November 11, 2011
The Institutional Pass By JOE NOCERA

". . . Big-time college football requires grown men to avert their eyes from the essential hypocrisy of the enterprise. Coaches take home multimillion-dollar salaries, while the players who make them rich don’t even get “scholarships” that cover the full cost of attending college. They push their “student-athletes” to take silly courses that won’t get in the way of football. When players are seriously injured and can no longer play, their coaches often yank their scholarships, forcing them to drop out of school.

“College football and men’s basketball has drifted so far away from the educational purpose of the university,” James Duderstadt, a former president of the University of Michigan, told me recently. “They exploit young people and prevent them from getting a legitimate college education. They place the athlete’s health at enormous risk, which becomes apparent later in life. We are supposed to be developing human potential, not making money on their backs. Football strikes at the core values of a university.”

Marx, Capitalism and the "Uncertainty" Problem

2011-09-07T12:27:00.004-04:00

"Was Marx Right?" from the Harvard Business Review Blog is fascinating and worth attention and analysis.

http://blogs.hbr.org/haque/2011/09/was_marx_right.html

We hear everyday that American business is sitting on mountains of cash but they refuse to expand and hire workers. Why? One word appears more often than any other in their answers: “uncertainty.” Perhaps they’ve been reading Marx. He lays out all kinds of reasons, utopian in his day, reasonable in ours, that would give rise to a plague of “uncertainty” in the minds of those who make economic decisions in the global economy.

But perhaps Marx was wrong about all this, just another evil alarmist whose predictions about class struggle and revolution failed to materialize, or just failed.

John Gray on the BBC thinks so. But John Gray isn’t about to provide solace to the uncertain. More alarming than Marx, Gray makes a good case that capitalism is doing itself in.

Here’s an excerpt. The entire essay is worth pondering. Just don’t show it to those capitalist pantywaists who are frozen in uncertainty. It would turn them from comatose into a state of total rigor mortis.
___________

A Point of View: The revolution of capitalism

. . . In a society that is being continuously transformed by market forces, traditional values are dysfunctional and anyone who tries to live by them risks ending up on the scrapheap.

Looking to a future in which the market permeates every corner of life, Marx wrote in The Communist Manifesto: "Everything that is solid melts into air". For someone living in early Victorian England - the Manifesto was published in 1848 - it was an astonishingly far-seeing observation.

At the time nothing seemed more solid than the society on the margins of which Marx lived. A century and a half later we find ourselves in the world he anticipated, where everyone's life is experimental and provisional, and sudden ruin can happen at any time.

A tiny few have accumulated vast wealth but even that has an evanescent, almost ghostly quality. In Victorian times the seriously rich could afford to relax provided they were conservative in how they invested their money. When the heroes of Dickens' novels finally come into their inheritance, they do nothing forever after.

Today there is no haven of security. The gyrations of the market are such that no-one can know what will have value even a few years ahead. . . .

Capitalism has led to a revolution but not the one that Marx expected. The fiery German thinker hated the bourgeois life and looked to communism to destroy it. And just as he predicted, the bourgeois world has been destroyed.

But it wasn't communism that did the deed. It's capitalism that has killed off the bourgeoisie.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14764357

Labor Day -- 2011

2011-09-04T11:26:00.003-04:00

As conservative political forces work hard to turn back the clock on government regulation, it's worthwhile to recall the conditions which created the needs for such governmental action. Jack London's autobiographical story, "The Apostate" is a good place to start. This comes from The Library of America "Story of the Week"
site.

http://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2011/09/apostate.html

The Apostate

Jack London (1876–1916)
From Jack London: Novels and Stories

Interesting Links
“Child Labor in U.S. History” (Child Labor Education Project, University of Iowa)

Also of interest:
Jack London:
Novels and Social Writings
The People of the Abyss • The Road • The Iron Heel • Martin Eden • John Barleycorn • essays
See the table of contents
1,192 pages

Jack London worked a number of odd jobs during his childhood years in West Oakland, California: delivering newspapers, sweeping salon floors, and setting up pins in a bowling alley. After he completed grammar school in 1890 at the age of fourteen, he found employment at the nearby Hickmott’s cannery, where he spent twelve to eighteen hours a day stuffing pickles into jars—at ten cents an hour. The work was strenuous, tedious, and robotic, and the long hours kept the teenager from his favorite pastime: reading in the local library. As Alex Kershaw notes in his biography of London, “There had been no attempt to outlaw child labor in California, nor was there health and safety regulation, nor any limits on hours worked.” Toward the end of the century, some states began passing laws prohibiting factory and quarry work for children under fourteen, but evasion was widespread and enforcement was spotty. . . .

Daily Dose of Depression -- Plum Trees and Food Stamps

2011-08-06T13:29:00.002-04:00

It’s easy to look around and see the yawning gaps between the rich and the poor. From the prices on menus at upscale restaurants to the electronic boards featuring “Value Meals” at Mickey Ds, where and what we eat dramatizes these gaps. Schools, of course, also scream out differences in opportunities. From the green, park like physical settings of private prep schools to the still true 1950s cliche of the asphalt jungles of the inner city, schools can welcome or resist students in search of an education. The social ladder to success in this country is far from being equal in length and sturdiness.

It’s foolish to resent the golden platter opportunities of an Josh Isackson (see the Jenny Anderson story). Good for him that he has reached the age of eighteen and has the curiosity to explore the ancient culture of China. And good for his parents or the trust fund that will pay for this experience.

Juxtapose Mr. Isackson’s good luck and well used opportunity with Charles Blow’s account of “The Decade of Lost Children.” America is filled with such contrasts. We feature the outstanding individual’s luck; we bury the too common in a statistical fog.

Some will say that’s just the way it is .

August 5, 2011
For a Standout College Essay, Applicants Fill Their Summers
By JENNY ANDERSON

Josh Isackson, an 18-year-old graduate of Tenafly High School in New Jersey, spent the summer after his sophomore year studying Mandarin in Nanjing, China. The next year he was an intern at a market research firm in Shanghai. When it came time to write a personal statement for his college applications, those summers offered a lot of inspiration.

“When I was thinking about the essay, I realized that taking Chinese was a big part of me,” he said.

So Mr. Isackson wrote about exploring the ancient tombs of the Ming dynasty in the Purple Mountain region of Nanjing, “trading jokes with long-dead Ming Emperors, stringing my string hammock between two plum trees and calmly sipping fresh green tea while watching the sun set on the horizon.”. . .

Full article here
______________

August 5, 2011
The Decade of Lost Children
By CHARLES M. BLOW

One of the greatest casualties of the great recession may well be a decade of lost children.

According to “The State of America’s Children 2011,” a report issued last month by the Children’s Defense Fund, the impact of the recession on children’s well-being has been catastrophic.

Here is just a handful of the findings:

• The number of children living in poverty has increased by four million since 2000, and the number of children who fell into poverty between 2008 and 2009 was the largest single-year increase ever recorded.

• The number of homeless children in public schools increased 41 percent between the 2006-7 and 2008-9 school years.

• In 2009, an average of 15.6 million children received food stamps monthly, a 65 percent increase over 10 years.
. . .

Full article here

Daily Dose of Depression -- Who Notices?

2011-08-04T12:00:00.001-04:00

“Who notices?”

This is the season when minimum wage working and out of work families start to look at their kids and then look at the calendar and then feel an ache in the stomach and a sour taste in their mouths. The school year is coming on fast. There will be a list of school classroom items to buy. There will be clothes and shoes the kids will expect but not get. There will be agonizing decisions about book rentals and school lunches.

It all puts a gray damper on the excitement of the coming school year.

“Who notices?”
___________________
You know the economy is in bad shape when customers can't afford to shop at dollar stores anymore.
By Annie LowreyPosted Wednesday, Slate Aug. 3, 2011, at 5:15 PM ET

Even dollar stores are struggling. . . . Customers flock to the chains, which sell thousands of products for a buck or $2 or $10, when times get tough. When the economy improves, they shop at nicer outlets, like Target. But there are some worrisome signs that the prolonged economic malaise has changed even this retail paradigm. Middle-class households remain reluctant to spend. And cash-strapped consumers are finding even dollar stores a bit too expensive.

____________
Goods Fly Off Shelves – Even Marked Up, Luxury
By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD NYT August 3, 2011

Nordstrom has a waiting list for a Chanel sequined tweed coat with a $9,010 price. Neiman Marcus has sold out in almost every size of Christian Louboutin “Bianca” platform pumps, at $775 a pair. Mercedes-Benz said it sold more cars last month in the United States than it had in any July in five years. . . .

. . . Luxury goods stores, which fared much worse than other retailers in the recession, are more than recovering — they are zooming. Many high-end businesses are even able to mark up, rather than discount, items to attract customers who equate quality with price.

“If a designer shoe goes up from $800 to $860, who notices?” said Arnold Aronson, managing director of retail strategies at the consulting firm Kurt Salmon, and the former chairman and chief executive of Saks.

Daily Dose of Depression--What Do You Have On Your Back?

2011-07-21T12:56:00.002-04:00

“To avoid inelegant struggles as you don or remove your backpack make sure you buy one with a nice easy-slide surface. In their fab new bag collection for the Row, Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen have introduced a nice glazed croc number which slips on a treat, yours for a mere $39,000.”

OK, OK, fearless defenders of the Rich and the Foolish, save yourselves the trouble of hitting the always at the ready line, “It’s their money and they can spend it on whatever they want.”

I post this to demonstrate again how out of whack things get when the wealth of the top 400 in the country exceeds that of the 150 million at the bottom. Not saying taxes should be part of a vast income redistribution scheme. (Lots of luck with that in a country run and controlled by the Rich and their slavish minded minions.) But $39,000 backpacks and the other gew gaws of the Rich do have a way of catching the eye. Some may long and moon over finding a used glazed croc thingy at Goodwill, but eventually resentment sets in. And resentment is not the stuff of a Happy Kingdom.

Daily Dose of Depression--Cracks in the Edifice?

2011-07-20T13:19:00.002-04:00

New York Times, July 19, 2011
Cost-Cutters, Except When the Spending Is Back Home
By RON NIXON

WASHINGTON — Freshman House Republicans who rode a wave of voter discontent into office last year vowed to stop out-of-control spending, but that has not stopped several of them from quietly trying to funnel millions of federal dollars into projects back home.

They have pushed for dozens of projects in their districts, including military programs opposed by the president, replenishing beach sand lost to erosion, a $700 million bridge in Minnesota and a harbor dredging project in Charleston, S.C. Some of their projects were once earmarks, political shorthand for pet projects penciled into spending bills, which Republicans banned when they took over the House. . . .

Go Here

_____________________________________________________

This story isn’t so much evidence of a crack in the radical right wing edifice as it is a result of creating edifices that were cracked from the beginning. No one applauds wasteful spending. In Congress it’s always a case of sorting out what is needed locally and has a positive impact nationally and, most importantly, what the times call for. Dems and Redubs both succeed and fail at this task. It, however, is only the Redubs who of late have taken a holier than thou stance on budgets, spending, taxation. The pristine statues they erected to themselves end up with feet of clay and hearts of stone. People are coming to realize this and will act accordingly.

The temporary ascendance of these self-styled saints was assured by two things. They, 1. had national media outlets (FOX and right wing talk radio) to hum and drum their hum drum ideas incessantly and 2. large boodles of cash from the Kochs and corporations, political naifs and political nihilists were made available to them at crucial points in their rise. Again, people are being made aware of these tawdry, interest driven puppet masters manipulating their creations. The interests of the Rich, the soulless corporation, the extremists without fellow-feeling are being unmasked, denounced and deserted.

Damage is being done but our democratic republic will survive. Perhaps someday even Glen and Rush and the Radical Right will read the history of the Progressive Era, the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the New Frontier, the Great Society and realize the truths they so willfully evade. -- Nah. Won't happen.

Daily Dose of Depression -- The Literary Market Place

2011-06-18T13:22:00.001-04:00

Here’s what it’s come to in the literary/quasi-literary world of writers and book publishing:

The problem is this: except for the most ego-driven or ego-protected among us, it's an unnatural position for most writers. We like working in pajamas. We like watching sentences unfold as ideas unfurl. We don't like shaking our booties.

But to sell, we must.

This is the uncomfortable truth. If you want to follow your fantasy of writing and publishing, then you gotta shake that booty. You must learn how to sell without appearing crazed -- because nobody likes the snake oil man. You must swallow your pride and put it out there--Look, I wrote a book! Want to buy it? -- without coming across as greedy, crazed, or so entranced by yourself that people back away in horror. . . .

Randy Susan Meyers – From Writing Quietly to Screaming "Buy Me!" -- Promoting a Book

GO HERE for full article.

________________________________

Yes, Econ 101 does establish that selling and buying happen in a kind of market. And as we have learned from the Bush Depression, the accepted practices of this market come with heavy, heavy costs. There's no free "magic" in the market. I happen to hate seeing our literary culture purveying and investing in derivatives and sub prime loans.

Here’s my modestly-snobbish, modestly-arrogant, position on author/artists serving as their own sales agents. I think it hurts their art. Conglomerate publishers/toady editors/dollar signs-for-eyes agents are constantly drumming out the advice: “You must write for the market.” That’s inspiring, isn’t it? And now these same bottom-line guys/gals insist that author/artists also become drummers! Doesn’t this all go to core questions of what literature, the true ‘product” (ugh!) of creative work, is all about?

I’m trying not to be hard on those writers who feel they have a book in them, be it a formulaic harlequin or a formulaic memoir. Run it through the word processor, send it up the flagpole, twitter it around the blogosphere. If you win the lottery, good for you. But if the literary culture in this country is going to turn out MFA’s in creative writing like hot cross buns, I would hope they have more integrity than the MBA’s which dumped our economy into the sewers of the Magic Market. Selling has its price. There’s even a popular phrase for it: “selling out.”

Daily Dose of Depression -- East Meets West?

2011-06-11T20:37:00.002-04:00

Is this where we as a nation are heading?

GURGAON, India — In this city that barely existed two decades ago, there are 26 shopping malls, seven golf courses and luxury shops selling Chanel and Louis Vuitton. Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs shimmer in automobile showrooms. Apartment towers are sprouting like concrete weeds, and a futuristic commercial hub called Cyber City houses many of the world’s most respected corporations.

Gurgaon, located about 15 miles south of the national capital, New Delhi, would seem to have everything, except consider what it does not have: a functioning citywide sewer or drainage system; reliable electricity or water; and public sidewalks, adequate parking, decent roads or any citywide system of public transportation. Garbage is still regularly tossed in empty lots by the side of the road.

Can we learn anything from India’s economic growth?

In Gurgaon, economic growth is often the product of a private sector improvising to overcome the inadequacies of the government.

To compensate for electricity blackouts, Gurgaon’s companies and real estate developers operate massive diesel generators capable of powering small towns. No water? Drill private borewells. No public transportation? Companies employ hundreds of private buses and taxis. Worried about crime? Gurgaon has almost four times as many private security guards as police officers.

You could call it the United States of Gurgaon,” said Sanjay Kaul, an activist critical of the city’s lack of planning who argues that Gurgaon is a patchwork of private islands more than an interconnected city. “You are on your own.

GO HERE

Does the U.S. need a massive infrastructure stimulus? You tell me.

Daily Dose of Depression --Names of the Dead

2011-05-30T12:14:00.003-04:00

Memorial Day, May 30, 2011

Names of the Dead

The Department of Defense has identified 1,581 American service members who have died as a part of the Afghan war and related operations. It confirmed the deaths of the following Americans recently:

BOHALL, Thomas A., 25, Sgt., Army; Bel Aire, Kan.; 101st Airborne Division.

HAMSKI, Joseph J., 28, Staff Sgt., Air Force; Ottumwa, Iowa; 52nd Civil Engineer Squadron.

JOHNSON, John C., 28, Pfc., Army; Phoenix; 10th Mountain Division.

MILLS, Edward D. Jr., 29, Staff Sgt., Army; New Castle, Pa.; 101st Airborne Division.

OSMAN, Ergin V., 35, Staff Sgt., Army; Jacksonville, N.C.; 101st Airborne Division.

PATTON, Adam J., 21, Specialist, Army; Port Orchard, Wash.; 101st Airborne Division.

RUNKLE, John M., 27, First Lt., Army; West Salem, Ohio; 101st Airborne Division.

SOLESBEE, Kristoffer M., 32, Tech. Sgt., Air Force; Citrus Heights, Calif.; 775th Civil Engineer Squadron.

THIBODEAU, Christopher R., 28, Chief Warrant Officer, Army; Chesterland, Ohio; First Battalion, Fourth Combat Aviation Brigade.

VELAZQUEZ, Louie A. Ramos, 39, Sgt., Army; Camuy, Puerto Rico; 101st Airborne Division.
____________________________

I haven’t found many news outlets, with the exceptions of the New York Times, Washington Post and the PBS News Hour, which regularly post the names of those who, after ten years of war, are still dying in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Here’s part of the Times’ editorial for this Memorial Day, May 30, 2011.

Whatever you make of the wars in which those soldiers fought, whatever you make of war itself, their sacrifices are real and permanent. How death came to them, now or then, is something only they can know. We who have not been called to war, or have been lucky enough not to lose anyone dear, still feel the loss. These are things worth remembering here in the last blush of spring, the first flush of summer.

Every sentence in this paragraph deserves close attention. Memorials honor those whose sacrifices lie in the past. Memorials also burden those living in the present. Do we carry this burden too lightly?

Daily Dose of Depression -- Micro Managing Mitch Says No

2011-05-25T12:16:00.000-04:00

I’m generally hard on Micro Managing Mitch and his strong arm tactics. But stepping away from all that and just looking at MMM’s decision to not run as a general problem in our electoral process, what do you come up with?

One thing stands out in clear relief: It costs a lot of money to run for office. This means collecting money, which means owing friends and special interests. Both Republicans and Democrats go through this money meat ethics grinder. Perhaps MMM and his family balked at this prospect. Perhaps Newt Gingrich embraces it. It’s not a pretty prospect for most candidates. And the Supreme Court’s misguided “United” decision has worsened the situation.

Yet few are ready to put limits on campaign spending, or, heaven forbid, opt for electoral reforms that equalize campaign expenditures through a combination of private caps and public financing. So we are left with what we get–money making the political world go round and those who are good at it, revel in it, don’t even bother to think about it, running for public office.

So who should be surprised when we get what we pay for? Or by the news of how too many of our elected officials pay for what they get?

Daily Dose of Depression -- Giving Empathy a Bad Name

2011-05-14T11:01:00.002-04:00

The Empathy Trap
What happens when Obama, like all presidents, tries to show Americans that he feels their pain.
By John Dickerson Posted Slate Thursday, May 12, 2011, at 12:01 PM ET

. . . So he [President Obama] emphasizes that he understands the plight of regular Americans. The problem with empathy, however, is not just that there's never enough of it to go around. It's that by offering it, presidents raise unrealistic expectations of a different sort. . . .

. . . Obama needs voters to think he's on the case. The challenge is vast, though. Whether at the gas pump, in the grocery aisles, or on their mortgage statements, people are constantly seeing scary numbers. To keep up with all that anxiety, the president-as-therapist would have to hold office hours every day.

GO HERE FOR FULL ARTICLE

____________________________

“Empathy trap”!?!

Since when has UNDERSTANDING the situation and plight of others become a “trap”? Oh, right, since the pundits, polls and publicists of the world have taken control of the vocabulary and behavior of anyone in government, right or left. These experts now slice and dice normal words into grains of carborundum and grind out pronouncements which sound solid and important but are as soft as crapola.

All this is admittedly much easier then, say, actually examining economic data on cuts in public services, corporate profits and their non-hiring practices, the cost of wars based on arrogance and the current rage-of-the-day, budget deficits and debt. So OK, play around with the “empathy trap.” But how about a column or two or three on the “indifference trap”?
For starters, we might read and hear more of this:

The Chart That Should Accompany Every Discussion of Deficits
By James Fallows
May 11 2011, Atlantic Online 9:39 PM EST

GO HERE

And if you can’t follow the econ-speak in Fallows’ report, just study this chart carefully. Decide for yourself who and which policies exceed the bounds of human empathy.

Royal Wedding -- Masterpiece Theater or Wall Street Journal?

2011-04-29T17:22:00.002-04:00

“When the last of the bunting is taken down, the marriage of William Wales and Catherine Middleton may be remembered not so much as a magical fairytale, but as a hard-edged business case study. . . .”

While skipping through Princess Kate’s ancestry (go to “descendants” in this article) it was interesting to see among her Great-greats relatives who were domestics, coal miners and field hinds (sic). Does this make you believe in Cinderella, or at least in Julia Roberts’s “Pretty Woman”? Judging by the multi-millions spent on this wedding in the midst of economic depression aggravated by mindless austerity measures, I’m thinking the Brits would have preferred to have Kate’s diamond tiara sold at auction, the proceeds going to public job creation. Americans? They could care less. Give them the glitz! London or Las Vegas, they’re buying in. A line of credit for Julia on Rodeo Drive made her a “Pretty Woman” with pseudo-class and, for the materialistic minded in the U$ of A, a credit card and a nearby Wal-Mart is all it takes to be a Princess in their own minds

The royal wedding

Women’s History Month – Dagmar Wilson, We Still Need You, We Still Remember You

2011-03-11T11:41:00.000-05:00

Local Gerogetown, Washington DC hero, Dagmar Wilson, who co-founded the Women Strike for Peace movement that later grew to include a half-million members, died on January 6 at the Washington Home and Community Hospices. She was 94 years old and died of complications from congestive heart failure.

In 1961, during the hieght of the US-Soviet nuclear arms race, Wilson, a homemaker and successful children’s book illustrator, organized a phone tree and encouraged her friends to call on their friends to rally support for a one-day demonstration in support of peace and disarmament.

On Nov. 1, 1961, less than two months later, some 50,000 mothers, grandmothers and other women took to the streets to demonstrate in 60 cities across the country.

“I decided there are some things an individual can do. At least we can make some noise and see,” she once said.

The movement garned such a wide and far-reaching support for antiproliferation that President Kennedy credited the group with helping to force the Cold War superpowers to eventually sign a partial nucelar test-ban treaty.

Wilson is survived be her three daughters, two grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Source: The Washington Post, January 24.

This Is Not About Charlie Sheen

2011-03-10T18:06:00.000-05:00

March 10, 2011

FLASHPOINT: America’s wars continue, even as we ignore them

By Gary Daily Special to the Tribune-Star

TERRE HAUTE — “Master, master, old news! And such news as you never heard of!” — William Shakespeare

It’s the same old, same old when I read the newspaper. Republicans believe (or pretend to believe) that the 7 percent of union members in America’s workforce caused the Bush Depression. Charlie Sheen again demonstrates which part of “Two and Half Men” he is. And college sports scandals continue to blossom and smell stronger than the sweat in a crowded locker room or the money in a big booster’s off-shore bank account.

Not getting as much attention is the same old news on America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I guess the expiration date on interest in these costly wars (trillions and counting) and deadly (thousands and counting) has run out.

So in case you aren’t current with the same old news in regard to Iraq and Afghanistan, here are a few items sitting in the “Let’s just forget about it” bin from last month’s reports.

In Iraq, the citizens of this American-assisted “democracy” project are upset about the lack of jobs, electricity and clean water, better pensions and medical care. The “Days of Rage” demonstrations took place across the country, starting as peaceful gatherings and ending with 19 dead as the “elected” government’s security forces used tear gas, water cannons, sound bombs and at times live bullets to disperse the crowds.

We have 47,000 American troops in Iraq. Remember when presidential candidate John McCain speculated that the United States might be in Iraq for maybe a hundred years?

Who buys and reads the books by the Bush war architects and cheerleaders? Trying to paper over his role in the tragedy that is Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld is out plugging his just released memoir, “Known and Unknown.” The book might as well be titled “Forgetting and Dissembling.” For a guy who is good at numbers he tries mightily to squirm away from a blood and treasure cost analysis of the war he did so much to push us into. This is old, old news.

Another new book out last month knows what Rumsfeld ignores and General Petraeus and President Obama refuse to acknowledge. Bing West, an infantry officer and former assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration, decided at age 70 to spend time, a lot of time, embedded with American troops in Afghanistan. He saw and studied the war there up close — in Garmsir, Marja and Nawa in Helmand Province; Barge Matal in Nuristan; and the Korengal Valley in Kunar. The title of his book doesn’t say it all, but it has a forthright ring to it that is missing in Rumsfled’s trip down a rabbit hole. Thank you Bing West for your “THE WRONG WAR, Grit, Strategy, and the Way Out of Afghanistan.”

Here’s an old story from West’s book. “For three years, the provincial reconstruction team had lived in a compound a few blocks from the scene of the tragedy [a grenade blew up a truck in Asadabad in 2009 killing a number of civilians]. The P.R.T. had paid over $10 million to hire locals, who smiled in appreciation. Every time a platoon from 1-32 patrolled through town, they stopped to chat with storekeepers and to buy trinkets and candy to give to the street urchins. Yet the locals had turned on the soldiers in an instant.” … “‘Kill the Americans!’ the Afghans shouted. ‘Protect Islam!’ Only later did a videotape of the incident show clearly that an Afghan had tossed the grenade.”

West’s recounting of this old story fits perfectly with a mid-February shift in troop deployments. Maj. Gen. John F. Campbell, the commander for eastern Afghanistan, ordered the withdrawal of Americans from the Pech Valley, an area previously described as “central” in the fight against the Taliban. Over 100 American soldiers have died there. “I don’t want [to give] the impression we’re abandoning the Pech.” General Campbell said. As troops who fought hard and died hard in the Pech were leaving, General Campbell put a nice double-speak spin on the withdrawal: “I prefer to look at it as realigning to provide better security for the Afghan people.”

In a moment of candor, someone familiar with the withdrawal decision with stars or bars on his helmet [in a not-for-attribution comment] offered this assessment: “What we figured out is that people in the Pech really aren’t anti-U.S. or anti-anything; they just want to be left alone. Our presence is what’s destabilizing this area.” This conclusion is painfully old news to those who have been opposing the war for nine years.

Then there was this from our current Secretary of Defense. “… Robert M. Gates bluntly told an audience of West Point cadets on Friday that it would be unwise for the United States to ever fight another war like Iraq or Afghanistan, and that the chances of carrying out a change of government in that fashion again were slim.” I doubt if Gates will be reading Rumsfeld’s “Known and Unknown” but he seems to know Bing’s “The Wrong War.”

Finally we have the new old news of brave Americans paying the ultimate price in these wars. The Defense Department reported that CARPENTER, Andrew P., 27, Lance Cpl., Marines; Columbia, Tenn.; Second Marine Division; HIDALGO, Daren M., 24, First Lt., Army; Waukesha, Wis.; Third Squadron, Second Stryker Cavalry Regiment; and SISSON, Robert C. Jr., 29, Sgt., Army; Aliquippa, Pa.; Fourth Infantry Division, died in Afghanistan sometime in February.

To date, 1,467 American service members have died as a part of the Afghan war and related operations; 4,439 U.S. troops have died in Iraq. The seriously wounded exceeds 40,000.

Women's History Month--2011

2011-03-07T18:58:00.000-05:00

Presidential Proclamation - Women's History Month

[includes this] “As we move forward, we must correct persisting inequalities. Women comprise over 50 percent of our population but hold fewer than 17 percent of our congressional seats. More than half our college students are female, yet when they graduate, their male classmates still receive higher pay on average for the same work. Women also hold disproportionately fewer science and engineering jobs. That is why my Administration launched our Educate to Innovate campaign, which will inspire young people from all backgrounds to drive America to the forefront of science, technology, engineering, and math. By increasing women's participation in these fields, we will foster a new generation of innovators to follow in the footsteps of the three American women selected as 2009 Nobel Laureates.”

GO HERE FOR FULL PROCLAMATION

Why Are We Still in Afghanistan?

2011-01-22T12:41:00.001-05:00

The Saturday Profile
Artist Playing Cat-and-Mouse Faces Russia’s Claws
By ELLEN BARRY
Published: January 21, 2011

“For three years, Voina, which means war, has been playing cat-and-mouse with Russian law enforcement, staging street actions that ranged from the obscure (throwing live cats at McDonald’s cashiers) to the monumental (a 210-foot penis painted on a St. Petersburg drawbridge, so that it rose up pointing at the offices of the F.S.B., the security service).”
GO HERE

Poets played a role in bringing down the Communist dictatorship in the Soviet Union so we shouldn’t scoff at Voina. Perhaps we could get out of Iraq and Afghanistan, I mean really get out, if we started throwing cats around Mickey D’s and putting a giant prophylactic over the Trump Tower in Chicago. Nah! Americans love their cats too much, our kids work at Mickey D’s, and Donald Trump is another of those revered celebrities we love to hate but really love. As the song goes: “We got troubles right here in River City,” and theses troubles go deep.

In case you missed it:

January 21, 2011

Names of the Dead

The Department of Defense has identified 1,449 American service members who have died as a part of the Afghan war and related operations. It confirmed the deaths of the following Americans recently:

CRUZ, Dominique, 26, Petty Officer, Navy; Panama City, Fla.; U.S.S. Halsey.

LANCASTER, Joshua T., 22, Specialist, Army; Millbrook, Ala.; 184th Ordnance Battalion, 52nd Ordnance Group.

Daily Dose of Depression (DDD)

2010-12-18T18:13:00.003-05:00

As we struggle to understand and prevent another Hoover or Bush Depression, pay attention to how the Repubs react.

Wall Street Whitewash By PAUL KRUGMAN
. . . all four Republicans on the commission voted to exclude the following terms from the report: “deregulation,” “shadow banking,” “interconnection,” and, yes, “Wall Street.”

When Democratic members refused to go along with this insistence that the story of Hamlet be told without the prince, the Republicans went ahead and issued their own report, which did, indeed, avoid using any of the banned terms.

__________________

Why won't the GOP's financial-crisis report follow the money?
By Bethany McLean
Slate Posted Thursday, Dec. 16, 2010

Now, get ready for a few of the [Republican F.C.I.C. member’s] primer's breathtaking conclusions. "Put simply, the risk of a housing collapse was simply not appreciated." Shit happens. ("Bubbles happen" is, in fact, the first sentence in the report.) How about some exploration of why consumer advocates—who in the 1990s began warning the Federal Reserve and members of Congress that people were getting loans they couldn't pay back—were ignored? Here's another genius insight: "The panic ended when confidence returned." That one inspired me to check the definition of panic (a "sudden overwhelming fear") to make sure I wasn't wrong to find this a bit redundant. Daylight appeared when the sun rose. War ended when the armies stopped fighting. Hurt went away when the pain subsided.

____________________

December 17, 2010
Explaining the Crisis With Dogma By JOE NOCERA

. . . When the commission was formed last year, there were high hopes that it could act as a modern-day Pecora investigation — which rooted out Wall Street corruption in the wake of the crash of 1929, and helped create the political groundswell for such key reforms as the Glass-Steagall Act. That investigation was led by Ferdinand Pecora, who held the country spellbound through some two years of nonstop investigations. Clearly, this effort isn’t going to come close to that one.
“I think we can officially stop comparing these guys to the Pecora Committee,” said Michael Perino, author of an engaging recent book about Pecora, “The Hellhound of Wall Street.” Mr. Perino added, “It is disparaging to Pecora.”

Daily Dose of Depression (DDD)

2010-12-14T14:38:00.006-05:00

This is from the Evansville Courier and Press:

For those politicians aspiring to be the next governor of Indiana, a big Christmas gift came early this year. Over the weekend, Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh announced that he will not return to Indiana from Washington, D.C. to run for a third term as governor.

Bayh, who announced his retirement from the U.S. Senate earlier this year, was widely thought to be a shoo-in for the Democratic nomination for governor — if he chose to run — and a likely fall winner, regardless of opposition. . . .

Bayh's decision not to run opens the door to the Democratic nomination to several candidates, among them 8th District Rep. Brad Ellsworth and Evansville Mayor Jonathan Weinzapfel. . . .
GO HERE

The real gift Evan (Let's Go to War) Bayh provides is not in providing an opening for clones-of-Bayh, complete with marbleized razor hair cuts. What this offers Indiana Dems is a chance to finish the work started but not finished by Obama in this state. The Dems should connect with citizens who pay their bills with a wince, look for the jobs that aren't there, take out education loans that weigh like anchors for life, and have trouble voting on work day Tuesdays because they hold two part time jobs.

In other words, the Dems can take the side of "you" in the Republican refrain: "I got mine, you get yours." They should emphasize this:

The latest installment of the groundbreaking work on income inequality by the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez shows that the richest 1 percent of American households — those making more than $370,000 a year — received 21 percent of total income in 2008. GO HERE

But we'll see. The timid Dem leaders around the state like the cozy deal they have. Organization Dems don't want to shake the table of goodies and give up the crumbs from the banquet the boot lickers of the rich, the Repubs, scatter like pigeon droppings at their feet.

Daily Dose of Depression (DDD)

2010-11-26T13:04:00.003-05:00

November 25, 2010
Auburn Is Seeing Crimson Over Questions and Rivalry
By MIKE TIERNEY

The most anticipated day of every year in the state of Alabama has arrived with Auburn football devotees caught in a riptide of emotions. . . .

N.C.A.A. violations have landed the Tigers on probation six times, totaling 12 years, since 1956, though none recently. (Alabama received penalties last year for the fourth time since the mid-1990s.) . . . [my emphasis] GO HERE FOR FULL ARTICLE

Does the NCAA need a “Six strikes and you're out rule”? Why would any self-respecting institution of higher education want to put up with a record like this? Why would any self-respecting institution of higher education want to establish, cater to, and cower before an army of team boosters that ignore a record of malfeasance equal to Auburn’s, Alabama's, or _______________, or ____________, or ________________ (you fill in the blanks, many Big Buck Programs to choose from)?

Yeah, the Auburn - Alabama game will be a big game. Anyone with their nose to the wind will be able to smell it.

A Daily Dose of Depression (DDD)

2010-11-22T11:55:00.003-05:00

“WARRINER, Christian M., 19, Pfc., Army; Mills River, N.C.; 101st Airborne Division.”

A little over three years ago lines formed outside of bookstores everywhere. Young people came dressed in costume and makeup. These were serious Harry Potter fans and they were on a mission. The last volume in the J.K. Rowling earth moving series of books was going on sale. “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” was snapped up, devoured and discussed.

At the time, I couldn’t ignore the fact that among these 13 to 19 year old readers, one who might have been there to enjoy the excitement was Ron J. Joshua Jr.. The Department of Defense reported that Pfc. Joshua Jr. was killed in Iraq on July 17, 2007, when a makeshift bomb exploded near his Military Police vehicle.

Of course, the Department of Defense did not provide information as to whether or not Ron J. Joshua Jr. was a reader of the Harry Potter books. If he was, Ron Jr., age 19, did not have the opportunity to read the seventh and final novel in the series. He became one of 229 nineteen year olds who had died in Iraq up to that point.

And now Part One of the movie “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” is premiering. And again 13 to 19 year olds are waiting in line for the movie and enjoying life. And still we have 19 year olds dying in wars far from home.

Last week from the Department of Defense we get this terse announcement of an American service member who has died as a part of the Afghan war-- “WARRINER, Christian M., 19, Pfc., Army; Mills River, N.C.; 101st Airborne Division.”

Nothing on whether or not Christian was a Harry Potter fan who stood in line at age 15, waiting to buy a copy of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.” It’s a pretty good guess that if Mills River, N.C. has a cineplex, Christian would have seen the movie. I hope the film includes this epigraph from J. K. Rowlings’ book,

"Oh, the torment bred in the race,/the grinding scream of death"--Aeschylus

More kids like Ron J. Joshua Jr. and Christian M. Warriner will die in Afghanistan next year and in the years beyond. Will we, a distracted and indifferent people (judging from the silence of the politicians and public on the wars in the last election) ever start to think about how we continue to send 19 year olds into “the grinding scream of death”?

As of November 21, 2010, 329 young people, age 19, have died in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A Daily Dose of Depression (DDD)

2010-11-20T12:33:00.004-05:00

November 19, 2010
SEC Suspends Vols’ Coach for First 8 League Games
By PETE THAMEL

In what could be a harbinger for stiffer penalties for rules breakers in college sports, the Southeastern Conference announced Friday that the Tennessee men’s basketball coach, Bruce Pearl, would be suspended for the first eight league games. . . .
In September, Tennessee cut Pearl’s pay by $1.5 million over five years and prohibited him from participating in off-campus recruiting for a year after he acknowledged that he misled N.C.A.A. investigators about photographs taken of him with a recruit in 2008. Tennessee also found that Pearl and his assistants had broken N.C.A.A. rules by making too many phone calls to recruits. . . .
“I’m in favor of this type of thing,” Hamilton [Mike Hamilton, Tennessee’s athletic director] said. “I think it’s necessary if we’re going to take back control of things in college athletics.”

GO HERE

I guess this means AD Hamilton is admitting things among the Programs of Plenty of Deficits are out of control. As the NYT's pointed out yesterday, "Only 14 of the nation’s 120 major athletic departments reported making a profit in the 2008-09 school year, according to the N.C.A.A." Financial and ethical deficits in college sports--who'd a thunk it?

A Daily Dose of Depression (DDD)

2010-11-19T00:01:00.005-05:00

MobyLives is always worth a visit and some thought. The following DDD comes from this site.

David Foster Wallace: “It becomes more and more difficult to ask people to read …”

A Daily Dose of Depression (DDD)

2010-11-12T21:24:00.003-05:00

And the beat goes on. You lose when you lose and you lose when you win. So now we can add a new phrase to our policy/process hip conversations. “Win-win” situations can be tempered with “lose-lose” realities. At least when it comes to the Big Buck College Athletic programs.

NYT November 11, 2010
How Broken Must College Football Be to Fix It? By GEORGE VECSEY

It is time for my annual foray into the lower depths of higher education — that is to say, the business of Bowl Championship Series football as perpetrated on or near centers of learning. . . .

My theory is, when a university suddenly becomes proficient at football or basketball, it is usually a sign its admissions director is being held hostage in some rural hideaway.

But this is worse. The B.C.S. system turns out to be a private enterprise for the usual suspects in the insider conferences. The top colleges make money, but the big winners are the major bowls — and the administrators thereof.

According to the Sports Illustrated article, Paul Hoolahan, the top executive of the Sugar Bowl, made $607,500 in 2007 and the Sugar Bowl was given $3 million by the hard-strapped Louisiana government.

The big losers are the lucky tigers who get invited to the Cement Shoes Bowl and then lose money that could have gone to athletes or, even better, budding physicists or linguists or cellists and other potential assets to society.[my emphasis]

The same article points out that Virginia Tech and the Atlantic Coast Conference had to purchase 17,500 tickets at $125 each for the 2009 Orange Bowl, but sold only 3,342, for a loss of $1.77 million — surely worth it for a marginal inclusion into Our Thing, as the B.C.S. could be called.

The latest Heisman mess and the B.C.S. shakedown have led me to reconsider my long-held position — “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” — about bowl games and the national championship. . . .

As it is now, only the anointed championship bowl game is worth a glance. And the old concern about keeping the lads from their classrooms and laboratories seems laughable at this stage.

Full article here

A Daily Dose of Depression (DDD)

2010-11-11T11:10:00.001-05:00

Gene Robinson, Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for the Washington Post, MSNBC liberal, all round great man, came to Terre Haute last night. He spoke to the community and the students of Indiana State University about politics and the last election. Sadly, he didn't mention once the failure of the press to cover the issues in depth. Even Mr. Robinson has fallen into the insiders trap of seeing politics as "narrative," sensation, and up or down poll numbers.

How many Americans, after two years of fighting the Bush Depression, can tell you how the economics of the stimulus is/was supposed to work? How many understand what half/no truths went into the catch term "Death Panels"? How many know in a conversant manner about the distribution of income in this country?

It's easy to say (as Robinson seemed to be saying) that the president failed to get his message across on any of this. It's just as easy to say that the press failed to do this job. And unless the press is going to hide its failings behind the lame excuse "We only report what comes out of the White House," don't we all have to say "Thanks for nothing, press corps," that's what you've been giving the American public the past ten years.

A Daily Dose of Depression (DDD)

2010-11-10T13:40:00.004-05:00

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE [from the Republican Study Committee]
11.8.2010

Tackling Spending: Save $25 Billion by Restoring Welfare Reform

Washington, Nov 8 - With the national debt quickly approaching $14 trillion, Washington needs to get serious about cutting spending. One option the next Congress should consider is to restore welfare reform, one of the most successful bipartisan initiatives of the 1990s.

The 1996 welfare reform law created incentives for states to help people get back on their feet and off of taxpayer assistance. However, the 2009 stimulus package created a new “emergency fund” under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program which actually incentivizes states to increase their welfare caseloads without requiring able-bodied individuals to work, get job training, or make other efforts to move off of taxpayer assistance. Specifically, a state must increase its welfare caseloads in order to receive any funding, and states receive an 80% match to cover all expenses associated with increasing their welfare caseloads. This costs taxpayers $2.5 billion each year.

    “The goal of welfare programs should be to help people get back on their feet as quickly as possible rather than simply expanding dependence on government,” said Republican Study Committee Chairman Tom Price (R-GA). “In addition to saving taxpayers $25 billion over the next 10 years, cutting the emergency fund from the President’s failed stimulus package will refocus temporary assistance on its rightful role.”

This is just one of the many common sense spending cuts proposed by the Republican Study Committee. For more, check out the RSC Sunset Caucus and our FY 2011 Budget Plan.

____________________

Go get ‘em debt reduction tigers!

Oh wait!

--- The TANF Emergency Fund no longer exists. It expired on September 30. You can’t achieve savings by ending a program that has already ended.

— Nobody has ever proposed spending $25 billion on the fund. Earlier this year the House passed a bill to extend it for one year, at a cost of $2.5 billion — one-tenth of the savings that the RSC claims.

--- The TANF Emergency Fund is welfare reform. In fact, the fund represents welfare reform at its best: it has enabled states to expand work-focused programs within TANF despite high unemployment and a weak economy. Using the fund, states placed about 250,000 low-income parents and youth in subsidized jobs, mostly in the private sector.

GO HERE: Killing Expired Program Won’t Save Money

A Daily Dose of Depression (DDD)

2010-11-06T12:12:00.004-04:00

CAN THE McRIB SAVE US?
[Go Here]

[On the large space above, I don't know how in the hell it got here and I can't seem to get rid of it. But think of it as the TeaHeePublicans version of John Locke's tabula rasa, a blank slate they never get around to filling in with anything approaching sanity or social kindness.]

Know Your Local Rightist --Vote Democratic Tuesday

2010-10-29T18:15:00.002-04:00

Unemployment
Rightists think the world works in some magical, solid, and mechanical way. Free markets self-regulate, the Constitution is written in stone for all time, and their violence is always provoked and justified.

Let's apply Newton to the Bush Depression, specifically on unemployment:

I. Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it.

We may be ready to follow that great (Not!) Republican and "Just say no to drugs." That’s it, however. A constructive, helpful response to the Bush Depression calls for more than just saying “No!” to personal suffering and “No!” to social-economic decline. Thank you Democrats for providing the needed "external force" that is starting to reverse the conditions created by Bush and the "No!" boys.

Americans should vote Democratic on Tuesday because "Just saying "No!" to needed change" only takes you, your family and your friends backward into the selfish grasp of Bush robot thinking.

Debt
Scrooge McDuck's and the Rightist camp are constantly harping on "more debt." Yes, the U.S. has a debt problem. And yes the U.S. will need to deal with this debt problem--IN THE COURSE OF TIME.

Our country plans on being here long after the 2010 election, long after the the 2012 election, in fact long after we, our children and our childrens' children can no longer rise up and vote. This means our debt as a nation is not the bill we get from our credit card company each month. (And by the way, thank you Obama and Dems for passing consumer protection legislation that at least starts to muzzle the loan sharks running those companies.) Nations work on different time scales than mere mortals.

This means now is not the time for austerity, it's the time for investment. Interest rates are low and unemployment is high. Borrow the money and put people to work. People working are a good thing. Paying low interest charges on investments in people and badly needed infra-structure (roads, bridges, power grids, computer grids, etc.) are a good thing. And collecting taxes from people put back to work is also a good thing.

Rightists are short-sighted and selfish when it comes to planning for the nation. Too much ME and not enough US--as in United States!

Vote Democratic Tuesday and invest in yourself AND your nation.

Government
Rightists want us to fear OUR own government. So much so that they go apoplectic if you call our nation a "democracy" and not a "republic." As if our REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY is some kind a shadowy enemy, a cabal planning to steal our freedoms and liberty rather than assure and protect these wonderful fruits of our still growing, still developing nation. I know, I know, Glen Beck doesn't see it this way. But Glen Beck is an entertainer not an historian; a rich demagogue not an unemployed citizen.

Yes, it's a big government, but this is a big country. Yes, government requires many laws and many workers, but we're a complex and growing society, we can't operate by getting together at the local bar and deciding what we should do about, say, clear cutting in our National Forests or tasting the drugs we’re sold in order to decide if they’re safe or poisonous.

"No!" is not a policy, it's an excuse to ignore problems and run way from citizen responsibilities. "No!" sneers in our faces, saying, "I got mine, you get yours." "No!" is not the best of America.

Vote Democratic on Tuesday remembering it is OUR government and OUR government works for us.

Video: 'Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck' Tribute

A Daily Dose of Depression (DDD)

2010-10-09T11:10:00.001-04:00

Indiana’s public universities vary widely in how much money they spend to educate and graduate students—and none are performing at the top of their peer groups in efficiency, according to a new study commissioned by the Indiana Chamber of Commerce. . . .

The study compares how much in state, local, tuition and fee revenue each school receives per student and per graduate. It then compares each school’s “cost per degree” against a group of peer institutions selected by the school and the Indiana Commission for Higher Education. . . .

Chamber: State universities need to be more efficient

How can you argue with a report that is headlined:

“Chamber: State universities need to be more efficient”?

The magic word “productivity” is scattered throughout the summary of this report like leaves falling from trees in October. And “productivity” in the hands of the C of C is a concept just as brittle and dead as those leaves.

So, before we get all down in the mouth about what the august Chamber has to say as it grinds its usual axe for turning all of life into cogs in a business model, think for a minute about what the “product” of that “productivity” and “efficiency” is supposed to be.

Philosophers and educational theorists have been struggling with the question of what an education should be and do in our society since before the Athenian Chamber of Commerce put Socrates to death. This study is flawed in the many ways already mentioned. It, however, is mainly useless as a guide to policy because it includes an implied definition of what a college should do and create with its resources that is far too narrow and self-serving.

Someone (I think it was Oscar Wilde) once said a cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. I’m not saying a rebranding of the Chamber to Chamber of Cynics is called for, but the C of C’s study of college prices lacks finesse, insight, nuance and understanding. The C. of C., as always, appears to be very good at taking gross numbers and dividing and massaging them into a conclusion that fits their preconceived ideas and political agenda in regard to public expenditures. Can’t you just hear the Larry Kudlow wannabes whining to Mr. Mitch Outsource, “Oh my! Higher education is so expensive. Oh my! Some colleges cost more than others per graduate. Oh my! What a waste of our taxes.”

If value is worth compared to price, shouldn’t we all be paying more attention to that “worth” side of the equation?

A Daily Dose of Depression (DDD)

2010-10-08T12:09:00.005-04:00

Here's a Daily Dose of Depression (which I will sometimes refer to as DDD because I know it's difficult to ask people to read the full name.)

David Foster Wallace on Commercial literature and reading

Banned Books Week

2010-09-28T12:04:00.004-04:00

Banned Books Week: Celebrating the Freedom to Read
September 25-October 2, 2010

Banned Books Week (BBW) is an annual event celebrating the freedom to read and the importance of the First Amendment. Held during the last week of September, Banned Books Week highlights the benefits of free and open access to information while drawing attention to the harms of censorship by spotlighting actual or attempted bannings of books across the United States. . . .

The Top Ten Ludicrous Reasons To Ban A Book

1. “Encourages children to break dishes so they won’t have to dry them.” (A Light in the Attic , by Shel Silverstien)

2. “It caused a wave of rapes.” ( Arabian Nights, or One Thousand and One Nights)

3. “If there is a possibility that something might be controversial, then why not eliminate it?” ( Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, by Dee Brown)

4. “Tarzan was ‘living in sin’ with Jane.” ( Tarzan, by Edgar Rice Burroughs)

5. “It is a real ‘downer.’” ( Diary of Anne Frank, by Anne Frank)

6. “The basket carried by Little Red Riding Hood contained a bottle of wine, which condones the use of alcohol.” ( Little Red Riding Hood, by Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm K. Grimm)

7. “One bunny is white and the other is black and this ‘brainwashes’ readers into accepting miscegenation.”
( The Rabbit’s Wedding, by Garth Williams)

8. “It is a religious book and public funds should not be used to purchase religious books.” ( Evangelical Commentary on the Bible, by Walter A. Elwell, ed.)

9. “A female dog is called a bitch.” ( My Friend Flicka, by Mary O’Hara)

10. “An unofficial version of the story of Noah’s Ark will confuse children.” ( Many Waters, by Madeleine C. L’Engle)

Tests and Other Cheap Schemes to Avoid Real Educational Reforms

2010-08-27T12:13:00.003-04:00

Tests, tests, tests. Teach the tests. Cheat on the tests. Use all class time for tests. Revise the tests. Make the parents take the tests. Make School Board members take the tests. Make Mitch take the tests. Test State Superintendent of Education Bennett. Test Larry Bird. Test Big Bird. Test Republicans. Test bloggers, test editorial writers, test radio talk mouths . Test middle-line backers. Test point guards. Test school bus drivers. Test the test makers. Test the test scorers. Test babies. Test nursing home dwellers. Test cops. Test criminals. Test preachers. Test sinners. Test preachers who are sinners and cops who are criminals. Test the poor. Test the rich. Test tax payers. Test tax cheats.

Ah, there, now we have an educated community.

________________________________________________________________________________

I'm not being entirely facetious. Testing and its high falutin' siblings "outcomes" and “accountability” and “measurement” fill every discussion of so-called school reforms. All assume that which we call education can be added up, plotted, graphed, and bottled. It can’t.

We spit in teacher’s faces at every convenient point in our frustration with children, teens, and adults who do not know what we think they should know. We use tests and “merit (sic) pay” tactics to justify our frustrations. School boards put serious money into dodges peddled by computer and textbook hustlers who, get this, guarantee their costly mechanistic fixes are “teacher proof”!

Ah, isn’t this a good way to attract the best, the brightest, the committed to the teaching profession?

Testing measures what is known. Testing cannot instill in students, or more than impressionistically calculate, curiosity, imagination, a love of reading, intellectual adventure, critical thinking, security in the face of the unknown. Test scores are arid and hollow artifacts of time wasted. Test scores are without lasting meaning.

As George Orwell wrote in 1984, his famous distopian novel, “Sanity is not statistical.” Testing as an end in itself is not sane educational policy, practice or philosophy.

You love your kids? You think real education is important to their and their nation’s life? Then pay the price. That price includes paying for the best prepared teachers, paying for teachers prepared in their subject matter, paying for small class size, paying for lighter teaching loads, paying for pre- and after school support of students, paying for Master teachers to mentor beginning teachers. In short, paying for what we say we want from education but try to find through cheap, misguided short-cuts in tests, gimmicks and “merit pay” schemes.

2010-07-25T21:00:00.005-04:00

(go here) The War Logs --Afghanistan

An archive of classified military documents offers an unvarnished view of the war in Afghanistan

NYT July 25, 2010
In Disclosing Secret Documents, WikiLeaks Seeks ‘Transparency’
By ERIC SCHMITT

WikiLeaks.org, the online organization that posted tens of thousands of classified military field reports about the Afghan war on Sunday, says its goal in disclosing secret documents is to reveal “unethical behavior” by governments and corporations.

Since it was founded in December 2006, WikiLeaks has exposed internal memos about the dumping of toxic material off the African coast, the membership rolls of a racist British party, and the American military’s manual for operating its prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

“We believe that transparency in government activities leads to reduced corruption, better government and stronger democracies,” the organization’s Web site says. “All governments can benefit from increased scrutiny by the world community, as well as their own people. We believe this scrutiny requires information.”

The trove of war reports posted Sunday dwarfs the scope and volume of documents that the organization has made public in the past. . . .

_________________________________

Read these logs.

Perhaps they will help you to feel like you’re more involved in this longest of American wars. The Summer Movies, the NEW TV season, the latest version of a gadget that allows you to glue it to your ear and take turns telling acquaintances the cool stuff you just did, like eat a whole pizza or smile at someone you “OMG don’t even know,” all present “teasers” to bring you on board their diversion expresses. Would you call the following excerpts from the War Logs “teasers”? Maybe not.

November 28, 2006

Gardez Orphanage Ribbon Cutting

- The PRT Commander gave a speech about how honored we were to help the orphans and presented a leather jacket to the man who runs the orphanage. The jacket was donated by a friend of the commander in the United States with instructions to give it to someone special. The commander stated that she could think of no one more deserving then someone who cared for orphans. . .

December 20, 2006

- We expressed our concern that when we conducted a follow-up check of the orphanage that we opened [in Gardez] a couple weeks ago, we found very few orphans living there and could not find most of the HA we had given them. He stated he was also concerned about what was going on over there and has no idea what they did with the money that he gave during the ribbon cutting which was supposed to be divided among the orphans. He does not believe they got any benefit from the funds. He also stated that he had only seen about 30 orphans, not the 102 that the orphanage director said lived there. He said he would have the Director of Social Affairs follow-up.

October 16, 2007

SOCIAL: The PRT visited the Gardez Orphanage to conduct an assessment and drop HA and toys to the center. There are currently no orphans at the facility due to the Holiday (note: orphans are defined has having no father, but may still have mother and a family structure that will have them home for holidays.) Governor ———— states that the Red Crescent fund raiser (donation tickets) for winter relief has begun in the Province and will be collecting funds to aid the unfortunate during severe winter weather.
__________________________

Most Americans have paid little for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Without a draft, the deaths and the wounds, the long stretch of emotional healing following multiple deployments, have and are being borne by relatively few. Most who suffer are unknown to you and me. Spouses and parents of those who serve are affected directly; friends and neighbors of these warriors acknowledge and recognize their sacrifices; most at home, far from the wars, are untouched–most of the untouched act accordingly. And in these days of debates over the economy, tax cuts and tax increases, budget deficits and rising national debt, need it be mentioned that we are not paying for these wars. We are putting them on the tab, costs to be paid for by future generations.

Shut Up, Barton. Love is never having to say "I'm sorry ." And we know who you love, baby.

2010-06-18T11:31:00.005-04:00

President Obama said he was taking names and kicking oilasses. He did just that.

Now here’s the Republican response to BP’s crime. They shuffle in, hat in hand, heads bowed, and we have to hear conservative bigwigs Steele, Bachman, Price, Inhofe, Barton and how many others, issue apologies to BP!

Next thing you know Paul and Palin, embarrassed by the anger of the “small people” of America, will be suggesting we should all shape up, see the real good in corporate giants who have their heels on our collective necks. Maybe the Drill, Baby, Drill crowd wants us to send Hallmark cards thanking BP for their great work in the Gulf. Sounds like it.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06...

“Republicans on the Hill have calculated that President Obama's successful demand that BP set up a $20 billion escrow account to pay out claims is ripe for political attack. In the wake of Wednesday's White House announcement, a host of GOP officials are raising questions about both the process by which the deal was made and the deal itself -- going so far as to apologize to BP on America's behalf.

"I'm ashamed of what happened in the White House yesterday," said Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tex.) during a hearing on Thursday morning with BP's CEO Tony Hayward.

BP did the crime; BP should pay their dime.

Thank you President Obama for doing the very angry “small people’s” work so well.

The Rich and Taxes: On and On

2010-06-14T00:34:00.004-04:00

On the rich and taxes, and in the realm of "you learn something every day, even what you should have already known," here's news of the super rich fighting the income tax in the 1920s and early in the New Deal:

Quote:

". . . the publisher of The Wall Street Journal, Clarence W. Barron, argued that ending Prohibition would enable the government to collect $2 billion a year and abolish the income tax. In 1926, Pierre du Pont’s brother Irénée told an associate that General Motors would save $10 million in corporate taxes each year with the return of the alcohol levies. Irénée’s specific solution — imposition of a 3-cent tax on every glass of beer — would, effectively, make the working poor and the unemployed finance tax relief for the rich. . . .

By 1930, the chemical du Ponts had recruited a roster of other gilt-edged names to their anti-Prohibition cause: automotive Fishers, financial Harrimans, oil Harknesses, rubber Goodriches. Their publicity campaign featured pamphlets like “What Price Prohibition?” (Answer: with the return of legal alcohol, “the necessity of levying income taxes would be eliminated”) and “The Cost of Prohibition and Your Income Tax.” [Daniel Orkent, NYT, 6-13-10]

The rich lead the "deficit crazies"* charge today. The "not and never will be rich" blindly follow their master's lead. Look for the "deficit crazies" to next be telling us that a fair, progressive tax system can be replaced with a New and Improved Lottery game. Or how about a dime sin tax on every long neck bottle of beer?

On the other hand, the rich will lobby and lie to keep the government away from their single malt scotch, the Bombay gin filling their long stemmed martini glasses, and all the wine they've stashed in the cellars of their mansions and multiple vacation "getaways."

We are regularly told these are the perks the rich justly deserve for their business innovations. Right! You know, deep sea oil drilling, derivative financial instruments, another useless and dangerous over the counter drug. And they do throw alms in our direction--the names of the rich and powerful adorn many a stadium and monument.

*"deficit crazies," as best I have been able to find, is a term coined by economists to describe those who sincerely, or as a political smoke screen (for example, Mitch McConnell's "No!" theatrics), reject a needed second stimulus on the grounds that such expenditures will add to the current deficit and the national debt. They term this "craziness" because without an economic stimulus to pull the United States out of the economic hole of the Bush Depression unemployment will remain high, tax revenues low and recovery delayed into a future time no one can come close to predicting. They also see this as "craziness" because now is the perfect time, economically, for a stimulus--interest rates are low and inflation is under control. None of these economist dismiss deficits and debt as not being important. They, however, want America to work its way out of the doldrums, not wait our way out. Too much pain and suffering affecting too many Americans to do nothing about it NOW.

Memorial Day 2010-- Two Wars Roll On

2010-05-31T10:55:00.004-04:00

Readers' Forum: May 31, 2010

The Tribune-Star

TERRE HAUTE — Our duty to remember on two fronts

Once again we honor the dead of our past wars, recognizing the sacrifices they made for all of us. This should always be job one over the Memorial Day weekend. Job two should be thinking about the dead and the sacrifices taking place in our two unending wars of choice in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We get only random news blips from the media about these wars. Some say the bothersome war blips are telling us that “Americans are wearying of the wars” and that Obama is losing credibility on this issue.

Solemn celebrations are in order if these fleeting info bits are true. Of course, they are not.

Did this news come through to you last month?

Costs of the two wars: $1 trillion and counting ($60 billion added to the total just last week) and, more devastating, 1,000 brave Americans have now died in the nearly nine-year-old war in Afghanistan.

These two markers, menacing and dark monuments, were reached with barely a nod from the press. The public’s response? We choose to nod off, turn the page, grab for the remote, go shopping.

Faced with two wars of unending duration and astronomical costs in dollars, human life and physical and mental wreckage, what do we get from politicians, the press and the public? A muffled, static-filled silence. Our elected officials rubber stamped Bush’s arrogant folly and Obama’s sleep walking centrism takes us along the same bloody path to nowhere.

Our leaders think and act on what appears from every angle to be the people’s wishes — more guns and more sad glory at future Memorial Day remembrances.

Seven years of failure in Iraq, and still counting

2010-03-29T15:31:00.007-04:00

Almost unnoticed, the war in Iraq has just entered year number eight. Anti-war demonstrators gathered in front of the courthouse on Third Street to mark this anniversary of dark failure. Many in this group have been demonstrating since before the March 19, 2003, invasion of Iraq.

To them, I say thank you for your dedication, your commitment. It’s a tragedy that the truth of your vision and clear reason was not recognized and acted on seven years ago.

Seven long and costly years. You may recall the rush to war in March 2003. One of the stated reasons given for this unseemly haste to embrace tragic consequences was a stated concern for our troops. It was frequently mentioned by leaders of this scramble into war that to delay war would mean our operations might stretch all the way into the hot weather of summer 2003.

Weather is often a factor in the conduct of wars. We missed this forecast big time.

What do we celebrate after seven years of war? “Victory” has not been realized, not even defined. “Mission Accomplished” is a standard phrase for failure among political satirists. The present conditions in Iraq, after hundreds of billions of dollars and two elections, remain forlorn and combustible.

I wonder if the water and electricity in Baghdad are on yet.

Given the bleak present and the pall hanging over the future, we’re left with the shreds of the past to sift through. But who has the stomach for another post-mortem on the harum-scarum search for WMDs? Should we revisit the war plans that resulted in a deadly shower of IEDs instead of Cheney’s promised candy and flowers? Can we bear to look again at the human toll, 4,300 brave Americans and 100,000 Iraqis dead? And the crippled in body and mind beyond count.

One of the most recent fallen heroes in the Iraq-Afghanistan wars came from Hungry Horse, Montana. He was 12 years old when the Iraq war began. Did you know any 12-year-olds back in 2003? Do you know any today?
__________________

The Tribune-Star

Second Stimulus Needed to Make Smith's "Invisible Hand" Visible

2010-03-09T21:37:00.003-05:00

Enthusiasts who turn their religions, spiritual or secular, into cults, often find it necessary to cleanse their founding fathers of ideas that do not fit current conditions. So we have market fundamentalists today sweating hard over the idea that the magic market will pull us out of the Bush Depression. Sorry, it’s not to be. Only some form of Keynesian stimulus will do this in a timely manner. Without a second stimulus, and it needs to be a big stimulus, one directed at big and much needed infrastructure projects, we will dwaddle along for a decade, living with misery that could be averted.

Many will suffer needlessly because ideologues grabbed the ear of noodle-spined pols and naive, “give-me-the-easy-answer” citizens.

One of the founding saints of the religion of the magic market was Adam Smith. But don’t look for who this great thinker really was in the way his thoughts and views are twisted and distorted by his followers today.

Here's Andrew B. Busch on some ignored truths about Adam Smith:

“[Adam] Smith never used the phrase ‘laissez-faire’. His association with the idea was an invention in the 19th century and was widely promoted by modern economists from the mid-1950s. About this time Smith was also widely promoted as the author of the notion of there being “an invisible hand” in the market. Both inventions are false.

“There were hundreds of miles of inter-city roads in need of construction and repair; scores of harbours that needed to be built and dredged; thousands of bridges in need of construction; hundreds of towns that need to be paved and have street lighting in place; thousands of ‘little school’ constructed and staffed with state-registered teachers; scores of palliative care hospitals established for those afflicted with ‘loathsome diseases’; scores of depots for stamping clothes with government quality marks; a network of post-offices established and organised; and likewise for all the other activities that Smith envisaged should be funded and managed by the state.”

Go here

Is Reading on a Screen Reading?

2010-01-29T22:50:00.009-05:00

When are we going to realize that readers of ten, twenty, forty years ago are not the same as the non-readers reared on iPhones and video games? I would guess that Daniel Akst (“Apple's tablet and the future of literature,” Los Angeles Times, Jan. 24, 2010) grew up a reader of traditional print sources. He stacked up a nice vault full of print on the page reading capital; acquired the skills of concentration, self-motivated imagination, and patience. This is what Daniel Akst's children and ours will be missing as books on screen blur and destabilize reading practices. (See Mary Anne Wolf's Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.) And what will be there instead? Gone or severely compromised will be what readers of print on the page eagerly searched for and expected while reading a great book. All lost and/or diminished as screen readers dash to the next, and then the next, surface stimulus. Readers in the past sought comprehension and meaning; readers of screens surf and skim. And what should we expect from a generation raised on twittering?

[A version of this appeared in the LA Times, "Letters to the Editor," Jan. 31, 2010]

It's a Good Day for Democrats -- 3

2010-01-23T12:44:00.005-05:00

Always remember this.

Even Scott Brown knows this:

-if nothing is done, by 2019 there will be 57 million Americans without health care insurance,

-if nothing is done, by 2019 employer paid health care insurance will cost $20,000+ per employee, up $10,000 from current costs.

This is why Scot Brown and Mitt Romney support the Massachusetts health care system which goes beyond that proposed in the Senate.

And just what do the Tea Partiers and Republicans propose to do with these facts staring America in the face? "No!" and Nothing are the only responses coming from their direction. To Republicans and Tea Partiers I say, write a program meeting these problems. Do it in 2 pages or 2000 pages, but let's hear some specifics engaging these realities.

Listen carefully. Hear the silence.

Republicans in Congress won't produce a program because they know the complex facts of the problem of health care reform. This makes them hypocrites every time they criticize the Democrats efforts.

Tea Partiers will never provide answers to pressing policy problems because they are not about the well being of the nation, only about applying ego-salve to their pathetic personal feelings of loss and inadequacy. This makes them a bunch of adolescent whiners.

This being the case, the Democrats should push, shove, force, their health care program through. Let the babies who stand on the sideline waving their empty rattles get all red in the face. Democrats need to show some backbone, some statesmanship, some political courage. They should work to make history and quit looking over their shoulders at the next election. That's for do-nothing, lobbyfied, bending to the wind, Tea Party petrified, Republicans.

And never forget this.

It's a Good Day for Democrats --2

2010-01-22T12:54:00.008-05:00

Always remember this.

It's a good day for Democrats.

As we well know, no explanations are necessary in these Tea Party Times when emotions rule and "No!" is the extent and essence of the Republican’s program. In this political climate, reasoned explanations are superfluous. Democrats need to hammer home the reality of the Bush Depression and Republican and conservative opposition to doing anything about economic suffering. The people suffering and those with sense and fellow feeling will vote accordingly.

But there is work to be done. And method precedes object.

Senator elect Cosmo won on what is being called "public unease." The Democrats can win on this as well. They need to point (keep pointing, and point some more) their finger at the causes of this unease--the Bush Depression and Republican inaction/obstructionism. The prosperous bond traders and bankers will howl, clueless Teabaggers will grimace, and those unemployed and unable to send their kids to school in new clothes in September will vote Democratic in November.

Real Democrats need to get on message. Send the yellow dogs to a kennel in limbo. They are a part of a puppy mill that soils the truths of what real Democrats stand for. Better a vanguard of idealists than a motley crew of scavenger camp followers.

Work from the central belief that the Republicans can only go so far on the oil of hollow slogans and the fumes of fear. Trust the voters. Educate and establish for the public the truth that the Republicans are without solutions or substance.

Democrats should repeat this every day and into any microphone that comes within fifteen feet. They should not explain themselves at length. They should punch home job stimulus legislation, heavy bank regulations, taxes on bail out bonus greed, and cuts in defense spending which can be reinvested in the domestic economy. The value of these steps are self-evident and should be proposed and achieved in this tone.

When challenged on any of this, the Democrats should shrug their shoulders and say, "Of course this is what we are doing. Bush wrecked the country and the minority Republicans offer nothing to help the people and the nation he wrecked."

[Version of this appeared in Terre Haute Tribune Star, Feb. 2, 2010.]

And never forget this.

It's a Good Day for Democrats -- 1

2010-01-21T22:43:00.006-05:00

It's a good day for Democrats.

Massachusetts should show the Obama administration what they are up against and that kid gloves treatment with the minority Republicans only means they are acting like kids. Polarization? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Think about the Democrats: post Massachusetts. They can pretend to be Republicans or they can act like FDR liberal Democrats. Which choice would you make if you were a yellow dog, say Indiana's Senator Bayh or Representative Ellsworth and the Republicans put up another Cosmo centerfold type candidate against you? I say these two leaning right Dems can only lose votes (to say nothing of self-respect) by taking on the role of counterfeit Republicans.

Perhaps these counterfeit candidates, and the Democratic party as a whole, will finally take those soft kid gloves off and start the political alley fight that’s needed. If they fail to do this, refuse to use the ideology and tools of New Deal liberalism to the hilt, they lose.

So here’s the agenda:

–-the House should pass the Senate version of the health care bill making it unnecessary to pass a conference committee version of the bill in the Senate,

-- move full steam ahead on bank regulation and greedy bonus payout to the execs on Wall Street (let the Republicans defend their own),

–immediately propose another stimulus to the economy and add long term projects in the mix,

–be bold on military hardware waste and close 70 unneeded bases open around the world; redirect parts of these savings to true Homeland security, starting with our ports and the shipping security,

–take whatever steps are necessary to end the filibuster rule in the Senate (it’s not a law, it’s not in the U.S. Constitution, the Tea Party should support this move), if it ends up in the Supreme Court, so be it. This action will educate the public and show the nation that one party, the Democrats (liberal version) is not afraid of democracy.

[Go here for clear and fair discussion: Filibuster ]

President Obama should announce this agenda in his State of the Union address this month. Congress should put these bills up for a vote in the next three months. Let’s see if the real Democrats will swallow a cup of starch and stand up straight. (Bye, bye Bayh and Ellsworth?) This will all add to the record of the Republicans obstruction of needed legislation supported by large majorities in both houses of Congress.

The Democrats can attack or drift. Massachusetts demonstrated the rewards of drift. Massachusetts represents a good day for the Democrats if it sends them into attack mode.

Ruth Lilly, 1915-2009

2010-01-06T22:41:00.007-05:00

[Ruth Lilly died on Dec. 30, 2009. I repost this in her honor and for her support of the arts, most famously and fittingly, poetry.]

Two Ruths to Remember

[gary daily col. 46 December 22, 2002]

Ten Cents A Dance
That's what they pay me
Gosh how they weigh me down.
-- from the Ruth Etting album "Ten Cents a Dance," Living Era, 1926

It would be easy to fill this column with “Ruths.”

I could linger on the likes of Ruth Benedict the path-breaking anthropologist, Dr. Ruth the diminutive Smasher of Sex Shams and Shames, the incomparable Ruth Etting quoted at the head of this piece, and Ruth Gordon, the great actress who once profoundly asked: “Why should ruts be so comfortable and so popular?” (Why, indeed?)

But the Ruths I sing about, or at least mumble in praise of today, are Ruth Stone and Ruth Lilly.

These Ruths have had a recent splash of ink in the papers and 30 second news spots on the tube. Their lives and contributions, however, are tied to something deeper and more meaningful than the media’s attempt to freeze a moment of the passing parade. They have lived long lives touched, guided, dominated, suffused, given over to, and enriched by a love for the consuming and creation of poetry.

Ruth Stone is a poet. She is this year’s winner of the National Book Award for poetry, but she is not, as one account reported, “a sweet old lady.” As Dinita Smith notes it in her New York Times profile, “There are words in Ms. Stone's poems that cannot be printed in this newspaper, even for art's sake. The words are not written for effect, they are there because of a brutal honesty.”

Maybe not “sweet” then, but there’s no reason to avoid “old” in descriptions of Ruth Stone. She’s 87. And certainly the “brutal honesty” stands. Here are a few lines from the National Book Award-winning volume, In the Next Galaxy (Copper Canyon Press):

"Tied a silk cord around his meat neck
and hung his meat body, loved though it was,
in order to insure absolute quiet,
on the back of a rented door in SoHo."

Tough stuff, no? Tougher yet when you know that this poem, "The Electric Fan and the Dead Man (or the widow as a useful object toward the end of the century)," is about her husband who committed suicide in 1959. Stone calls her husband "Serial-killer of my days," in another poem, "March 15, 1998."

Unsentimental, unflinching. These hard memories are one source for her art, a gash of memory never to heal, underlining the constancy of a great poet to her art. Sharon Olds, a friend and renowned poet says, "It's as if she hasn't heard that you're supposed to sugar it up."

It seems safe to say that one “R. Lyly” was thrilled to see four of her poems published by the New York Times in 1939. One of those poems included the lines:

“Secure in plush upholstery
I wink a torpid eye
and note above the plaudits
the needle of your sigh.”

Read those lines again. If you tasted sugar in the first reading, you’re certain to find bitterness in a second sampling.

This poem, with its hint of Emily Dickinson, has been attributed to Ruth Lilly, the billionaire Indianapolis philanthropist. Last month this Ruth bestowed a gift of $100 million on Poetry.

Poetry is the oldest and the most prestigious poetry magazine in the country. It has published poets of international importance continuously since its founding in 1912. Journals and magazines of poetry come and go, foundering after running against financial rocks that are very real, not symbols. Even a journal with the reputation and history of Poetry continues to exist through the kindness of friends and the hard work of volunteers.

Many a wag has used the line over the years that only one letter spells the difference between “poetry’ and “poverty.” The journal Poetry has scrambled to survive for decades. It operates out of two small, donated offices in the basement of the Newberry Library in Chicago. The magazine pays the poets it publishes only slightly more than the “Ten Cents a Dance” Ruth Etting plaintively croons about in her signature (poem) song. The going rate at Poetry? Should a contemporary Will Shakespeare show up with a fourteen-line sonnet today, he could walk away with 28 bucks in his breeches.

Now, with intelligence and generosity unheard of since the Medici, Ruth Lilly of Indianapolis, a poet four times rejected for publication by Poetry, has demonstrated to all a love for a form of expression that dates back at least 3000 years. Are corporate and government leaders paying attention? The arts starve in this country. While Americans' minds grow obese with trivia, the arts, the spirit sources of curiosity and imagination, shrink from the anorexia of neglect.

Finally, did I mention that Ruth Lilly, like Ruth Stone, is also eighty-seven years of age? Or that Ruth Stone also grew up, albeit in very different circumstances, in Indianapolis, Indiana?

It’s wonderful to imagine these two Ruth’s, sitting together, talking of their life paths--lives so very different in details yet so alike in their passion for poetry. I like to think of them discussing and laughing about the opening lines of Ruth Stone’s poem, “1941":

I wore a large brim hat
like the women in the ads.
How thin I was: such skin.
Yes. It was Indianapolis;
a taste of sin.

Cutting Through the Smoke, Again and Still

2009-11-30T17:44:00.005-05:00

It's my hope that we continue to return to the topic of banning smoking in venues opening their doors to the public until we finally, the last car on the nation's train to a healthy environment , pass state wide legislation doing so.

Sometimes late, but always appreciated, help for this thoroughly researched, reasoned and needed legislation comes from surprising sources. Here's the Indy Star editorializing on the need for the ban in Indianapolis. It answers all the flimsy and irrelevant questions opponents always put forward.

Indy Star editorial
November 30, 2009

The best answer: pass the ban . . .

GO HERE

Interestingly, no comment on this issue from the state's supposedly #1 health advocate, My Man Mitch. He is silent. Why so mute, Mitch? Are you working on a plan to outsource all second-hand smoke? Keep it up My Man, you'll soon be seeing more and more of those "Ditch Mitch" banners as people cut through the haze of smoke you’ve been blowing.
______________

Earlier posts on need for smoking ban, HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE.

Obama should not escalate war in Afghanistan

2009-11-11T11:48:00.004-05:00

General McChrystal wants to fight the Taliban insurrectionists with a retread version of the utopian “hearts and minds” strategy. Only those narrowed by military arrogance linked to cultural ignorance and papered over with willful disregard for the facts on the ground would consider putting such a strategy into effect. Why should anyone assume an outside force armed to the teeth on the ground and raining indiscriminate death from the sky via drones and bombers can turn an entire country of isolated mountain villages into something akin to Switzerland?

Read Alissa J. Rubin’s “New York Times” report from Afghanistan. She catches the thinking that circulates through village markets every day and is bantered about each night around the family meal. Americans and NATO forces are seen as inept occupiers who will someday leave. Afghans who are not powerfully placed puppets and profiteers see no upside in supporting the supporters of the corrupt regime in Kabul.

So, remembering the defeat of the Soviets and other western powers in the past, the man on the dusty street, the village Afghani, scoffs at our efforts.

“What have the Americans done in eight years?” asked Abdullah Wasay, 60, a pharmacist in Charikar, a market town about 25 miles north of Kabul, expressing a view typical of many here. “Americans are saying that with their planes they can see an egg 18 kilometers away, so why can’t they see the Taliban?”

Hawkish conservatives in the United States are the first to cry out for local solutions to local problems. These blind hawks, the Sultans of the Surge to Nowhere, mindlessly argue every domestic problem can be solved on the local level. I propose they listen to this ideologically simpatico brother, Mohammed Younnis. Here is his analysis:

“They [the Taliban] are the sons of this country, it is right to negotiate with the Taliban,” said Mohammed Younnis, a shopkeeper in Charikar who sells tea, sugar and grains.

“This government is Afghan, and the Taliban are Afghan; they should build the country together,” he said.

President Obama should not escalate the war in Afghanistan. It may have been a “necessary war” when bin Laden was crouching in a cave. He is long gone. This war is now a bloody mountain quagmire.

— Gary W. Daily

Nov. 11, 2009, Terre Haute Tribune Star

So the question now is . . .

2009-09-27T18:14:00.007-04:00

Terre Haute Tribune Star, FLASHPOINT: Will Obama, et al., do the right thing? September 25, 2009

TERRE HAUTE — Spotted during the recent Tea Party protest held in Washington, D.C., was a sign proclaiming this tasteless solution to America’s health care crisis: “Bury Obamacare With Kennedy!” Those assembled at this anti-health care reform, anti-Obama, anti-the-way-the-world-is-going-for-me gathering were doing what they do best, expressing their fears and frustrations with wildly misguided fierceness.

How different from the hope and good feelings pouring out of our capital city just eight short months ago.

Do you remember the poster signs Americans waved with pride at President Obama’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2009? If you were watching, you probably saw signs announcing “This Is Our Moment” and “A Great Beginning.” But “Moments” and “Beginnings,” auspicious as they may be, are just that, brief points of birth. No “Moment” guarantees winning the future; no “Beginning” secures expectations.

For the 2 million Americans at the inauguration and the many millions more who watched the proceedings on TV with a lump in the throat, the signs we should remember and act on from that beautiful day are these: “Work for Change!” and “Be the Change!”

And now come, depending on your source, the “thousands” (the New York Times) or “tens of thousands” (Fox News) or “two million” (Rush Limbaugh) who turned out for the Tea Party Express protest in Washington.

The leaders at this event spent a good amount of their time patting their audience on the back for their underdog status (though most probably have jobs and health insurance), misrepresenting themselves as populists (though most have never read the socialist leaning Populist Party platform of 1892) and claiming all involved were in the vanguard of change that will “rein in government” (though most are probably rabid to extend our government’s reach around the world).

This vanguard of the haves was repeatedly assured that they were “patriot revolutionaries.” Fine, the scent of revolution in the air can be healthy for democracy.

But isn’t there a contradiction here? Shouldn’t revolutionaries show at least a modest inclination to accept change in the world in which they live? And doesn’t everything these antis say, write and do scream out a fear of change? “Change” scares and angers the antis. Omelets and revolutions are not made without breaking eggs. These reactionaries are having their breakfast fare sunny-side up with grits, the official food of South Carolina, on the side.

No one can deny a kind of diversity within the ranks of the protesters. There were hard-charging Tea Baggers, “birthers,” “deniers,” Ron Paul acolytes and Ayn Rand enthusiasts. Semi-courageous ultra-conservative pols turned out to fish for votes they had at “Hello.” And the two “Joes” were in attendance. Or at least Addison Graves Wilson Sr., forever to be known as Joe “The Yeller” Wilson, was represented by his hot item “You Lie” T-shirt. Joe No. 1, “Joe the Plumber,” never again to be known as Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, made a speech supporting guns over plungers as the weapon of choice. So it was a brightly mottled crew, all angry, all afraid — of something.

The timid who are fearful of the future and so much else hoisted their sentiments in front of every camera available. From their posters we could learn this: “Obamacare makes me sick,” “Obama — The Greatest Communist President We Ever Had,” “Obama Lies — Grandma Dies,” and “Congress: are you stoned or just stupid? Please wake up and save America.”

The more venomous elements among these imitation revolutionaries waved placards making certain all knew that, “The Zoo has an African and the White House a Lyin” and “We came unarmed [this time].” Nice bit of work, no? Colonel Glenn Beck must have been proud of his logic-challenged, status quo-supporting troops.

Right wing zealots, whipped badly in the 2008 election, are whipped up daily by the Becks and the Limbaughs. These ranters pollute public discourse and are responsible to no one or thing other than their ratings and bank accounts. They target Obama, Congress, taxes, Ted Kennedy and whatever suits their fancy. But the simple ideology underlying the views of the celebrities of the lie and the half-lie that gets transposed onto clueless poster comments were spelled out on this sign: “We are under attack by our own government.”

“We are under attack by our own government.” It is this view which justifies dismissing these protesters as hollow radicals and not thoughtful patriots. They lost an election, they are losing every fact-based debate and they just won’t take it anymore. They are saying to themselves and to us, your government isn’t to our liking, That’s it. Government is an assailant and the enemy — “We are under attack . . .”

But say what you will about messengers of fear who fail to supply even a minute nudge in the direction of a solution to any of our nation’s real problems, they are effective in creating targets to dread and detest. And for some people these fabricated targets do create anxiety and anger with no place to go other than into the waters of egotistical hysteria.

So the question now is will Obama, Bayh, Ellsworth and the Democratic Party of Indiana ignore the manufactured discontent and directionless anger of the far right and work to provide all Americans with health care, sorely needed financial regulation and crucial energy/conservation legislation? If these leaders do not, all of us who voted for and embrace constructive change need to “Work for Change!” “Be the Change!” And when we do, and if necessary, we may need to turn our backs on those who are deserting us less than a year after assuring all that “This Is Our Moment!”
--Gary W. Daily

Manipulative, Mendacious and Misinformed Menagerie

2009-09-07T13:20:00.004-04:00

It’s depressingly clear that bleating sheep are listening to chattering parrots which are fed crackers handed out by crafty and self-aggrandizing orangutans. This is unfair to the animals being referenced, but it nails the source, flow and targeted herd of those opposing health care reform.

Perched in skyscraper treetops above the hurly burly of real life, secure in times of hardship as well as prosperity, imperious orangutans ultimately call the shots. The orangutans of Big Pharma, Big Insurance, Big Profits ask not what they can do for the citizens who create the luxurious penthouse tree tops they permanently inhabit. Their vision for those below begins and ends with the flattening of life into a bottom line. For the orangutans it’s all about business. And the crumbs falling from the cake they enjoy from on high are used to satisfy those who only think crumbs, have only experienced crumbs, only expect crumbs.

Pointing sharp talons at imagined and conveniently created enemies, blathering on and on with crooked tongues, the parrots of paranoia squawk incessantly from the echo chambers of talk radio and the Fix News channel. Chattering their way to the bank, they deposit droppings of exaggeration, bluster, and communal indifference along a twisting, worn path laid down long ago by the orangutans, their cracker dispensing masters. The path they screech and preach is beaten dusty by naive and nervous sheep.

Protesting mindlessly, denouncing everything from imagined “death panels” to a nefarious plan to “take away my medicare” and replace it with a government program (!?!), the uninformed, misinformed and don’t inform me sheep, bleat out their ignorance of the facts. Primed by the parrots, patronized by the orangutans, this much-handled herd turn their backs into ever-stiffening rods, their brains into one-way sponges, and their hearts into stone. They mistrust democracy because they only understand the narrowed, self-interested world molded for them by those who fear democracy.

This is the animal domain of the healthcare opposition in America. You may enter it out of curiosity and frustration, but it deserves nothing but contempt. You cannot reason or compromise with sheep, parrots and orangutans. Health care reform requires that we choose to exist outside of this menagerie’s uncaring indifference.

We must have health care reform that recognizes those in need but who go without; health care which protects those of limited resources who live each day with anxiety and pain; health care reform which serves the community at large because we are a community not an animal reservation.

Orangutans will bellow, while reaching for more, ever more: “Inefficient! Unfair. Dangerous.”

Parrots will bob and sweat, prattling on: “Un American! Socialism. Hitler. Be afraid.”

Sheep will be sheep. But perhaps between bleats they will admit that the luck of a healthy childhood and a crisis free old age is not guaranteed. Adults recognize a family’s medical needs shouldn’t depend on luck. They acknowledge that erratic luck is no substitute for a health care system serving all, available to all, and paid for by all.

When we achieve this as a nation community, we will be expressing to all and to ourselves the power of democracy and the core of our humanity.

Rainbows and Dreams Come to Terre Haute

2009-09-03T00:04:00.003-04:00

“Follow the fellow who follows a dream.”

The New York Times’ Bob Herbert did a nice job on the Kennedy brothers in his column last week, using this theme:

“But I always found ‘Finian’s Rainbow’ to be a more appropriate touchstone for the family, especially the song ‘Look to the Rainbow,’ with the moving lyric, ‘Follow the fellow who follows a dream.’”

An added bonus is this Terre Haute sighting in the column:

“The Kennedy message was always to aim higher, and they always — or almost always — appealed to our best instincts. So there was Bobby speaking to a group of women at a breakfast in Terre Haute, Ind., during the 1968 campaign. As David Halberstam recalled, Bobby told the audience: ‘The poor are hidden in our society. No one sees them anymore. They are a small minority in a rich country. Yet I am stunned by a lack of awareness of the rest of us toward them.’”

And who were the women at that breakfast and what are they remembering today? Hopefully, it’s something about rainbows and dreams.

--Terre Haute Tribune Star, September 2, 2009

Hesitations and Escalations

2009-08-23T23:51:00.006-04:00

Here comes Diana West, the Ann Coulter wannabe who waves the phony “Clash of Civilizations” flag whenever she can. She’s considerably concerned about a “fatal hesitation” in Afghanistan (Terre Haute Tribune-Star, Aug. 14, 2009). GO HERE FOR WEST's ARTICLE

If the lives of our American military men and women and our tax dollars weren’t at stake here, it would be enjoyable watching the contortions the Bush Warriors go through as President Obama (wrongly!) expands the war in Afghanistan. These tail-ender warriors have supported real “Death Panels” (not to be confused with Sarah Palin’s imagined Grandma executioners) in Iraq and Afghanistan from the get go. They want wars, yes sir. Wars led by Commander in Chief Barack Obama? Well, that’s clearly problematical.

And so West, her nose fully out of joint, is sniffing out “fatal hesitancy” under President Obama. She warns, are you ready for this, that generals in Afghanistan are actually saying things like: “The Afghan people are the reason we are here” and “When the Afghan people trust us and believe us . . . we will win overnight.”

With this mind set, can “fatal hesitancy” be far behind?

Nope. Noting casualty figures from the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, West works at trying to make the “only 20 percent” of “civilian casualties” in Afghanistan caused by our over-extended and misplaced American war machine sound inflated and insignificant. Fess up to stuff like this, she reasons, and we’re on a slippery slope to “dangerous second thoughts” where “split-second decision making” is required.

I guess the quotation marks West uses around “20 percent” and “civilian casualties” are also supposed to make the deaths and the wounds caused by “Death Panel” errors in the heat of battle more palatable to Americans. The Afghan people? They don’t read UN reports. The literacy rate in this fractured and war torn country is only 28 percent. Most news travels orally. I find it hard to imagine an Afghan using finger quotes in the air as he tells clan members how death rained out of the sky, killing his “young brother and his wife.”

As stated, West isn’t worried in the least about what the Afghan people think of us. She’s too busy fighting the creep of “fatal hesitation” so that America can get on with mindless escalation.

Terre Haute Tribune Star: Readers' Forum: Aug. 24, 2009

Rory Stewart on Afghanistan -- Read This Now

2009-07-31T15:34:00.004-04:00

I count myself among the Bush “haters” who opposed the tragic Iraq adventure long before it became a full-fledged fiasco. I’m hoping that Afghanistan will not turn me into an Obama “hater.” Right now things are not looking good. Obama has options. He should listen and act on the ideas and analysis of Rory Stewart. GO HERE

If you’re having trouble getting your mind around the quandry that is of our making in Afghanistan–-if we leave the Taliban will wreak havoc, if we stay we will wreak havoc–-read this short essay by Rory Stewart. It is simply the best thing yet written on the subject. Print it out and shove it anyone’s face who thinks we have no alternatives in Afghanistan.

Rory Stewart’s voice is just about the only voice of authority, experience and honesty currently getting “out there” that speaks against the madness of our policy in Afghanistan. Here’s a profile/interview from the Financial Times on the man today. As is always the case, making sense and getting those in power to act on that sense are two very different things.

GO HERE

On the day we meet, the New York Times reports that it looks as if Obama’s policy of increasing troops in Afghanistan will work. Stewart has a different take. “The policy of troop increases will look ridiculous in 30 years,” he says. “They’re not going to make America safer from al-Qaeda. The theory of state-building is suspect. I’m not sure that the state they aim for is conceivable, let alone achievable. We should be pursuing a much more conventional development strategy in Afghanistan. And, if you want to combine that with a Special Forces unit that would make things uncomfortable for Osama bin Laden, then so be it.” He sighs. “But you can’t say that sort of thing to the policymakers. They’re grand, intelligent, busy people who have no interest in this kind of abstraction. They’re not interested in values, virtue, outlook ... ” He pushes away a barely touched plate of mussels.

Hat in Hand Or Chants Democratic?

2009-07-14T15:44:00.004-04:00

I think a good deal of our pride in and honoring of George Washington comes (and justly so) from his leadership in war and his self-limiting grasping for power as our first president. Today is Bastille Day in France. July 14, France's fête nationale, is their No. 1 state holiday – inspired by the storming of Paris prison castle Bastille in 1789 that abolished aristocratic privileges, and three years later led to the toppling of the monarchy. The holiday dates to 1880.

George Washington, and all of the founding fathers (though not the outsider Thomas Paine), were part of what seems today to be a curious kind of “aristocracy.” The “fathers” believed in, and practiced, the powers of a culture of deference. And many of the lower orders of the day acquiesced and participated willingly. So we have George Washington advising this:

“To treat them [ie. people without rank] civilly is no more than what all men are entitled to, but my advice to you [his manager at Mount Vernon] is, to keep them at a proper distance; for they will grow upon familiarity, in proportion as you sink in authority.”

And isn’t much of our political squabbling today over issues of “proper distance” and “authority” as expressed in economic terms? There is a tension between the seeming order embedded in a culture of deference and the erasing of privilege which lies at the heart of the Bastille Day celebrations. Deference accepts the hat in hand in expectation of security; the chants democratic of Bastille Day may unleash chaos, usher in the unpredictable. Our times are still taut with the significance of this split in thought and action.

Robert Strange McNamara Didn't Live on the Moon

2009-07-08T01:16:00.005-04:00

Entertainment as news filled time slots on television and newspaper columns for a full week. It was wall to wall coverage of Michael Jackson’s death. The media was lost in Neverland.

Every scintilla of information about the man was chewed into gruel and spit out, again and again. Speaking ill or making light of the dead “King of Pop,” or challenging the deep feelings held by his family, friends and true fans upon his passing would be cold and meager in spirit. He was loved. Many will never forget him.

But the cascading frenzy surrounding the meanings and the tributes flowing endlessly through the oiled channels of the media should give pause. As one TV news reporter in a slip of candor put it: “. . . we see the power of pop culture that a broadcaster ignores at its own peril. Death, for a moment, wipes a slate clean.” And Americans have always been partial to fresh starts, clean slates. Memory and history are for family reunions and holidays.

But it’s worth noting that in the shadow of Michael Jackson’s death, many others moved to their final rest. Perhaps none as significant for our times as Robert McNamara. If you are a freshly minted Michael Jackson fan, born in the past quarter century and just about have your version of Jackson’s Moonwalk ready for prime time YouTube fame, you may never have heard of McNamara. And many who will never try to Moonwalk, who are more at home with The Twist, a dance craze of their youth in the late fifties, will recognize the name and that’s about it.

But for some, Robert McNamara will always be a name etched as deeply in their memories as are the 58,000 and more names burned into the polished black granite of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C..

Robert Strange McNamara was good with figures, with understanding complex systems, with rolling out charts for presidents and telling them with great assurance what would and would not, could and could not, happen if they ordered this or this. The “this or this” concerned military operations–nuclear weapons, bombing patterns, covert invasions, and always, yes always, casualties, body counts.

McNamara was the Secretary of Defense for seven years, serving both Kennedy and Johnson. He was sometimes called the “whiz kid” because as a young man in the late fifties he was successful in turning Ford Motor around. He also got his name stuck on a disastrous war; the Vietnam War became known by many as “McNamara’s War.”

After a week of adulation of a pop entertainer, even one carrying the baggage Michael Jackson picked up over the years, it’s breathtaking to read what one newspaper had to say in an editorial in 1995. McNamara had just published a book admitting that on the Vietnam War he had been “wrong, terribly wrong.” Here’s part of how the “New York Times” responded editorially: “Surely he [McNamara] must in every quiet and prosperous moment hear the ceaseless whispers of those poor boys . . . dying in the tall grass . . . for no purpose.” His future should be the “lasting moral condemnation of his countrymen.”

Yes, this is harsh. (And there were even harsher commentaries from other quarters.) But is there not something just in saying to a man who as much as any other led this nation into a war that ended so many lives abroad and broke so many at home, you are not forgiven your blind arrogance?

Many today look forward to a day when the same tight-jawed wrath will rain down on Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Rice and others responsible for leading us into the bare mountains of Afghanistan and the blood soaked dust of Iraq. But many more are just not paying attention. If pressed, some may say they’re not interested in “settling scores,” playing the “blame game.” But most are just interested in being uninterested, in doing The Twist, or practicing the Moonwalk.

“We get the leaders we deserve,” is a standard piece of political chatter these days. Few look behind this bland, diversionary truism to ask: “What kind of people are we to create and deserve such leaders?” Maybe we know the answer to this question and knowing the answer are quick to wipe the slate clean.

Old Men, Old Ideas, Young Recruits

2009-06-14T22:34:00.004-04:00

I saved an important story in 2007 by Jeffrey Fleishman, a “Los Angeles Times” staff writer. It was about Erwin Kowalke.

Kowalke is a member of the German War Graves Association. He’s 64 years old and for 43 of those 64 years he’s been searching for World War II skeletons, German and Russian soldiers who fought near Berlin in the last days of the war. By Kowalke’s estimate, he’s excavated over 20,000 bodies. I guess you could say he knows something about war.

Here’s what Erwin Kowalke knows. "In these bones,” he says, “you see what war is like. I know war now. I'll tell you what it is. War is young men killing other young men they do not know on the orders of old men who know one another too well."

Two old men, Robert L. Galbraith, MSgt, USAF (Ret) and Robert G. Huckabee, took me to task for my Forum letter on May 22, 2009. In that letter, I linked the absurdity and tragedy of enlistment programs that result in 60 year olds dying and teenagers being pushed to fill military recruitment quotas.

Both of these old men out rank me. During my service in the military I only managed to reach the rank of Sp4th Class. To Galbraith and Huckabee I say, I’m glad I’m a civilian and not in uniform again. I know from experience that it’s easier to speak your mind in worn tennis shoes than in spit shined combat boots.

Along with Msgt Galbraith, I did my part in winning the Cold War. From Limerock to South Lyme, I helped defend the skies over the golf courses of Connecticut. On my watch, the streets of Hartford were never attacked.. I helped make “The Insurance City” safe for the coming of AIG.

Robert G. Huckabee’s recent duty and service in Iraq is on a whole other level than mine. But both of these old men deserve the nation’s thanks and respect for their service. They certainly have mine.

But as is often the case, the view from the foxholes on the battlefield and the pigeon holes of the military establishment is limited. When your head is down, when you’re trying to stay alive–physically and psychologically–one’s attention can understandably take on a narrow focus. Operating under the chain of command and participating in endless drills can force march the mind into authorized channels. The selfless support of your comrades in arms can indelibly mark the circumference of one’s identification, the range of understanding.

Who would be surprised by the fact that so many vets, not just Galbraith and Huckabee, but vets from all wars, carry their military experiences, peak experiences in so many lives, home with them when they shed uniforms for civies? Who would be surprised that the military experiences remembered by old men give rise to the giving of orders of support to young men to follow the course they themselves once took?

I should add here that, in general, I respect the old. I’m old. Old grumpiness, not to be escaped, is earned through the perspective of experience. Old ideas, though appearing decrepit in form, often prove supple, useful. Old wisdom, such as it is, can have enlightening depth to it.

But today high schools are staffed with military recruiters. Slick big budget “Join Now!” advertising aimed at teenagers fill movie houses and TV screens. And old men living with old stories and older myths far too often provide youth with not quite the whole truth of war.

President Bush listened to old men and the result was disastrous. President Obama is listening to old ideas and tragedy continues to unfold. We should be listening to Erwin Kowalk, an old man who speaks the stories told by the bones of the young.

[from Terre Haute Tribune Star, June 14, 2009]

Another Anniversary of Pain

2009-03-20T00:43:00.003-04:00

Six Years in Iraq.

Honor the dead.

Heal the wounded.

End the war.

Afghanistan--Write the Poems Now, Please

2009-02-26T00:00:00.009-05:00

I try not to have memory flashes of helicopters being dumped into the waters off of Viet Nam when I read stories like the following. I also blot out those pictures of Soviet tanks, battle scarred and worse for wear, winding their way down dusty roads, past burnt out shells of their comrades tanks, as they left Afghanistan exactly twenty years ago. And even farther back in time, no pictures, but we do have Rudyard Kipling’s chilling end stanza of a poem about the Brits 19th century attempt to bolster their empire in Afghanistan:

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
So-oldier ~of~ the Queen!

Our empire in Afghanistan may be played down and described as being only virtual. Our military stance may be sold on the basis of “first line defense against terrorism,” whatever that means. The time line for this continuing disaster may even be called temporary, though this is term of plastic meaninglessness. Whatever and however, the costs are hard and real, in blood and treasure.

The Bush gang covered this with manufactured fear and flag waving; the Obama gang should shove our noses deep into the reality of Afghanistan so we can decide if we really want to live with the odor of it indefinitely.

NYT February 26, 2009
Afghan Buildup Includes Billions for Equipment
By THOM SHANKER

WASHINGTON — As part of its buildup in Afghanistan, the Pentagon plans to deploy billions of dollars in heavily armored vehicles, spy planes, jammers and even experimental ground-penetrating radars to defend troops from roadside bombs that are proving increasingly lethal. . . .

Overall, there are 38,000 American troops in Afghanistan today; half are in the NATO security and assistance force along with 32,000 allied troops, and half are under United States command carrying out counterterrorism, counterinsurgency and training missions.

I.E.D.s are intended to do more than kill troops on the battlefield, General Metz said. “The enemy knows this is a strategic weapon to influence public opinion back in the U.S., to influence positively his recruiting, and to show people that central government in Kabul has less control,” he said.

GO HERE

Limbaugh and Gang Set to Bury "Joe the Shovel"

2009-02-15T14:33:00.006-05:00

Jobs will be created by the Obama stimulus, long ignored building and maintenance will be carried out on the nations’s infrastructure, a start will be made on turning the sorry state of our schools in the right direction, and more and more Americans will smile on President Obama and frown on the obstructionists in Congress.

What course is open to the mangled and marginalized shockcasters on the right?

Next week, next month, soon, Fox News, Limbaugh, O’Reilly, and the rest of the wired haters on the right will report on the stimulus with outrage. The veins will be sticking out on their necks and their words will be chocked with anger, as if lobster from the great state of Snowe and Collins, was sticking in their craws.

With frenzied fury--fingers pointing, lips curling-- they will place the needle on the disk and bellow: Wake up America!-- the Obama stimulus is riddled with theft, corruption, graft, condom peddling and worse.

Of course the peddlers of hyperbole will find some poor schmo in Grand Rapids or El Centro who took a shiny new shovel home with him rather than using it to stick into the hard ground on a “shovel ready” stimulus project. O'Reilly will throw around “tip of the iceberg” scare rhetoric. Limbaugh will add another counterfeit bead to his “I told you so” self-righteous bling, an adornment conveniently missing all of the “I was wrong” baubles he's thrown the public’s way for years.

Stimulus problems? We’ll see some. But what these right wing guardians of the purse chose not to see or report through all the tragic years of the Iraq war is the colossal waste and crime described in this story of graft in Iraq. The entire, not a tip, of this filthy iceberg remains clearly in view.

But don’t expect to hear anything about the colossal waste of the Iraq war from Limbaugh and his ilk. From them it will be, “Let’s not play the blame game with Iraq and the past. We caught “Joe the Shovel” out in Pocatello. Right now. This is on your watch Barack Hussein Obama.”

Right wing zealots, Bush tail-enders, Ron Paul converts, Kondratieff wave wierdos, Austrian School hardliners, and Wall Street plunder boys will fill web sites and oped pages with such minutia. All attempting to turn a shovel into a bulldozer in people’s minds.

None of this will take with the American people desperately in need of economic relief “right now.” Unfortunately, it will divert attention from the cost of two wars still being fought and paid for and long ago revealed to be what they never were.

"We Can't Quite Believe It" --Well, try looking around.

2009-02-01T11:31:00.005-05:00

Rupert Murdock’s Wall Street Journal [editorial board?] runs down the Obama stimulus program and has this to say: Go here for full article

We've looked it over, and even we can't quite believe it.

They are of one mind that the Obama “stimulus” does not create jobs or stimulate the economy to any great degree. Here, specifically is what they “can’t quite believe.”

There's $1 billion for Amtrak, the federal railroad that hasn't turned a profit in 40 years;

I guess straightening tracks and upgrading safety technology on Amtrak is supposed to happen without any workers performing these tasks. And no profit, the only engine that should ever be considered in moving this country. So why would this country need a railroad transportation network?

$2 billion for child-care subsidies;

Early childhood experiences are a key to success in later life, whether that “success” be measured by educational outcomes, good health, family stability or income earned in a lifetime. As with Amtrak, child-care does not turn a “profit” in the usual sense of the term. But money for more and better staffed, fairly paid, child-care workers is well spent–in the short as well as long term.

$50 million for that great engine of job creation, the National Endowment for the Arts;

Ah. A favorite of mine. Call it my very own “pet” project. The truth is that we as a nation care and feed our pets, the four-legged kind, much better than we do our artists and the arts. And arts are good business. Cities thrive and grow with the arts. This $50 million is such a pittance in the face of the needs of the art community, in comparison with what democratic developed nations around the world spend on the arts, that one wonders if the WSJ critics presented this objection with a straight face. By the way, $50 million out of an $819 billion stimulus adds up to a munificent total of 6/1000s of 1% of the stimulus package.$400 million for global-warming research and another $2.4 billion for carbon-capture demonstration projects.
Oh, right, no jobs or profits or infra-structure benefits here. Do these people who regularly lambaste us with the “entrepreneurial spirit” club have no imagination at all?

There's even $650 million on top of the billions already doled out to pay for digital TV conversion coupons.

Though this is another Bush administration incompetence type fiasco, in the spirit of bipartisanship I say drop this program and shift the $650 million into the NEA and NEH.

Another "stimulus" secret is that some $252 billion is for income-transfer payments -- that is, not investments that arguably help everyone, but cash or benefits to individuals for doing nothing at all.

Leaving aside the spurious "secret" charge (only these guys broke the code?!) , now we get to the heart of the matter. The undeserving poor (which increasingly includes large swaths of the middle-class) who, in the eyes of the WSJ editors, sit around and collect entitlements while the rest of us do the work of America. And some of these working Americans just collected $18 billion in bonuses for their vital contribution in the building of America's financial system.

Herbert Hoover fed starving Europeans after World War I. Starving Americans? Not so much. He wrote a book in 1922, American Individualism, which characterized the spirit that made the USA a nation not be sullied by government handouts. It would kill the “individualism” so unique in the American people. But people living in the real world recognize that starvation--for food and health care and shelter--is a great equalizer. This starvation demeans and cripples all regardless of which flag you wear in your lapel. Individualism is crushed by joblessness, poverty and the lack of health care and educational opportunity.

All of the following programs, which the WSJ “can’t quite believe,” recognize these facts about the corroding influence economic distress has on human beings, their families, their individuality.

There's $81 billion for Medicaid,

$36 billion for expanded unemployment benefits,

$20 billion for food stamps,

$83 billion for the earned income credit for people who don't pay income tax.

So we get to the WSJ bottom line, which really isn’t a line at all but an ideological box. They simply choose to live in this box as they shut out the rest of the world.

While some of that may be justified to help poorer Americans ride out the recession, they aren't job creators.

Congress and the American people will decide if this is the case. The Obama stimulus is a close relative to the Three Rs of FDR’s New Deal-–Relief, Recovery and Reform. As we slip ever deeper into the Bush Depression we desperately need all three.

Look around this town, this state, this country. Unlike the Wall Street Journal editors, you can believe in this needed stimulus program because, as Bush use to say, you can feel it in your gut. Of course, he was talking about war and you're just feeling hungry.

Now Playing Center Field--Us

2009-01-22T12:43:00.003-05:00

A good story about Leo Durocher is making the circuit these days. It’s told that when Durocher was the player manager for the Brooklyn Dodgers he put a rookie in center field. In two innings this rookie had misplayed three balls. Durocher, not known for his even temperament, reamed out the rookie, benched him, and went into centerfield to play the position himself. He proceeded to make two errors. When he came back into the dugout he threw his glove at the rookie in disgust, yelling at him, “You’ve screwed up centerfield so bad no one can play it.”

Comparisons between Bush and Obama will be endless. And voters have benched the Republicans who “screwed up centerfield.” But Obama, the Congress and the people can’t and won’t sit by and lament the state of the field, domestic and foreign, left after eight years of Bush. These fields have to be rebuilt, and rebuilt in radical ways.

Here’s part of Obama’s start on this difficult but absolutely necessary rebuilding job.

_______________

Go here for full story

January 22, 2009
On Day One, Obama Sets a New Tone
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON — President Obama moved swiftly on Wednesday to impose new rules on government transparency and ethics, using his first full day in office to freeze the salaries of his senior aides, mandate new limits on lobbyists and demand that the government disclose more information.

Mr. Obama called the moves, which overturned two policies of his predecessor, “a clean break from business as usual.” Coupled with Tuesday’s Inaugural Address, which repudiated the Bush administration’s decisions on everything from science policy to fighting terrorism, the actions were another sign of the new president’s effort to emphasize an across-the-board shift in priorities, values and tone.

“For a long time now there’s been too much secrecy in this city,” Mr. Obama said at a swearing-in ceremony for senior officials at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, adjacent to the White House. He added, “Transparency and rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”
___________________

Go here for full story

January 22, 2009
News Analysis
Scientists Welcome Obama’s Words
By GARDINER HARRIS and WILLIAM J. BROAD

WASHINGTON — When he vowed in his Inaugural Address to “restore science to its rightful place,” President Obama signaled an end to eight years of stark tension between science and government.

But many of the Bush administration’s restrictions on science, like those governing stem cell research, will take time to be removed. And whether the Obama administration entirely reverses its predecessor’s strict controls over the government’s main scientific agencies remains to be seen.

Still, many scientists were exuberant. Staff members throughout the government’s scientific agencies held inaugural parties on Tuesday, and many reported being teary-eyed with joy.

“If you look at the science world, you see a lot of happy faces,” said Frank Press, a former president of the National Academy of Sciences and former science adviser to President Jimmy Carter. “It’s not just getting money. It’s his recognition of what science can do to bring this country back in an innovative way.”

Time to Fold Up the Tent

2009-01-11T00:17:00.004-05:00

Mark Twain was a master at puncturing the self-delusions of Americans. He once noted the appearance of a touring baseball team playing a series of games near the sea kissed beaches of the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii). He called this an exercise about as incongruous as “interrupting a funeral with a circus.”

Distorting Twain, but holding on to his circus and funeral allusion, think of how the Big Bucks-Big Programs of College Sports, Inc. intrude into the life of universities. Each year more and more dollars are lavished on three ring performances attended by fewer and fewer supporters. As stadium seats yawn empty, the fabled “roar of the crowd” is turning into the low murmurs heard at funerals. Increasingly disappointment turns into discontent and the murmuring becomes muttering. It’s all taking on a tone of alarm. It’s about time.

Last year the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) conducted an exhaustive study of college sports circus revenues and expenses. The report put hard numbers to a long known but undocumented truth. It revealed that the vast majority (95 per cent!) of college athletic programs lose money for their schools.

Slogging through university and athletic department accounts, the NCAA’s "2004‑06 NCAA Revenue and Expenses of Division I Intercollegiate Athletics Program Report" showed only 17 of 300 programs managed to make money or pay their own way by breaking even. And remember, 2004-06 were the “good ol’ days” in terms of the economy.

Despite these ever growing bottom line defeats, college teams hold on to dwindling numbers of die-hard boosters. See the Tribune-Star Editorial of Dec. 20, 2008, “Don’t give up on ISU’s football team” for an outstanding example of the type.

This editorial holds out gauzy dreams (“community” and “loyal bonds”) while clouding over dollars and cents realities. But no one should forget that the pursuit of these dreamy hopes come with a serious pay now price tag. We are spending vast sums in the subprime College Sports, Inc. bubble and the word is out: Pailouts Are Us!

Who pays? Students cough up fees to keep the circus calliope whistling, or at least wheezing; and tax dollars in the general funds of universities serve as the much used safety net when it comes time to make up for ticket booth deficits.

The Trib-Star, ISU Faculty Senate, President Bradley, and the community need to examine how long students and taxpayers should be expected to play the role of water boys sitting at the end of the bench, hopping up each year to carry pails of moola to a pachyderm-sized intercollegiate athletic program. Research on the amounts in the pails of cash supplied to this insatiable white elephant enterprise need to be made available to all.

It goes without saying that hard questions are not asked in gatherings where fan groupthink about Big Buck-Big Program college sports prevails. Probing questions need to be asked in the university setting where the search for truth guides and motivates. Always remembering, it’s not answers that embarrass so much as the failure to ask questions demanding answers.

P. T. Barnum, the king of circus hoop-la and hype, once said, “Every crowd has a silver lining.”
But the sports circus crowds are now thinned out, worn out.

If Barnum were in the college sports biz today, he would take note of the ever-expanding menu of games available on satellite and cable TV at home and in sports bars. He would coolly observe the ever-deepening dips in student attendance at games.

With these funereal facts staring him in the face, with a heavy heart filled with memories of times past, Barnum would take down the bright bunting and put up black crepe. He would fold up his circus tent and move on–satisfied in knowing that he no longer was losing money feeding a lonely elephant.

[This commentary appeared in the Terre Haute Tribune Star, Jan. 11, 2009]

If the shoe fits . . .

2008-12-19T12:57:00.006-05:00

Given the fusillade of flying footwear aimed at our departing president in Baghdad, late night comedian Craig Ferguson wonders if a “second thrower” conspiracy theory is taking hold in the blogosphere. Plenty of bad jokes on those shoe missiles are filling the news, late night TV and circulating on the Internet.

You’ve heard more than a few by now. Do they make you feel better?

It’s all gallows humor. It’s Shakespeare’s Romeo attempting, unsuccessfully, to ease his dying friend’s pain. Mercutio knows better:

Romeo: "Courage, man; the hurt cannot be much."
Mercutio: "No, 'tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church-door; but 'tis enough, 'twill serve: ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man."

Because Americans are afflicted with Attention Deficit Disorder, we often miss the significance of events that swell beneath the surface. Bush adeptly ducks the shoes; we efficiently bob and weave our way to the next bizarre 30-second YouTube clip.

This all allows us to report to ourselves with escapist self-satisfaction: Well, didn’t I handle that with aplomb and a minimum of personal intellectual and emotional cost.

Back up a little and really think about what this celebrity of the moment, Iraqi journalist Muntather Zaidi, yelled out as he threw the first of his clodhoppers:

“This is a gift from the Iraqis; this is the farewell kiss, you dog!”

A few seconds later, Zaidi let fly with his other shoe, shouting:

“This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq!”

Widows and orphans. Almost a dismissed cliche in American political oratory. The phrase means plenty in Iraq.

Here’s the estimated number of Iraqi deaths due to the U. S. led invasion of Iraq: 1,297,997.

The number is shocking and sobering. It’s based on studies published in the prestigious British medical journal, “The Lancet,” in 2006 and a British polling agency in September 2007, Opinion Research Business.

If you’re skeptical of this number, knock off a 100,000, or 200,000. Or cut it in half. Or slice it back to any number that manages to make you feel comfortable.

How low would your estimate go? How many widows and orphans would emerge from your figure? How many shoes would you feel like throwing if these deaths had happened to your family, in the neighborhoods of your home country? How long would you remember Muntather Zaidi’s flying shoes? How long would you remember his words and repeat them: “this is the farewell kiss, you dog!” And would you ever be able to get those widows, those orphans, out of your mind?

[from Terre Haute Tribune Star “Reader’s Forum," Dec. 28, 2008]

Let's Punish the Auto Workers and Ourselves

2008-12-05T11:10:00.004-05:00

More news from the "Let's Punish the Auto Workers and Ourselves" front.

The Street
U.S. Stocks Tumble as Job Losses Accelerate
Mike Taylor
12/05/08 - 09:41 AM EST
GO HERE

Before the new session's trading commenced, the government reported that the unemployment rate reached a 15-year high of 6.7% in November, up from 6.5% in October but slightly below the 6.8% analysts had expected. Nonfarm payrolls showed a loss of 533,000 jobs, a much greater decline than the drop of 335,000 forecast by economists.

The September and October job-loss figures were also worse than previously thought. The September number was revised to 403,000 from 284,000, and October job losses were up to 320,000, up from an initial reading of 240,000.

The average workweek declined slightly to 33.5 hours, and hourly earnings were up 0.4%, compared with a 0.3% increase in October.

"This is almost indescribably terrible," wrote Ian Shepherdson, chief U.S. economist for High Frequency Economics, in an email. He said that total job losses in the past six months have now reached 1.55 million, a figure that matches the entire recession of 2001.

And now the rabid ideologues and union breakers are blindly panting to close down or bankrupt (which adds up to the same thing) the American auto industry. It’s goodbye to three million or so jobs dependent on that industry. Many of which made it possible for working class families to live and dream at a middle-class level for the first time in this nation’s history.

The UAW took out a full page ad in today’s New York Times. I wish it was in every paper in the United States. It’s a checkerboard of faces of people that look like you and me. And they are like you and me. Across their pictures is a banner headline reading: “WE ARE NOT BANKERS.”

And meanwhile, we get the usual pokes (all deserved) at the blind, inept and avaricious CEOs testifying before Congressional committees. It may be satisfying to see and hear the high and the mighty grovel, but a little of this goes a long way when the lives of millions of workers depend on intelligent solutions more than symbolic trips to the woodshed.

This account gets at two key points. The snowballing urgency of the problem and, far less recognized, conservatives short-sighted desire to destroy the union movement.

Salon, 12/5.2008
Detroit revs up its bailout begging
By Mike Madden
GO HERE

Actually, the CEOs were less alarmist than some of the other witnesses. Moodys.com chief economist Mark Zandi told the panel that the costs of not bailing out the car companies -- and letting them go bankrupt -- would be far, far more than $34 billion. "It's not even in the same universe," he said. United Auto Workers president Ron Gettelfinger said there wasn't much time to dither: "I believe that we could lose General Motors at the end of this month." And if Detroit goes under, the witnesses agreed, the rest of the country won't be in such good shape itself -- suppliers could also fail, whole local economies could fall apart, the government could find itself handling warranty claims on all the Jeep Cherokees out there. . . .

. . . People in Tennessee "have a tough time thinking about us loaning money to companies that are paying way, way above industry standards to workers," said Sen. Bob Corker. Of course, the UAW already announced that it would let automakers suspend payments into a healthcare fund for retirees, killed a program that paid laid-off workers most of their salary, and agreed to let management reopen negotiations on a contract signed just last year. Still, with Congress already girding for a fight over "card check" legislation that would let workers organize without a secret vote, expect to see Republicans try to lay down some markers about labor during the bailout debate.

Unions aside, it was pretty easy to see what the popular move for GOP lawmakers will be. "The strength of the American economic system is that it allows us to take risks, to create, to innovate, to grow, to succeed and sometimes to fail," said Sen. Richard Shelby, a Republican from Alabama (which happens to be the home of Honda, Hyundai and Mercedes plants, making Shelby a little less worried about the Big Three's viability). . . .

Yeah, Joseph Schumpeter’s concept of “creative destruction” is all the rage today among the Republican ideologues who helped bring this totally unplanned economic destruction down on our heads. Conservatives set fire to the economy with deregulation and regressive taxes and now they pat themselves on the back as visionaries who are predicting a new and improved America rising out of the ashes of their failed policies. As we kick through the ashes of this destruction, you’ll see the bones of the union movement. And unions have always been one of the few buffers between working people and the total power of the profits-at-any-price few at the top.

"Creative Destruction" -- Whose creation? Whose destruction?

2008-12-04T12:44:00.004-05:00

________________________
Too Big Not To Fail We need to stop using the bailouts to rebuild gigantic financial institutions.

The great irony is that our new place in the global economy is a direct consequence of our grand victory over the past 60 years. We have, indeed, converted virtually the entire world into one integrated capitalist economy, and we must now bear the brunt of serious and vigorous competition. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the United States was essentially the only nation with financial capital, intellectual capital, skilled labor, a growing middle class generating consumer demand, and a rule of law permitting safe investment. Now we are one of many nations with these critical advantages.

This long-term change frames the question we should be asking ourselves: What are we getting for the trillions of dollars in rescue funds? If we are merely extending a fatally flawed status quo, we should invest those dollars elsewhere. Nobody disputes that radical action was needed to forestall total collapse. But we are creating the significant systemic risk not just of rewarding imprudent behavior by private actors but of preventing, through bailouts and subsidies, the process of creative destruction that capitalism depends on. . . .

It is time we permitted the market to work: This means true competition with winners and losers; companies that disappear; shareholders and CEOs who can lose as well as win; and government investment in the long-range competitiveness of our nation, not in a failed business model of financial concentration and failed risk management that holds nobody accountable.

I hate it when I have to dig out well reasoned arguments in opposition to the policies I support. But I do like the historical analysis of the first paragraph. This is what made the U. S. smug and satisfied. And now we all pay the price for that smugness and self-satisfaction. My problem is in that “all” blanket punishment thing.

Do you notice one thing about this analysis that is missing? Where are the working class types that went along for the ride? That last paragraph about “It is time we permitted the market to work” has nary a mention of the workers who regularly punched the clock, did the jobs they were told to do, and tried to make the best world possible for their families. The winners and losers mentioned here are companies, shareholders and CEOs–plenty of responsibility there.

But where are the real “Joe the Plumbers,” not the McCain-Palin inflatable doll type Joes, in all of this? Missing, forgotten, unimportant, not worthy of consideration or help?

I never fail to be saddened by working class people who take out their frustrations with “the system” on other working class people–neighbors and relatives who have about as much to do with the failings and greedy excesses of “the system” as a passenger sitting in the back of the plane has to do with the course chosen by the pilot or bringing that plane down to a safe landing.

Criticize CEO pay packages or tax cuts for the rich and conservative neon billboards are immediately switched on: CLASS WARFARE! LOSER ENVY! is the glaring response. Attempt to save the comparative pittance of wages, benefits, dignity and respect built up over a life time of work and union organizing and the UAW is attacked as some kind of gangster cartel. Now that’s what I call LOSER ENVY. Too bad so many of the losers live on the same block as those who had the smarts and the guts to join unions.

If you find the analysis in the excerpt above to your liking, the entire column is HERE .

By the way, the author of this thought provoking piece is Elliott Spitzer. Please note for future reference how Spitzer's personal life was not dragged out in order to put his argument in an irrelevant shadow.

THE WAR -- THE MONEY [Part 33]

2008-11-30T23:38:00.005-05:00

The following is only 534 words from an over 5200 word investigative report appearing in The Times today. From the front page opening to two full, five column inside pages, this story digs into the role of one retired Army “stars for hire” general. It provides details and online documents on his role in selling the Iraq war to the American people on NBC and MSNBC while also selling military hardware and services to the Pentagon and the Iraq government.

If you don’t read this, your understanding of how this needless war unfolded is seriously impaired.

Barry R. McCaffrey is not the only retired military man who is a part of this Military-Industrial-Media Complex. Last spring David Barstow wrote about an entire platoon of these guys who shovel their skewed and dollar stained expertise at the public over TV news programs. See New York Times, April 20, 2008, “Message Machine--Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand.” GO HERE

Barstow should and probably will receive a Pulitzer for this reporting.

One Man’s Military- Industrial-Media Complex

By DAVID BARSTOW
Published: NYT November 29, 2008

In the spring of 2007 a tiny military contractor with a slender track record went shopping for a precious Beltway commodity.

The company, Defense Solutions, sought the services of a retired general with national stature, someone who could open doors at the highest levels of government and help it win a huge prize: the right to supply Iraq with thousands of armored vehicles.

Access like this does not come cheap, but it was an opportunity potentially worth billions in sales, and Defense Solutions soon found its man. The company signed Barry R. McCaffrey, a retired four-star Army general and military analyst for NBC News, to a consulting contract starting June 15, 2007.

Four days later the general swung into action. He sent a personal note and 15-page briefing packet to David H. Petraeus, the commanding general in Iraq, strongly recommending Defense Solutions and its offer to supply Iraq with 5,000 armored vehicles from Eastern Europe. “No other proposal is quicker, less costly, or more certain to succeed,” he said.

Thus, within days of hiring General McCaffrey, the Defense Solutions sales pitch was in the hands of the American commander with the greatest influence over Iraq’s expanding military.

“That’s what I pay him for,” Timothy D. Ringgold, chief executive of Defense Solutions, said in an interview. . . .

GO HERE FOR FULL ARTICLE

Blue Mondays and Saturday Mornin's

2008-11-10T21:48:00.006-05:00

There’s plenty of music out there to represent how people are feeling now that Barack Obama has won the election. To paraphrase the old saying: Victory fills every iPod; defeat inspires silence.

Asked to name a fitting oldie for the occasion, with only a minute of reflection, I’d lean toward this Fats Domino classic. It’s a statement on the course of history as encapsulated in the average persons’ work week/life.

Go here for "Blue Monday"

After 8 years of Bush, we deserve tp enjoy our “Saturday mornin', oh Saturday mornin'. One thing is certain, Obama may extend our “Saturday mornin', oh Saturday mornin' “ or he may not, but with Bush it was an endless week/life of “Blue Monday how I hate Blue Monday.”

[For those who have a slow connection or just do not do YouTube, here are the lyrics. Sing along, think along.]

Blue Monday
Fats Domino and Fabian

Blue Monday how I hate Blue Monday
Got to work like a slave all day
Here come Tuesday, oh hard Tuesday
I'm so tired got no time to play
Here come Wednesday, I'm beat to my socks
My gal calls, got to tell her that I'm out
'Cause Thursday is a hard workin' day
And Friday I get my pay
Saturday mornin', oh Saturday mornin'
All my tiredness has gone away
Got my money and my honey
And I'm out on the stand to play

Sunday mornin' I'm feelin' bad
But it's worth it for the time that I had
But I've got to get my rest
'Cause Monday is a mess

With this spare song, the art is in the tragic certainties of life in tension with the hopeful dreams of a better tomorrow. And for me "Blue Monday" fully captures these elements of life. I would argue that Barack Obama knows these aspects of his life and in his striving. Just recall the frequent references in his speeches along the lines of "I may fail . . . ."

This “I may fail . . . “ line may be dismissed by some as boilerplate, nothing more than campaign speech modesty. Or it can be elevated to the Reinhold Niebuhr influence which runs widely through President-elect Obama’s bedrock life philosophy. I lean toward the Niebuhr influence. For me it represents a saving humility so missing in his predecessor.

This humility neither undermines action nor cancels out joy. It replaces the doldrums of a long night with the energy of a new day.

Saturday mornin', oh Saturday mornin'
All my tiredness has gone away

I would like to think that Obama is well versed in the spirit of the blues. The Blues reveals a line of human understanding running through the dark. The Blues magically leaves you feeling refreshed and cleansed for following that line. It speaks to us, saying: Life is hard, so hard, but life is life and what we make of it is what we make of it. And life is hard, so hard, but life is life and what we make of it make of it . . .

And so it goes. Without the beat, without the plaintive knowing voice giving meaning to mere words, this comes off as sentimental cliche washed up on some power point beach of cheap self-help advice. But put this humility and power into the hands of an artist and you find people listening and thinking, “Yes We Can.”

Stealing Votes Republican Style

2008-10-27T14:52:00.008-04:00

With the McBush campaign going up in flames, buckets of this rancid, meaningless bilge is the only response they have left.

43 people in Lake County, Indiana, were charged and convicted of Voter Fraud—all Democrats. ACORN—a group with strong ties to Barack Obama, has registered thousands of illegal aliens as voters—Mickey Mouse has been registered more than 2,800 times, along with a 7-year-old girl in Connecticut, by ACORN workers.

Scary, right. Well that's what it has come to now that McBush is on the edge of losing the 2008 election--scare tactics.

The Republican strategy in regard to the boogey-man of voter fraud is as transparent as Sarah Palin returning her millionaire wardrobe to the fancy stores where the RNC regularly shops. One strategy, let’s call it The Issues , has failed miserably for McBush. So now it’s on to phase 2 of gutter politics. Ayers didn’t seem to have legs. Calling Obama a “socialist” who wants to “spread the wealth” didn’t catch on. (Partially thanks to the Palin/RNC luxury shopping spree with the wives of the rich and infamous and greedy.)

So that leaves Acorn and the exaggerated claims of vote fraud being wildly waved at the electorate. In pure Bush/Rove fashion (We all remember WMDs, right?), we have unsubstantiated fear mongering about how Acorn is stealing the election. This is the old Bush pre-emptive strike method, election style. The cynical design is to circulate and sow fear and trembling into the hearts and minds of all who support honest and fair elections. Mainly, keep down the voter turnout which, of course, translates into keeping the Democratic and swing voters from voting.

Here's a report you won't hear or see from the MSM on the very nervous, very desperate right. Perhaps some concerned voter would care to challenge the facts in this story.

Alexander Keyssar, a voting expert at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and the author of “The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States,” suggested another possible strategic reason for Mr. McCain’s comments: an effort to “reinforce an image of the Democrats, or at least some Democrats, as the party that, A, will steal elections, and B, will steal elections by somehow mobilizing this threatening nameless mass of people who are ‘other,’ ” a reference to the mostly minority and low-income people registered in drives like Acorn’s.

Acorn said that of its faulty registrations, 20 percent to 25 percent were probably the result of duplications, 5 percent were incomplete and 1 percent to 1.5 percent were fraudulent.

Voting rights advocates say that there is no correlation between fraudulent registrations and fraudulent voting and that past elections have shown little evidence of actual voter fraud. While it does occur, they say, it is hardly rampant.

After the 2004 election in Ohio, for example, the Brennan Center found a voter fraud rate of .00004 of a percent, saying, “Americans are struck and killed by lightning about as often.”

GO HERE

So that’s the last ditch, in the ditch, McBush BS strategy to clog the polls and disenfranchise voters through intimidation, innuendo and, most of all, the creation of long-lines at the polls on election day. When ten voters decide they can’t wait in line 2, 3 or 4 hours while legal, registered voters, are hassled and forced to cast provisional ballots, six of those ten are Democrats.

It worked in Ohio in 2004. So McBush is trying it again. It’s all he has going for him.

Solution: Vote early. Be patient if you're in a line--it's worth it. Don't let these scare tactics scare you.

Erratic Maverick Wanders the Range

2008-10-21T16:28:00.003-04:00

October 20, 2008
Terre Tribune Star

Readers' Forum: Oct. 21, 2008

Do we want reason, or an erratic ‘maverick’?

mav·er·ick n. 1. An unbranded range animal, especially a calf that has become separated from its mother, traditionally considered the property of the first person who brands it. – American Heritage Dictionary

It’s easy to figure out whose brand self-styled “maverick” John McCain carries. He’s supported Bush administration legislation to the tune of 90 percent with his Senate votes. The brand on this maverick is clear and deep. It reads “McBush.”

Does a career as a wandering, lowing calf shuffling about the stalls of power on the D.C. range for a long 26 years qualify McBush as a dissenting independent? All his lost looping about is just so much erratic behavior. The McBush record, recent and past, bears this out.

Is McBush against the lobbyist outlaws riding the Beltway frontier? Not really. He voted for lobbying reform, but he has a small herd of formerly high paid lobbyists on his campaign staff. Among them are John Green and Wayne Berman. They both lobbied for Fannie Mae, the unregulated and failed mortgage giant.

At age 72, with more than one of his houses down the street from Arizona retirement homes, it’s not independent to support a “patients’ bill of rights” legislation. But just don’t ask the maverick-erratic McBush if he thinks health care in this country of the aging, the infirm and the uninsured is a right. He squirms and kicks like a heifer in heat when he hears this.

In desperation, McBush’s campaign tries to lasso ’60s radical, Bill Ayers, and tie him around Barak Obama’s neck. Obama was 8 years old when Ayers went off the range of political normality. McBush embraced current radicals of the cloth, Jerry Falwell and Pastor John Hagee, during the recent primary season. He needed their stamp of approval. Falwell blamed 9/11 on gays and John Hagee called the Roman Catholic Church “the great whore.” What part of their brand is still on this maverick?

On the human and economic disaster that is the Iraq war, McBush has ranged widely. First he jumped on the brainless Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld chuck wagon to start a needless war. Then McBush, maverick-style, ran off in all directions at once on how this impossibly costly war was being fought. Now he’s happy to set up camp for “50 to 100 years” in Iraq’s bloody desert pasture. But don’t ask him whether or not this endless war should have been started in the first place. That question is beyond the barbwire fence of his campaign “victory” sloganeering. Not up for “straight talk” discussion.

How did McBush go about making his first significant decision as the potential president of the United States? McBush chose his vice presidential running mate in the blink of an eye and the nod of his head. If McBush is elected, Sarah Palin is a heartbeat away from the most powerful office in the world. Too much locoweed in this maverick’s diet? Or was this a calculated and cynical political move by McBush that ignored the nation’s well-being?

Obama and McBush both wave the banner of “change.” Shouldn’t change be based on carefully reasoned decision-making in the White House? Or should we trust to the leadership of a self-styled erratic maverick stumbling along the trail?

Vote on Nov. 4, 2008.

No Reason to Be Confident and Many Reasons Not to Be

2008-10-21T00:42:00.002-04:00

The following timely warning comes from MoveOn. It deserves your attention.

If you're an Obama supporter, watching the polls or reading the news can feel pretty good right now. And we should feel good—progressives have worked hard to get this far!

But we can't listen to the pundits who say it's over. Can you share these "Top 5 reasons Obama supporters shouldn't rest easy" with your blog readers—and encourage them to volunteer for Obama between now and Election Day?

TOP 5 REASONS OBAMA SUPPORTERS SHOULDN'T REST EASY

1. The polls may be wrong. This is an unprecedented election. No one knows how racism may affect what voters tell pollsters—or what they do in the voting booth. And the polls are narrowing anyway. In the last few days, John McCain has gained ground in most national polls, as his campaign has gone even more negative.

2. Dirty tricks. Republicans are already illegally purging voters from the rolls in some states. They're whipping up hysteria over ACORN to justify more challenges to new voters. Misleading flyers about the voting process have started appearing in black neighborhoods. And of course, many counties still use unsecure voting machines.

3. October surprise. In politics, 15 days is a long time. The next McCain smear could dominate the news for a week. There could be a crisis with Iran, or Bin Laden could release another tape, or worse.

4. Those who forget history... In 2000, Al Gore won the popular vote after trailing by seven points in the final days of the race. In 1980, Reagan was eight points down in the polls in late October and came back to win. Races can shift—fast!

5. Landslide. Even with Barack Obama in the White House, passing universal health care and a new clean-energy policy is going to be hard. Insurance, drug and oil companies will fight us every step of the way. We need the kind of landslide that will give Barack a huge mandate.

We're just two weeks away from turning the page on the Bush era—but we can't afford to take our eye off the prize. We've got to keep pushing until the very end.

When will Sarah Palin be allowed to speak?

2008-09-07T12:45:00.003-04:00

As I write this, after 8 days, 22 hours, 42 minutes and _____ seconds and counting, Sarah Palin still has not talked to the press, taken questions, or in any way or manner shown she can handle the rigors of a tough campaign let alone serve as Vice President or, if necessary, President of the United States.

Palin’s convention speech was that of a scripted attack dog taking its commands from a tele-prompter. She has been held on a very short leash by McBush and his handlers. As one McBush advisor put it, "She may take some questions from local news entities in Alaska, but until she's ready -- and until she's comfortable -- which might not be for a long while -- the media will have to wait."

What are they afraid of?

And if you’re asking, why is any of this an important issue? Here’s why.

Voters in November will cast their votes based on their readings of the candidates at the top of the ticket, John McCain or Barak Obama. Palin and Biden will not shift voter preferences. But in making that choice a thoughtful voter will, to the best of their ability and given the information available, sort out how each of the candidates make important decisions affecting them and the nation.

The very first decision of national significance a prospective president makes is the choice of a running mate. Choosing who will step in to take over the presidency should circumstances require it, is vital and revealing.

This decision is always presented with the words: "_______________ is ready to lead."

So is Sarah Palin ready to lead? American voters don’t know and McBush and his political strategists apparently are in no rush to help us find out. This may be a good political decision for them. It is a bad decision for voters.

THE WAR -- The Human Costs

2008-08-17T00:01:00.004-04:00

“… And the appearance of the wounded, bereft of arms, of legs, eyes put out, flesh wounds in the face and body, and uniforms crimsoned with blood, proclaimed with equal force the savage horrors of human battling with weapons of war.”

This is how a New York World correspondent described the grim scene of July 21, 1861, as bloodied troops of the Union army struggled into Washington after the battle of Bull Run. Sometimes called the first battle of the first modern war, the horrors of the Civil War were sketched, photographed and written about in the truth of gruesome detail from the bombardment of Fort Sumter to Lee’s surrender at Appomattox courthouse.

Assaying the death and carnage of this massive blood-letting, historian Drew Gilpin Faust writes: “Soldiers struggled for the words to describe mangled corpses strewn across battlefields; families contemplated the significance of newspaper lists of wounds: “slightly, in the shoulder,” “severely, in the groin,” “mortally, in the breast.” … For the first time civilians directly confronted the reality of battlefield death rendered by the new art of photography. They found themselves transfixed by the paradoxically lifelike renderings of the slain of Antietam that Mathew Brady exhibited in his studio on Broadway.”

The public of Lincoln’s day could not have found refuge from the “patriotic gore” of the war had they wanted to do so. How things have changed.

As we know by now, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are being reported in ways that shade civilians from the heat of death and human suffering taking place in those violent worlds. The Iraq and Afghanistan nightmare toll rolls on in the far distance. We are familiar with roadside bombs and suicide bombers, but the death and destruction of lives and bodies, the work of war, all takes place in lands filled with place names we have quit trying to pronounce. And the dead and the wounded for life barely register on our consciousness, not quite visible, not quite real.

After accepting five-and one-half years of wars churning toward ever-changing objectives, we’ve become comfortable with our can’t see, don’t see, won’t see sensibility. Few at home clamor for wider, deeper, more detailed coverage and analysis of these ongoing wars. No one asks to see the images of the bloodbath we created. Only the exceptionally persistent and courageous search out and are willing to gaze at bodies blown to pieces by IEDs along roadways and human bombs delivered to market place crowds.

Over four thousand American troops have died in Iraq; last week the five-hundredth death was marked in Afghanistan. The military issues the names of the dead, their age, rank, unit and hometown. This spare accounting arrives on most days of our busy weeks, day in and day out.

In the early years of the wars, our dead heroes returned home in the cargo holds of commercial flights. Travelers on holiday and frequent flyers on important business trips might glance out the windows of planes and see a flag draped coffin preceding their suitcase up the luggage ramp into the space beneath where they were seated. Did this require them to think about what they were seeing? The military now uses private chartered jets.

The wounded come home in far greater numbers. They have sacrificed much and arrive unannounced. They are ignored as they depart from hospitals and rehab centers to take up the difficult strands left of their lives. The stories of the medical conditions, red tape encountered in their searches for help and lonely depression they face only occasionally break through the surface of non-stop news on Brett Favre, “American Idol,” whatever.

If we should decide to search out the price being paid by the heroes of these wars, the flesh, bone, blood and breath of their sacrifices, where would we look? Because most of us will be lucky enough to not lose a close loved one in these wars, and only a few will ever attend and support a grieving family who has suffered such a loss, I recommend the reading of Jim Sheeler’s magnificent book, Final Salute: A Story of Unfinished Lives.

Sheeler wipes away the anonymity of those who made the ultimate sacrifice; he documents the courage of families left behind; he honors Marine Major Steve Beck who takes on the crushing, necessary task of notification and support of the families of the fallen. Major Beck is a hero who honors heroes. He works with a dedication that is deserving of medals and promotions not yet imagined by the military brass sitting behind polished desks.

Read this book to better understand the total and final loss exacted by these wars.

On the wounding of these brave women and men, there is now a book that should be in all libraries, public offices, and especially in the hands of every politician holding or running for office. Television newscasts should open and close with a shot, presented without comment, of a photo from this book. Newspapers need to regularly run excerpts and photos from this book.

War Surgery in Afghanistan and Iraq: A Series of Cases, 2003-2007 was written and designed to teach surgeons going into these war zones what they will see, what to expect, and what practices are effective. This book has been praised by the military medical establishment. This book has saved lives.

Before War Surgery was published (order from U.S. Government Printing Office), attempts were made to censor it and keep it from being made available to the public. Along with flag-draped coffins, our war government does not want American citizens to see the horrors of war.

War Surgery is filled with photos of the human damage coming from the wars we are a part of — burns, bleeding, limbs shredded, amputations, an unexploded rocket embedded in a soldier’s hip. This is not video game pixel violence or summer movie special effects and stunt man make believe.

Dr. David E. Lounsbury, a retired Colonel and 1991 and 2003 Iraq vet and one of the three authors of War Surgery had this to say about the attempts to censor and restrict this book: “I’m ashamed to say that there were folks even in the medical department who said, Over my dead body will American civilians see this.”

The Civil War journalist quoted above offered this observation and prediction: “Most horrible were the sights presented to view, and never to be forgotten by those who witnessed them.”

As the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq drone on: What have we seen? What will we remember?
____________
This piece was first published in the Terre Haute Tribune Star, August 17, 2008.

THE WAR The Money [Part 32]

2008-08-14T11:56:00.005-04:00

Reports of waste, deception and deviousness in Iraq pile up almost as fast as Bush administration resignations. No real surprises here for anyone who has been half awake. Yet we’ve seen Bush, Senate Republicans and McBush (when he's around to cast a vote) are ready to go to the veto and fillibuster mats to keep appropriations cuts for a war that never should have happened from coming to a vote. I guess that’s called “continuity” by those Republican rabbits who have no place to go but back into the same hole.

If you read this entire article you will find that, yes, Cheney’s old corporate parlor car, Haliburton, is still the first car on the bloody gravy train. Here’s a target quote: “When the war began, for example, Kellogg, Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, the company run by Dick Cheney before he was vice president, was the largest Pentagon contractor in Iraq. After years of criticism and scrutiny for its role in Iraq, Halliburton sold the unit, which is still the largest defense contractor in the war, and has 40,000 employees in Iraq.”

Right. 40,000!

And this brings us to the last paragraph in the excerpt below. It points out circumstances few recognize let alone think about.

______________________________________________
The New York Times
August 12, 2008
Use of Iraq Contractors Costs Billions, Report Says
By JAMES RISEN

WASHINGTON — The United States this year will have spent $100 billion on contractors in Iraq since the invasion in 2003, a milestone that reflects the Bush administration’s unprecedented level of dependence on private firms for help in the war, according to a government report to be released Tuesday.

The report, by the Congressional Budget Office, according to people with knowledge of its contents, will say that one out of every five dollars spent on the war in Iraq has gone to contractors for the United States military and other government agencies, in a war zone where employees of private contractors now outnumber American troops. . . .

Contractors in Iraq now employ at least 180,000 people in the country, forming what amounts to a second, private, army, larger than the United States military force, and one whose roles and missions and even casualties among its work force have largely been hidden from public view. The widespread use of these employees as bodyguards, translators, drivers, construction workers and cooks and bottle washers has allowed the administration to hold down the number of military personnel sent to Iraq, helping to avoid a draft.

GO HERE

THE WAR -- The Money [Part 31]

2008-08-03T21:24:00.002-04:00

Barak Obama is finally linking the miserable war in Iraq to the fast deteriorating economy at home. To his credit, he’s never spouted nonsense like failure to defeat the terrorists in Iraq will mean those terrorists will climb into the trunks of our Humvees and “follow us home.” He seems well aware that what will follow us home from the ruins of five years in an unnecessary war, what will be tied around the necks of the American people for generations as a result of this disaster, is massive debt.

No one should be, and Barak Obama is not, so naive as to think terrorism ends in this world the day our last hero leaves Iraq. And no one should think for a minute that another terrorist attack cannot (or even will not) take place within the United States at some date in the future. But fear, however real, should not freeze us in place, force us to continue a policy that was wrong from the start and has cost us so much through all these years.

Who can seriously argue that involvement in Iraq is the best defense and preparation against fanatical assaults being planned, who knows where, right now? Resources being wasted in this war need to be used intelligently at home. Terrorism is global, not something corralled within the borders of a single nation.

McBush is throwing around heavily weighted but never defined words like “victory” and “defeat.” He will continue these going nowhere attacks right up until election day. (What else does he have to use?) But this campaign tactic only satisfies mindless emotions while ignoring hard facts. This is the stuff that has hurt us far too long. Enough.

I say: “Obama, 16 months is 16 months too long.” But given Bush’s mushy “horizon” time table (sic) and the slow ticking of McBush’s perpetual clock, Obama’s is the only option making sense..

_______________________________________

The New York Times July 22, 2008
News Analysis
For Obama, a First Step Is Not a Misstep
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. and JEFF ZELENY

BAGHDAD — The Iraqi government on Monday left little doubt that it favors a withdrawal plan for American combat troops similar to what Senator Barack Obama has proposed, providing Mr. Obama with a potentially powerful political boost on a day he spent in Iraq working to fortify his credibility as a wartime leader. . . .

He said his conversation with General Petraeus and Mr. Crocker focused on “what’s adequate for our security interests, factoring in the fact that not only do we have Afghanistan, which I believe is the central front on terror, but also the fact that if we’re spending $10 billion a month over the next two, four, five years, then that’s $10 billion a month that we’re not using to rebuild the United States or drawing down our national debt or making sure that families have health care.” . . .

Go Here for Full Article

THE WAR -- The Money [Part 30]

2008-07-18T12:13:00.004-04:00

Comments are flying about “Bush Lied” charges being left-wing paranoia. I guess it depends on what a lie is. Let’s see, you’ve got your flat-out-lie, your bald face lie, your genteel falsehood. And then there’s the Texas whopper, the all purpose bunk and we mustn’t forget that political standby, artful misrepresentation. Sissela Bok in Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life writes about lies as excuses, lies of justification, lies in crises, lies protecting peers and clients. Bok also analyzes "lies to the incompetent.”

Has the Bush war administration been engaging in lies to the incompetent–namely us, the American people?

Maybe that paranoia is really a bill of particulars. Maybe we need legal authority to seriously examine, while under oath, policies and pronouncements that may have been lies of commission and omission. These lies (if that is what they turn out to be) should be sorted out from the plain, vanilla on steroids incompetence, riddling the Bush years.

Here’s a report on a “surge” you hear little or nothing about, electrical deaths and injuries to our troops in Iraq.

Who’s to blame? As usual, the stone-walling by KBR and the Bush administration matches the Great Wall of China. Nice point in this report about “accusations of overbilling” and “[hiring] unskilled Iraqis who were paid only a few dollars a day” to electrical work.

_______________________

The New York Times July 18, 2008
Electrical Risks at Iraq Bases Are Worse Than Said
By JAMES RISEN

WASHINGTON — Shoddy electrical work by private contractors on United States military bases in Iraq is widespread and dangerous, causing more deaths and injuries from fires and shocks than the Pentagon has acknowledged, according to internal Army documents.

During just one six-month period — August 2006 through January 2007 — at least 283 electrical fires destroyed or damaged American military facilities in Iraq, including the military’s largest dining hall in the country, documents obtained by The New York Times show. Two soldiers died in an electrical fire at their base near Tikrit in 2006, the records note, while another was injured while jumping from a burning guard tower in May 2007.

And while the Pentagon has previously reported that 13 Americans have been electrocuted in Iraq, many more have been injured, some seriously, by shocks, according to the documents. A log compiled earlier this year at one building complex in Baghdad disclosed that soldiers complained of receiving electrical shocks in their living quarters on an almost daily basis. . . .

The reports of shoddy electrical work have raised new questions about the Bush administration’s heavy reliance on contractors in Iraq, particularly because they come after other high-profile disputes involving KBR. They include, providing unsafe water to soldiers and failing to protect female employees who were sexually assaulted.

Officials say the administration contracted out so much work in Iraq that companies like KBR were simply overwhelmed by the scale of the operations. Some of the electrical work, for example, was turned over to subcontractors, some of which hired unskilled Iraqis who were paid only a few dollars a day.

GO HERE FOR FULL ARTICLE

THE WAR -- The Money [Part 29]

2008-07-06T12:49:00.002-04:00

US and Iraqi forces drive al-Qa'ida from stronghold
The Australian
Marie Colvin, Mosul | July 07, 2008

AMERICAN and Iraqi forces are driving al-Qa'ida in Iraq out of its last redoubt in the north of the country. . . .

The group has been reduced to hit-and-run attacks, including one that killed two off-duty policemen at the weekend, and sporadic bombings aimed at killing large numbers of officials and civilians. . . .

US and Iraqi leaders believe that while it is premature to write off al-Qa'ida in Iraq, the Sunni group has lost control of its last urban base in Mosul, and its remnants have been driven into countryside to the south.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who has also led a crackdown on the Shia Mahdi Army in Basra and Baghdad in recent months, claimed yesterday that his Government had "defeated" terrorism. . . .

Iraq is enjoying a surge in oil revenue driven by record crude prices and the highest production levels since Saddam's ouster. The Government expects to earn $73 billion from oil this year if prices remain high.

Putting some of this money to work, the Iraqi Government held a groundbreaking ceremony at the weekend for a project to refurbish the main road to the Baghdad airport.

GO HERE FOR FULL ARTICLE
______________

Is The Australian a “the surge is working” or, as the critics of the critics of the war so profoundly put it, a “cut and run” news source? Who cares? This is good news–isn’t it?

The report notes only two policemen killed and, what the heck, they were off duty.

Bombings? Hey, we can live (though some will die) with “sporadic.”

And how about the chasing of the “remnants” of those pesky trouble makers into the countryside? I guess they will live there, happily ever after, as the brilliant fairy tale planners of this war envisioned it.

But the best news of all comes from Iraq’s Prime Minister, he pronounces, let’s put it in bold and in caps: “HIS GOVERNMENT HAD “DEFEATED” TERRORISM.” And why shouldn’t we believe our staunch, democratically elected, ally?

And the good news just keeps coming. $73 billion from oil going to the honest and efficient Iraqi government (and their families and clans) this year. That should shut the mouths of those clueless critics of Bush and McBush who are always saying Americans haven’t been asked to sacrifice during this war. Well, as anyone who has ever stood in front of a gas pump and watched the dollars ring up knows, Americans are putting their support of the war in their gas tanks, right next to their fading “Bomb Saddam” bumper stickers.

Nice touch at the end of this story, “the Iraqi Government held a groundbreaking ceremony at the weekend for a project to refurbish the main road to the Baghdad airport.” This IED pocked stretch of road does need some fixing.

Hope they get it done soon so that we can give our brave troops a smooth ride to the planes that will bring them home. Seeing as the surge has worked to perfection, why would we need to keep them over there?

THE WAR -- The Money [Part 28]

2008-06-19T18:09:00.007-04:00

Oil Giants Back

Maybe this is what McBush has in mind when he lets loose with those I don't care if we stay in Iraq “100 years,” and then, "No, I mean 50 years” pronouncements. Sweetheart deals with Big Oil written on the bodies of fallen American heroes in Iraq, who cares? After all, it may mean saving a dime to a quarter at the pump. Of course, Big Oil wants what Altman in this piece calls “a certain degree of confidence” to back up the no-bid windfall profits those hard working billionaire CEOs at Exxon, Mobil, Shell and BP foresee in Iraq's future. Are they going to pay the Blackwater mercenaries to protect their pipes and pumps, chauffeur around the geologists and engineers, and protect the skies over the desert derricks? I don’t think so. You and I are going to pay for the "permanent bases," or as the militarist wordsmiths would say, "venerable temporary facilities," Bush is pushing for in Iraq. And what we pay won’t be showing up at the pump as we fill our gas guzzlers.

________________________________

International Herald Tribune
June 19, 2008

High Energy Thursday: A peculiar deal for some of Iraq’s oil
Posted by Daniel Altman in High energy

Imagine. At the precise moment when demand for oil was the highest in history, a recently democratized country with enormous reserves had the chance to sell extraction contracts to the highest bidder. This was a country that desperately needed the revenue to help rebuild its schools, power grid and water supply after a long internal conflict. So why did it hand out the contracts with no auction at all?

As Andrew Kramer writes [see “Deals With Iraq Are Set to Bring Oil Giants Back,” NYT, 6/19/2008] , Iraq has handed out no-bid contracts to the same companies that used to profit from its oil before Saddam Hussein came to power. . . .

Undoubtedly, there is some political intrigue here; the contracts were actually signed before Iraq’s blockbuster oil law was approved by the government. And the deals do require a certain degree of confidence on behalf of the oil companies that their investment will be protected, even for a couple of years. Just this week, Shell had to close down an offshore oil rig producing 200,000 barrels a day because of attacks by a Nigerian militia. . . .

http://blogs.iht.com/tribtalk/business/globalization/?cat=9

THE WAR -- The Money [Part 27]

2008-06-15T17:49:00.005-04:00

Why is there such a disconnect between the reality of the enormous costs (human and dollars) of this war and the slivers of what imagined “victory” can achieve in Iraq? In a brilliant analysis of Lincoln’s moral development ( Lincoln’s Virtues: An Ethical Biography ), William Lee Miller offers this observation while examining two wartime presidents, Polk and Lincoln.

“The human inclination to self-deception and self-exculpation, . . . is magnified in collective life – in the behavior, in particular, of nations. Every nation . . . has a magnified ego and a minimized conscience. The national egotism, is a compound of the egotism and the idealism of the individuals who compose it.”

Doesn’t the self-deception and self-exculpation of the tail-enders in the Bush administration and among his dwindling supporters clearly demonstrate Millers’ point? In this we have the explanation for their frozen in place response to the heat of the facts.

While the evidence of lies, mistakes, and never to be recouped costs have piled up at the feet of Bush, McCain, and Republican congressmen on autopilot, they have refused to budge off of their self-righteous perches of power. Their magnified egos stubbornly refuse to face realities that do not fit their self-aggrandizing calculations; their minimized consciences sustain a personal and dreamy ideological romance which ignores human tears and cold cash evidence.

And November is still five months away.
_______________________

Iraq war could cost taxpayers $2.7 trillion
In addition to the cost of war, taxpayers pay for rising veteran health care costs, and returning soldiers faced with foreclosure and unemployment.

By David Goldman, CNNMoney.com staff writer
Last Updated: June 12, 2008: 12:20 PM EDT

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- As the Iraq war continues with no clear end in sight, the cost to taxpayers may balloon to $2.7 trillion by the time the conflict comes to an end, according to Congressional testimony.

In a hearing held by the Joint Economic Committee Thursday, members of Congress heard testimony about the current costs of the war and the future economic fallout from returning soldiers. . . .

William Beach, director of the Center for Data Analysis, told members of Congress that the Iraq war has already cost taxpayers $646 billion. That's only accounting for five years, and, with the conflict expected to drag on for another five years, the figure is expected to more than quadruple. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., told members of Congress that the war costs taxpayers about $430 million per day, and called out the Bush Administration. . . .

The Bush Administration, which was invited to give testimony, declined to participate.

The Pentagon has previously said that the war costs approximately $9.5 billion a month, but some economists say the figure is closer to $25 billion a month when long-term health care for veterans and interest are factored in.

Health care: In testimony before the committee, Dr. Christine Eibner, an Associate Economist with research firm RAND, said advances in armor technology have kept alive many soldiers who would have been killed in prior wars. But that has added to post-war health care costs for veterans, especially for "unseen" wounds like post traumatic stress disorder, major depression and traumatic brain injury.

Unemployment: Furthermore, many veterans who recently completed their service are coming back to a difficult job and housing market.

Foreclosure: Many soldiers who come home from active duty are also finding difficulty keeping their homes.
____________
First Published: June 12, 2008: 12:07 PM EDT/ For complete CNN article:

GO HERE

THE WAR -- The Money [Part 26]

2008-06-05T20:40:00.003-04:00

This is about The Money we didn't have to spend on a useless, deadly and debilitating war in Iraq. Some think it is unnecessary to find out what happened to thrust us into this five years and counting mess. Are we all Chicago Cub fans? What's happened in the past can't be recalled, replayed, re-voted on, so Go You Cubs. That's why baseball is a game and war is serious. That's why stammering cries of "We're winning." and hollow declarations about "Victory" are meaningless. We were lied to, we believed the lies, we're paying the price. There's no, "Wait till next year."

After long delays by the Republicans in the Senate, comes the dropping of the second shoe "of investigations by the Senate Intelligence Committee into the use, abuse and faulty assessments of intelligence leading up to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003." You may remember (most do not) the first part which demonstrated the failures of the CIA. Part 2 is about Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and that whole gang and their 2002-03 pre-war "exaggerations," or what most of us would call lies. Playing up and accentuating a climate of fear, massaging and misrepresenting the intelligence they collected, counting on Americans' deep well of too often blind patriotism, and threatening the timid in Congress with defeat at the polls, these liars led us into a war without a justifiable purpose.

We've been paying big time ever since.

The New York Times
June 5, 2008
Senate Panel Accuses Bush of Iraq Exaggerations
By MARK MAZZETTI and SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — A long-delayed Senate report endorsed by Democrats and some Republicans has concluded that President Bush and his aides built the public case for war against Iraq by exaggerating available intelligence and by ignoring disagreements among spy agencies about Iraq’s weapons programs and Saddam Hussein’s links to Al Qaeda.

The report was released Thursday after years of partisan squabbling, and it marks the close of five years of investigations by the Senate Intelligence Committee into the use, abuse and faulty assessments of intelligence leading up to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. . . .

The 170-page report accuses Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other top officials of repeatedly overstating the Iraqi threat in the emotional aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. Its findings were endorsed by all eight committee Democrats and two Republicans, Senators Olympia Snowe of Maine and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska. . . .

For full story and link to the Senate Intelligence Report go to:

Senate Investigation

Bush Plays Through, America in Sand Trap

2008-05-31T09:51:00.002-04:00

The Terre Haute Tribune-Star

Tuning out grim news about war

President Bush gave up golf in 2003. He says he didn’t want Americans to see him enjoying himself on the links in wartime. And who can argue with this president? It would be unseemly to see the commander in chief floundering about in a sand bunker of a posh country club while he continues to send brave women and men into the blood spattered sand trap of Iraq.

The year 2007 was a particularly bloody year in this five years and counting war in Iraq — more than 900 dead, the bloodiest year of the war. While we were having a particularly beautiful spring in Vigo County this April, 52 of our finest were dying in Iraq. This month — 18 dead so far.

The Bush golf story is one that may make it into the papers or be a short filler comment of 15 seconds or so on the nightly TV news. But probably not. We don’t hear much about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars these days. It’s reported that coverage of Iraq and Afghanistan has slipped to 3 percent of all American print and broadcast news as of last week, falling from 25 percent as recently as last September.

Pictures of death and suffering in the Iraq war are rare. Fewer and fewer photojournalists are sent into the field by news organizations. We now reach toward six years and five thousand dead in Iraq. We’ve wasted a trillion dollars on this war. But whose counting? “People have,” as Mark Jurkowitz of the Project for Excellence in Journalism says, “made up their minds about this war.” We’ve chosen to ignore it. Move on.

Memorial Day, since 1971, is now a convenient Monday holiday allowing us all to stretch our weekends into three days of leisured indifference. With only a scattering of admirable exceptions, most choose to watch the weather report then cook out, go on picnics, attend the Indy 500, mow the lawn, kick back. Remembering those who died in service to our country in the past? They’re sadly ignored. And those serving and dying right now, and tomorrow? They will be briefly honored by a portion of the public, mourned for a lifetime by their loved ones, lost to memory in next year’s long Memorial Day weekend activities.

Bush might as well play golf. No one is watching.

THE WAR -- The Money [Part 25]

2008-05-23T13:59:00.006-04:00

Writing about “The Money,” I often use phrases like “floating billions on the desert winds” and “pounding American dollars into a bloody, sandy abyss.” These flights of rhetoric are a way to personally express outrage and relieve frustration. But as I have tried to show in these "The Money" posts my angry words are sourced in the deeds and actions of our government. The evidence is grounded in years of Bush incompetence, Congressional lockstep faux patriotism, a failure of the press to do its job, and public indifference.

And now, with a shift of party control in Congress, with a “change” election looming, elected officials, Democratic and Republican, are scrambling or sulking toward a degree of accountability. Even part of the press is ready to help the public in understanding the depths of the waste that accompanied the ignorance and arrogance which spawned the disaster that is America in Iraq.

Hunkering down in the White House bunker of denial, only Bush and McBush refuse to face the mountain of evidence that has been growing, looming for years. They still talk about “Victory.” They still try to use flag lapel pins and hollow “Support Our Troops” bumper stickers to cover the crimes, large and small, bloody and venial, that they, and so many others have committed.
___________________________

New York Times May 23, 2008
Iraq Spending Ignored Rules, Pentagon Says
By JAMES GLANZ

A Pentagon audit of $8.2 billion in American taxpayer money spent by the United States Army on contractors in Iraq has found that almost none of the payments followed federal rules and that in some cases, contracts worth millions of dollars were paid for despite little or no record of what, if anything, was received.

The audit also found a sometimes stunning lack of accountability in the way the United States military spent some $1.8 billion in seized or frozen Iraqi assets, which in the early phases of the conflict were often doled out in stacks or pallets of cash. The audit was released Thursday in tandem with a Congressional hearing on the payments.

In one case, according to documents displayed by Pentagon auditors at the hearing before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, a cash payment of $320.8 million in Iraqi money was authorized on the basis of a single signature and the words “Iraqi Salary Payment” on an invoice. In another, $11.1 million of taxpayer money was paid to IAP, an American contractor, on the basis of a voucher with no indication of what was delivered. . . .

Examples of the paperwork for some of those payments, displayed at the hearing, depict a system that became accustomed to making huge payments on the fly, with little oversight or attention to detail. In one instance, a United States Treasury check for $5,674,075.00 was written to pay a company called Al Kasid Specialized Vehicles Trading Company in Baghdad for items that a voucher does not even describe.

In another case, $6,268,320.07 went to the contractor Combat Support Associates with even less explanation. And a scrawl on another piece of paper says only that $8 million had been paid out as “Funds for the Benefit of the Iraqi People.”

But perhaps the masterpiece of elliptic paperwork is the document identified at the top as a “Public Voucher for Purchases and Services Other Than Personal.” It indicates that $320.8 million went for “Iraqi Salary Payment,” with no explanation of what the Iraqis were paid to do.

Whatever it was, the document suggests, each of those Iraqis was handsomely compensated. Under the “quantity” column is the number 1,000, presumably indicating the number of people who were to be paid — to the tune of $320,800 apiece — if the paperwork is to be trusted.
______________

These excerpts are from a long and detailed article. If you have the stomach for it, go to:

Iraq Spending Ignored Rules, Pentagon Says

THE WAR -- The Money [Part 24]

2008-05-21T16:33:00.006-04:00

Sometimes “The Money” is not about the endless bundles of death cash we snake through the alleys of Baghdad, or send out into the desert never to be seen again, or line the pockets of the few, the well-placed and the brutally powerful.

Sometimes it’s about:

“Omar, a 69-year-old refugee from Baghdad, interviewed by UNHCR, said that he will die a “slow death” if assistance is stopped. His family has depended on food and medical aid since arriving in Syria in 2006, and pay rent out of remittances from Iraq which he described as “our only way to survive.”

And it’s about “The Money” we refuse to spend.

Money running out for Iraqi refugee crisis, warns UN agency

9 May 2008 –The United Nations refugee said today that it could soon be forced to reduce or even halt assistance to hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees unless donors provide more funds.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said there was a $127 shortfall for health, education and food assistance for Iraqi refugees. “We will not be able to help hundreds of thousands of the most vulnerable Iraqi refugees and internally displaced if we do not receive funding for the remainder of 2008,” said High Commissioner António Guterres. “Without this support, the humanitarian crisis we have faced over the past two years may grow even larger,” he added.

A total of 4.7 million Iraqis have been uprooted as a result of the crisis in their country. Of these over 2 million are living as refugees in neighbouring countries – mostly Syria and Jordan – while 2.7 million are internally displaced inside Iraq. . . .

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=26614&Cr=iraq&Cr1=

THE WAR -- The Money [Part 23]

2008-05-06T12:59:00.005-04:00

Frederick Kagan (author of Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq, 2007) stood firm on “Mission Accomplished” day. In a nutshell, victory in Iraq remains within reach, all that is good and true will follow.

The many who pushed this disastrous war, true believers and deceivers from the start, are now reduced to turning their past lies into future truths. The madness of all this was presciently, if inadvertently, skewered by Lewis Carroll in the 19th century. His “When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.” is probably one of the most quoted lines in contemporary political analysis. In Kagan’s case, it catches the authoritarian logic and tone of one who led us into the dark wood of war without even the bread crumbs provided Hansel and Gretel.

Here’s Kagan’s latest rickety prop to a war that could never be “won.” One senses in it the laying of the groundwork for the Right Wing Warrior nonsense that will come with our final withdrawal. The blustering spouts of how the left “lost” Iraq, plunged that country into chaos, and upset a smoothly running plan to create a democratic and peaceful middle-east. It will all flow with the darkness and force of the oil profits of Exon.

For five long years the United States presence in Iraq has attempted to build dreamy sand castles without the aid of reason and ignoring the weight of reality. Here’s Kagan’s Op-Ed in full. Lewis Carroll responds in bold type. Ridicule can never replace the pointed labor of reason or the careful sifting of reality, but it does provide a respite from the madness.

The New York Times, May 4, 2008
Op-Ed Contributor
Don’t Drain Iraq’s Cash
By FREDERICK KAGAN

THE way forward in Iraq must proceed from the recognition that the surge, of which I was an early proponent, has stabilized central Iraq, reduced violence overall and provided space for the Iraqi government to undertake important reconciliation efforts.

[“What I tell you three times is true.”]

Continuing along this path to success requires maintaining our counterinsurgency strategy and committing to see Iraq through its democratic transformation, with parliamentary elections scheduled for late 2009.

[“I think I could, if I only knew how to begin. For, you see, so many out-of-the-way things had happened lately that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible.”]

There is one obstacle to success, however, that we must avoid. Having failed to legislate retreat, some members of Congress are exploiting Americans’ economic anxieties and insisting that the Iraqi government help defray our costs in fighting our common enemies.

[“Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to stay in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”]

Yes, the war in Iraq is expensive (though hardly the hyperbolic $3 trillion some have suggested), and the desire to reduce that expense is reasonable. Iraq has a lot of money from oil, and we should do what we can to help and encourage the Iraqis to spend their money on rebuilding their country whenever possible.

[“His answer trickled through my head - Like water through a sieve”]

But a dangerous note has crept into the discussion, a tinge of imperialism, in fact. The argument that Iraq should use its oil revenues to pay the United States sounds like the ultimate proof that we invaded Iraq for mercenary reasons.

[“'But I don’t want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked. 'Oh, you can’t help that,' said the Cat. 'We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.' 'How do you know I’m mad?' said Alice. 'You must be,” said the Cat. 'or you wouldn’t have come here.'”]

If it insists that Iraq underwrite American military forces, Congress would do catastrophic damage to our image in the world, particularly the Muslim world. America does not go to war for profit — ever. We should not make it appear as if we do.

[“Be what you would seem to be - or, if you'd like it put more simply - never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.”]

FREDERICK KAGAN is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute
[“Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”]

THE WAR -- The Money [Part 22]

2008-05-05T00:57:00.004-04:00

There was a term in the military back when the weapons of war (as compared with the high tech, micro-destroyers of life used in the present) were akin to medieval siege machines and uniforms were without a square inch of Velcro. Enlistees served three year hitches, draftees, two. And then there were the “6 monthers.” After their 180 days it was back home to the Guard and Reserves. Fairly or unfairly, they were not much admired when I served.

Thomas Friedman has served most of the Iraq war as a 6 monther. (There are many of these among the pundits even today.) He’s always managed to almost get one foot out the door. For some reason though, he’s never quite able to pull the other one clear. Instead, on a regular basis he has solemnly informed his many readers that “in 6 months we will know if it’s time to leave Iraq.” He’s redeployed himself so many times I've lost count.

Lately he’s taken a new approach. The energy crisis, always a main concern with this 6 monther, is not going to be eased through any form of “victory” in Iraq. He doesn’t say this in so many words. Now he finesses the withdrawal issue by discovering the need for "nation building," at home. So there’s work to be done at home. Friedman makes like a modern day Paul Revere. If Paul had taken side trips to Canada, Ireland and the Bahamas, he still would have aroused the countryside as fast as stuck-in-Iraq-Friedman.

Many have been saying the same thing Friedman is saying about our crumbling infrastructure, pitiful research initiatives, and failing educational system since before “Mission Accomplished.” The costs of the Iraq war come in many forms. It’s irritating to see Friedman wring his hands and act as if he has to be the bearer of this bad news. If he had started with this line after the first 6 months of this disaster of a war, we might be getting out within six months after Bush leaves office. Barring, of course, the election of McBush. If that tragedy is heaped upon the last five year fiasco, Friedman will need a new supply of calendars.
_____________

The Money [Part 22]

The New York Times May 4, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Who Will Tell the People?
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Traveling the country these past five months while writing a book, I’ve had my own opportunity to take the pulse, far from the campaign crowds. My own totally unscientific polling has left me feeling that if there is one overwhelming hunger in our country today it’s this: People want to do nation-building. They really do. But they want to do nation-building in America.

They are not only tired of nation-building in Iraq and in Afghanistan, with so little to show for it. They sense something deeper — that we’re just not that strong anymore. We’re borrowing money to shore up our banks from city-states called Dubai and Singapore. Our generals regularly tell us that Iran is subverting our efforts in Iraq, but they do nothing about it because we have no leverage — as long as our forces are pinned down in Baghdad and our economy is pinned to Middle East oil. . . .

Who will tell the people? We are not who we think we are. We are living on borrowed time and borrowed dimes. We still have all the potential for greatness, but only if we get back to work on our country. . . .
_______________________________

Who Will Tell the People?

THE WAR -- FIVE YEARS, FIVE YEARS, FIVE YEARS, FIVE YEARS, FIVE YEARS

2008-05-01T22:46:00.004-04:00

Can you count to five?

Five Years After 'Mission Accomplished'

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Thursday, May 1, 2008; 12:56 PM

Much has happened in the five years since President Bush flew aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier in "Top Gun" style, stood under a banner proclaiming "Mission Accomplished" and proudly declared: "Major combat operations in Iraq have ended."

Five years ago, 139 American troops had died in Iraq. Now that number is 4,064. Five years ago, 542 American troops had been wounded in Iraq. Now that number is 29,395.

Five years ago, the national debt was $6.5 trillion. Now it's $9.3 trillion. Five years ago, your average gallon of gas cost $1.44. Now it costs $3.57. Five years ago, Bush's job-approval rating was at 70 percent. Now it's at 28.

Five years ago, Bush's appearance on the carrier was widely hailed as a brilliant PR move, imbuing the president with the aura of a conquering hero. Now, it's possibly the single most potent image of Bush's hubris.

One thing that's not so different: Five years ago, there were about 150,000 American troops in Iraq. Now there are slightly more. . . .

Full article: Five Years After 'Mission Accomplished'

THE WAR -- The Money [Part 20]

2008-04-30T22:02:00.006-04:00

That Was Then, This Is Now . . .

In March of 2003, the war in Iraq loomed. Oriana Fallaci, the much honored Italian journalist who died at 77 in 2006, published in English a scathing essay later turned into a book, The Rage and the Pride.

Fallaci was contemptuous of Islamic culture. Any compromise, nod or lean in the direction of understanding and conciliation with the followers of Mohamed was weakness and betrayal of the West. Her view (often called “Islamophobic”) was a tireless indictment (often called a rant) against Islamic fundamentalism.The book questioned the stated tenets of Islam and its practice, condemned totalitarian forces bent on destroying liberal Western society and civilization, and railed against apathy regarding the immediate threat posed by Islamic fundamentalism. In the United States, she was supported by the Ayn Rand Institute and a number of other right wing foundations.

Here is smattering from that March 2003 essay, “The Rage, the Pride and the Doubt--Thoughts on the eve of battle in Iraq.” Appearing just before the Iraq war began, this essay showed her unleavened contempt for any and all who might give Iraq a hearing, insist on more UN arms inspections, exhaust diplomatic channels. Be they communists or the Holy Father of the Catholic Church, Bush should and must have his war.

“They [anyone taking a pacifist or delay the war position] are in Rome where the communists left by the door and re-entered through the window like the birds of the Hitchcock movie. And where, pestering the world with his ecumenism, his pietism, his Thirdworldism, Pope Wojtyla receives Tariq Aziz as a dove or a martyr who is about to be eaten by lions. (Then he sends him to Assisi where the friars escort him to the tomb of St. Francis.)”

Tariq Aziz is the memory trace of importance in this pro-war diatribe. You might just recall this guy appearing regularly on TV. He always had a good word for Saddam; a straight-faced lie in service to his protector tyrant. Fallaci would no doubt rejoice with the news that this Chaldean Christian is facing post-Saddam justice in Iraq. But her smug joy at the prospect of Aziz going on trial would probably be tempered by her sneer at hearing the word justice in conjunction with a court made up of Muslims. Her war, much like Bush’s, was a Crusade, righteously pursued but lacking a clear, obtainable object. That kind of playing with people’s and nation’s lives is the essence of arrogance.

So it may be clear to all today that Tariq Aziz’s crimes as Saddam’s diplomatic and administrative henchman were brutal and tyrannical. What is not clear is what we should call the forces of brutality and chaotic tyranny we unleashed in an Iraq that no longer has a Tariq Aziz to bring to justice. One wonders if Oriana Fallaci could speak to that question with her cold reason today.

(Sometimes The Money is not about millions, billions and trillions. In this case it’s about what $15,000 could not buy in today’s war disabled Iraq.)
_____________
The New York Times, April 30, 2008
Trial Opens for Former Hussein Aide
By STEPHEN FARRELL

BAGHDAD — Tariq Aziz, who for years was the public diplomatic face of Saddam Hussein’s government, went on trial in Baghdad on Tuesday, facing charges over the execution of Iraqi merchants during the Baathist era. . . .

Elsewhere in Baghdad on Tuesday, heavy fighting erupted in the Shiite district of Sadr City as American and Iraqi troops continued efforts to curb rocket and mortar attacks on the capital’s fortified Green Zone. Many of these are launched from nearby Sadr City, a stronghold of the radical cleric Moktada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army.

The American military said it killed 28 gunmen during one prolonged clash on Tuesday morning, after a patrol was attacked with small arms, roadside bombs and rocket-propelled grenades. A military statement said American troops had fought back, using rocket launchers.

Doctors in Sadr City hospitals said they had received the bodies of 21 people, including women and children, Reuters reported.

In the central province of Diyala, the police in Balad Ruz said they had found the bullet-riddled corpses of six academics who were kidnapped last week. Their families had paid $15,000 each, but the kidnappers still executed the hostages, Iraqi security officials said.
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Trial Opens for Former Hussein Aide

WAR -- The Money [Part 19]

2008-04-27T12:34:00.003-04:00

This is what happens when you have a get along, go along Congress in place during five years of deadly, costly war. Let's see if John McBush makes getting the defense contractors to pay the $3 billion they are in arrears in taxes part of his "end the waste" campaign. Or will he turn his head, avoid the inconsistency, and just keep shoveling the money at the defense budget pirate profiteers as the war goes on, and on, and on . . .
__________________

April 27, 2008
Editorial
Tracking the Spoils of the Private Sector

There are so many barn doors to be closed on the Bush administration’s wasteful, murky world of government contractors that Congress barely knows where to begin. The House has made a start in plugging the multibillion-dollar loophole that the White House let slip into its promised crackdown on fraudulent contractors.

An executive mandate that contracted companies report misuse of taxpayers’ dollars to the Justice Department somehow managed to exempt work performed overseas. A drafting error, says the White House. But one, of course, that would further insulate the administration’s favored war contractors from ever answering for waste and fraud. There have been dozens of offenses, including kickbacks and bribes in Iraq and Afghanistan, where more than $102 billion has been spent on contracts. The Senate must approve the loophole closer.

The House voted as well to address another long-running boondoggle: the brazen failure of contractors to pay federal taxes, even as they are enriched by taxpayers in winning government business. More than 60,000 federal contractors owe $7.7 billion in back taxes, according to the Government Accountability Office. Almost half of the deadbeats are defense contractors who owe the Treasury $3 billion. Anyone shocked? . . .
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Go HERE for full editorial.

WAR -- The Money [Part 18]

2008-04-22T16:10:00.004-04:00

Is our mission in Iraq garbage detail? If this is the case, and if it will lead to some relief for the suffering Iraqi people, so be it. But after five long years and 100s of billions of dollars, it is fair to expect that we would be beyond these kinds of efforts. We entered this unplanned, ideologically driven war with nothing but an airy dream of “democratizing the middle-east.” Now we appear ready to spend months, or years, and billions more, picking up the garbage. There has to be a better plan for using our brave military personnel and our “put it on the national debt tab” dollars.
__________________

April 22, 2008
In Sadr City, Basic Services Are Faltering
By MICHAEL R. GORDON

BAGHDAD — Even as American and Iraqi troops are fighting to establish control of the Sadr City section of this capital, the Iraqi government’s program to restore basic services like electricity, sewage and trash collection is lagging, jeopardizing the effort to win over the area’s wary residents.

For weeks, there have been reports that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki is preparing to move ahead with a multimillion-dollar program to rebuild the southern swath of Sadr City, which is currently occupied by Iraqi and American troops.

But almost a month after American and Iraqi forces pushed into the area, there are no signs of reconstruction. Instead, the streets are filled with mounds of trash and bubbling pools of sewage. Many neighborhoods are still without electricity, and many residents are too afraid to brave the cross-fire to seek medical care. Iraqi public works officials, apparently fearful of the fighting, rarely seem to show up at work, and the Iraqi government insists the area is not safe enough for repairs to begin. . . .

Residents have repeatedly asked American troops during patrols why the garbage cannot be removed and basic repairs made in the areas the Americans control, especially since the most intense fighting appears to be over in these sectors. . . .

As a stopgap, the Americans are undertaking a $400,000 program to distribute large trash bins and employ up to 200 local Iraqis. More than 90 have been hired, but some of the workers have failed to show up and some of the results, Captain Carter acknowledged, have been poor.

The trash collectors are outfitted with yellow vests. On Monday morning, a soldier asked for an “eyes on” report over the tactical radio on how many workers were picking up trash along a major thoroughfare.

The reply over the radio was not encouraging: “They started at 20, but are down to 4.”

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