One Quaker's Take

Not Sure Where This Came From

2011-08-31T16:43:00.000-07:00

The secret is our red Kool Aid,
Fox News is where the best is made,
But it’s an old and old old brew,
For all the way that it tastes new,
it tells them just who is to blame,
For all their anger, all their pain
All their emptiness and fear,
Draw them closer, so they hear,
Of course it’s never been our fault,
Of this earth we are the salt,
Here’s the answer, always same,
Obama, Obama is his name.
And once they know, once they’re told,
And once they get whipped into bold,
This good old brew, one we all know,
Tells them how this has to go.
We repeat it and soon, you see,
How we create reality.

That stim was just a great big flop,
Tho’ we took credit where it dropped,
Tax cuts make jobs, don’t you forget,
just ‘cause it hasn’t happened yet,
They will come, like heaven sent,
When an R is president,
Of course, they’ll pay the minimum wage,
We have to turn that union page.
It’s all clear, don’t perplex us,
We just turn the country into Texas,
We repeat it, and then you see,
It’s become what they believe.

Need FEMA help? Oh, don’t be scared,
It will just cost your Medicare.
Teacher pay caused foreclosed homes,
So, leave our hedge fund guys alone,
EPA caused mine disaster,
Liberty is what we’re after,
Small government! Spread news!
Except, of course, for right to choose,
Or building mosques or right to strike,
Or anything else we don’t like.
We know what’s right, there is no doubt,
But we will never kick you out,
Money’s speech, now, you know,
Talk all you want, we have the dough,
To drown you out, or say you’re a fake,
Reality is ours to make.
Climate change? God’s will, you know,
Our money says it’s not our coal,
Repeat it and there you go!
Now what we say is all they know.

See, corps are now people, too,
A little different, from you, that’s true,
You’ll never get to see them fail,
Or spend a single night in jail,
Tax breaks they get, that’s a fact,
and big fat over-run contracts,
That’s not fair? Oh, you’re shocked?
It’s all about we own their stock.
So we need you to pay tax more,
To fund the stims we call war,
Your taxes make us rich, it’s true,
And our own base has no clue,
Repeat it, it’s what we do,
Til they repeat, repeat it, too.

He wanted change, is what he said,
and we just beat him, on the head,
He tries so hard, that silly jerk,
But we will never let it work.
Can never give us enough,
So let him try to call our bluff,
That mandate was our’s first,
But now we say it is the worst,
Deficits that were fine, back then,
They’re now socialism, friend.
Now all you blues are throwing fits,
Not change, you want the same old shit!
You want him to fight us back,
You want him to slug and hack,
You don’t want different, any more,
You scorn him--doesn’t know the score,
Hope won’t do a bit of good,
He’s just a big babe in the woods,
You don’t believe in hope, do you?
Or change, we took that from you, too.
We bet on the surest hunches,
You’re too gutless to take the punches,
You talked so big, you great big fake,
You didn’t have what it would take.
Repeated you don’t even see,
You’re back in our reality.

Oh, you might vote us out again,
Despite the money we can spend,
And those voter ID laws,
and all the hopelessness we caused,
We split your blue from blue from blue,
Got you to blame Obama, too,
The lies and spin and crap we say,
Drove all your hope and change away,
So, hunt or fish or watch the game,
Or down load porn, it’s all the same,
You bellied up my big, blue fools,
It’s red, it’s red, the Aid that’s Kool.
‘Cause If you come at us, again,
We’ll have no fear of you, my friend,
You’ll copy us, in that we trust,
‘Cause we’ve made you just like us.

The hamster might be dead, but the wheel just keeps on spinning...

2011-08-07T09:12:00.000-07:00

The Wall Street Journal is a snake dining on its tail and never more so than in the editorial on why we should all ignore the ratings downgrade of US public debt.

Their conclusion is correct--we should ignore the down grade. If we had ignored their grading of private debt (e.g., mortgage backed securities) our 401(k) accounts and the institutional investments of states and pension funds would be somewhere in the neighborhood of 40% stronger and the unemployment rate would be 4-6% lower. Perhaps the Wall Street Journal should have given us this advice when all three ratings agencies were stamping AAA ratings on those junk securities.   Late to the party, they were.

Everyone knows--or should know- how the craven corruption of these ratings agencies was an indispensable element in the process of looting our economy throughout the last half of the Clinton administration and all of the Bush/Cheney era. It could not have happened if these agencies didn't make immense profits lying about the AAA safety of the CDOs, CDSs, CP3Os and whatever other "securities" are now lining bird cages and wrapping fish. These three ratings agencies, although they were extorted into it by the banks who told them--literally--that if they didn't give up the big AAA one of their competitors would get the fee for doing it. But they knew what they were doing. They decided to be accomplices--accessories, as it were, before and during the fact. These agencies were as important in this massive criminal fraud as a gun is to a bank hold up. (guns, on the other hand, don't have ethical codes--but, then, they don't need them.)

So give the Wall Street Journal credit for seeing--if too late for our economy--that the rating agencies are worthless parasites, public relations firms for grifters, at best.

But the Wall Street Journal completely runs off the rails when it says in this editorial that the best way to rate the safety is...wait for it...what's the best way to value everything? THE MARKET! The market, of course, that was led by the ratings agencies, Standard and Poors among them, right off of the cliff with mortgage backed securities (and the tech bubble and...I digress).

I have to give a cynical nod to people who can see reality diverge from their ideology on a daily basis and still hold onto it.   Like members of a cargo cult, having built mock-up airplanes in the expectation that supplies will be delivered, The Wall Street Journal is still promising us that the tax cuts we have delivered to the "job creators" at the top of our economic food chain are the best--the only--job creation strategy worth pursuing. They keep saying this while wasting away, we are, in our own little Hoover-villes.

Tax cuts for job creators will create jobs? We have irrefutable quantitative evidence to the contrary from our era and eras past but The Wall Street Journal says we should pay no attention to that because "tax cuts equals more jobs is just common sense." ideology shapes reality, at least on the editorial page, of the Wall Street Journal, like--in fairness--it does most every where else one looks in the "news" and among those who make it.

Here's something that is apparently not common sense: THE MARKET snapped up those fraudulent mortgage backed securities that were rated AAA by all three rating agencies, and snapped them up by the bushel basket full.   When the karma turned bad and the defaults started happening on the underlying mortgages it became clear (again) that THE MARKET is predominated by greedy wishful thinkers (like us) who largely make decisions based on what is most convenient and in our short term interest--and what most everyone else is saying is "common sense."

This is not rocket surgery and I'm not (as those of you who know me personally can testify) all that smart to know it . it's our human/worldly nature--look it up in the literature of almost any spiritual--or "rational"--tradition to which you have access and with which you have sympathy. Or consult your own experience from which, by giving you this (truly conservative) wisdom sometime in your twenties (or for us late bloomers, in your thirties), I hope you are among those able to benefit from it in all aspects of your daily life)t. It's why "sheep" and "the flock" is one of the most frequent and enlightening metaphors for humanity in the Christian tradition.

The general moral condition in this country is this: our leaders know (and we accept them basing decisions on) the current price of most everything and the true value of very little. That's the context of market driven decision making. Don't look under the hood, in the horse's mouth or behind the curtain. Just do what everyone else is doing and you'll get what's coming to you in the end.

I've never given a Lily to the Wall Street Journal before--probably because I don't look at it very often. But today it's theirs. I wish them well with it. I wish us all well with the consolation and faith they provide to that part of us too comfortable with and/or afraid to try to stop living in this world we have created for ourselves.

Because as a contemporary prophet once wrote, "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows."

As a young Friend of my acquaintance once put it "the hamster might be dead but the wheel is still spinning."

how pig wrestling has led to the worship of jackals

2011-07-30T10:18:00.000-07:00

Long ago, I was a divorce lawyer. During those five years I learned some of the most important things I know about people and the way we function--what we are wiling to do-- when we are laboring under the control of our anger, fear, pain and desperation. Most divorces end without turning into full blown wars, but all are on the same continuum. The closest I ever saw to an "amicable divorce" was one in which both parties actually took ten full paces before they turned and fired. Some day I may write a book, but there's one aspect of this dynamic of conflict I want to write about at the moment because it is relevant to what has become of American politics.

In a divorce there is no referee until, and unless, the case gets to court. The law doesn't really care, in the end, about the things many people care the most about--proving that their soon-to-be ex-spouses are bad, bad human beings. All that means that people are free to say pretty much anything they want to say about these soon-to-be ex-spouses until one is front of the judge. Some of them are devastated that, at this point, Her/His Honor tells them to put a sock in it.

All people going through a divorce develop a narrative. It is probably a psychological necessity for one's self esteem and for how one thinks one's friends, family and even children view them. The more hurt and threatened (or guilty) one is feeling the more extreme the narrative becomes.

One of the ways some people deal with a narrative of their soon-to-be ex-spouse that threatens their own sense of being in the right (or deal with their own guilt) is called "parrot-ing." It's simple, really. If one is accused of something by one's soon-to-be ex-spouse then one will turn around and accuse that soon-to-be ex-spouse of being the one who is actually doing that.   The accuser becomes the accused, the victim becomes the perpetrator.

"Me? You're the one who ... "

Most often this is done cynically, to confound the accuser, to deflect blame, to prolong and escalate the frustration of the victim. It also inflates their attorney fees if the victims allow themselves to get caught up in it (or their lawyers encourage them to do so). The idea is to keep the conflict alive and punish, punish, punish the victim. Interestingly, this was most common in my cases where the "parrot," and not the victim, had initiated the divorce.

Having seen parrot-ing time and again in my cases I began to warn my new clients about it (along with other predictable horse-play). When they would call me later and tell me, for example, that their soon-to-be ex-husband was bringing the children home late from weekend visits and not returning their clothing with them, I reminded them of my warning and predicted that if we complained about it I might well soon receive a call from his lawyer accusing my client of being the one really causing the problem. Time and again any harassment my client suffered would, in the end, bring about the counter-claim that she was the perpetrator and that he was the victim.

I advised my clients to ignore it and concentrate on the legal issues--which except in the most rare cases have nothing to do with "fault" on anyone's part. Proving one is the victim and not the perpetrator (of stuff going on now or things that happened years ago) has nothing to do with the outcome of most cases. Unfortunately, at such a fragile time in one's life, not many of us are able to ignore malicious harassment. In the midst of divorce one is even more than usually concerned about how one is viewed by others, especially one's friends and family.

Never wrestle with a pig, I used to advise, you'll both get dirty and the pig likes it.

Last night I heard John Boehner, the Republican Speaker of the House, accuse the President and the Democrats of being "unable to say yes" to a deal on raising the debt ceiling.   He went on to say that he stuck his "neck out a mile" to try to make a deal, that he even put "revenues" on the table but the President refused to take a deal that gave the Democrats everything they said they wanted but that Mr. Obama refused to take the deal. Mr. Obama just wanted to make this all a political issue.

I remembered Mr. Boehner and Mr. Cantor claiming time and again throughout this passion-play that "the American people" were on their side when, in fact, polls show that the majority of the American people support a balance of revenue increases and spending cuts to reduce the deficit. I also remember Senator McConnel repeating, several times over the past 18 months or so, that the primary concern of the Republicans in Congress was to make sure President Obama was a one term president.

As I thought about this I realized that the Republicans are parrot-ing the President and the Democrats.

I don't say that the Democrats' or the President's point of view on this is necessarily correct. I am only looking at the way that the game is being played. The fact is that after years of hearing the Democrats call the Republicans "the party of no" the Republicans now call the Democrats the same thing--and "prove it" by saying that they did what the President actually did, and that the President did what they actually did. Whether it's best to try to lower the deficit by cutting spending alone, or lower the deficit with a balance of spending cuts and raising taxes, my point is simply how the parties tried to prevail--and the Republicans parrot-ed and are parrot-ing.

This is different in politics than in divorce because, as I say, in a divorce none of this stuff matters. In politics, though, this is huge, because as this goes on one of two things happens in the minds of the American people. Those in each "base" will believe that their champions are the victims and the other side is perpetrator.   On the other hand, those who are not part of either base become more alienated from all this pig wrestling and less inclined to participate in this dirty process and less inclined to believe that the government can do anything right.

(You can readily identify those in either base, by the way. They are the ones saying that they have been victimized by the other side's dirty tactics and therefore they are ready to escalate the dirty tactics to get even or even the odds. You can also recognize those who are not part of either base. They are the ones saying "a plague on both their houses.")

Which side do we suppose benefits from this hardening escalation that sends those in the middle to the sidelines?   Which party wins when voter turn out exceeds normal levels? Which party wins when people stay home? Look it up.

So the cynical point of view that drives awarding the Lily, here, has to give it to the Republicans, but must add an honorable mention to all of us. The refusal of Republicans to compromise--to recognize that the Democrats also represent real people in this country who deserve to have outcomes shaped by their interests (how the Constitution is designed to work)--is probably going to have an impact on how Democrats in Congress function in the future. There is, in fact, a narrative that argues with some justification claiming that the D's actually started this by freezing out the R's in the past.

The R's may win in 2012 but there will be still be D's in Congress. Will they insist on 60 votes to pass anything in the Senate? Will they put secret holds on the Republican president's nominees or on bills they don't like? And if they do, what will it look like the next time the R's ride into power? An eye, it is written, for an eye until the whole world is blind.

The ante will just keep going up and up--and so does the gridlock, along with the amount of wealth concentrated in the top 2% of the population. A co-incidence?

This means Americans will continue to turn off to politics making H.L. Mencken's assessment more and more accurate: American politics is the worship of jackals by jack asses.

It also means that the quotation attributed to Benjamin Franklin--"We have given you a republic, if you can keep it"--is looking less like the warning it was meant to be and more like an indictment.

Just saying ....

So, what do we do, then?

2011-07-01T11:09:00.000-07:00

In a Facebook exchange about mandating the saying the pledge of allegiance--which I think would not be helpful in any way--I was asked what I would suggest to help to unify the country. I answered (more or less) as follows:

At this point in our history our political narratives make national unity impossible.

Both of our major contemporary factions (remember how the Founders warned about the evils of factions?), both R and D bases/factions, believe that there is no living with the other. You see it on this Facebook page and every where else--if one side is for something the other is automatically against it. People on the "other side" are not only wrong--they are evil. People will even change their minds about issues just to stay on the other side from their "enemies."

I have lots of ideas about getting out of this situation--none of them original with me or novel or practical, given the thickness of the tar in which we are stuck.

First and foremost would be to remember what we learned in civics at Washington Elementary, Hedrick Junior and Medford Senior High School (class of 66) --that the hallmark of the American political system was compromise. That's what our Constitutional structure (separation of powers) requires in order to work. No compromise and there can only be...well, look at your newspaper...no compromise means gridlock.

The Founders were mutually suspicious of one another (you can look that up; e.g., big states and small states) and set up a system to balance interests--not to give one sway over the others. They understood (as we have forgotten) that anyone who gets too much power (government or economic) would cause problems for the general welfare (for everyone else).

Now it's all about pushing other people away from the table and expecting them to starve quietly while those remaining consume the share of those excluded as well as their own. It's about forgetting how we are all a part of a system that depends on everyone doing well enough to want to stay in the game. If we don't get back to that kind of understanding that we are all in this together and we can't succeed without each other then ... we are toast.

Regardless, requiring schools to display flags in every classroom and students to say the pledge of allegiance is not going to create some kind of a unified national identity. That wasn't what created the degree of unity we had in the fifties, the one that started to come apart in the sixties and is now completely unraveled. Sure, we said the pledge, then, but saying it wasn't what created our national consensus.

Far too many of us, even those who recite the pledge and stand for the national anthem at ball games, these days, don't really believe that the United States is about liberty and justice for all. Far too many of us think that we are being taken advantage of by some "special interest." No amount of reciting a pledge of allegiance is going to change the fact that way too many of us--rich or poor--think we don't get the share of the pie we deserve and that the only way we will get it is to identify who stole it from us and take it back--at gunpoint (or with the flourish of a pen) if necessary.

I don't know if that's the kind of thing you wanted to hear from me, Cyndi, but it's what I can say.

I am the most cynical person you'll ever meet and, at the same time, the most optimistic. I never underestimate and can thus try to account for the depravity in my own heart, and in the hearts of everyone else. That's something else the Founders understood (reading what they wrote instead of what others write about them increases one's understanding of where they were coming from)--they understood human nature and what we were all up against trying to create republic on the principle of self government given what a sinful lot we actually are.

Do any of the ideologies you hear out there today really describe how things actually happen in this world? Really? or do they all just describe utopias, things that those who believe in them think SHOULD be reality, what they want reality to be--to suit them and people like them?

"Darn," said one economist (or politician, or one of anything else any one of us is) to another. "According to my map we are on top of that hill over there." In saying that he was more honest than most of the ideologues who are driving our narratives--and driving us apart--today.

Who's a Creep?

2011-06-09T20:29:00.000-07:00

I am not a member of any political party--like the founders, I think that "factions" are the arch enemy of our republican form of government. I am a registered non-partisan who would support a ticket of Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken--but only if they promised to appoint Lenny Bruce as attorney general. I might also support a Marxist--Lennonist (Groucho Marx and John Lennon) ticket but, again, not without Lenny Bruce along to keep them real.

That said-----it's Congressman Wiener's turn on the spit I have to laugh when the Chairman of the Republican National Committee calls him a creep and demands his resignation. Good for the news person who, upon hearing Reince Priebus say that, asked if he considered Senator Vitter (R. Louisiana) (who very frequently committed the crime of frequenting prostitutes) to also be a creep. Mr. Priebus declined to answer and, it seemed to me, didn't even get the gist of the rhetorical question he had been asked..

But what about Eric Cantor? It's one thing to hear from an unelected party chairman but what about House leadership? Well, back when asked about Senator Vitter--back when Larry Flint uncovered and published the Louisiana Republican's sex crimes--Representative Cantor said it should be up to Senator Vitter's constituents whether he stayed or left the Senate. (Bonus points if you knew, by the way about how ironic it is for Senator Vitter's karma to work out as it did--given how Republican sexual acting out--at the height of the Clinton impeachment pageant--opened the door for Vitter to get to the House of Representatives prior to his election to the Senate). Shock: in the case of Democratic Congressman Wiener Mr. Cantor says that he should to resign.

I dunno if Mr. Wiener's "high crimes and misdemeanors" (none of which--at least those of which we know presently--was against the law as, say, Senator Vitter's frequenting prostitutes was and remains against the law) merit his resigning or not. I do know, though, that if I were consulting with Mr. Wiener about how to stay in Congress after all this I'd tell him, whenever anyone gives him any static, to just say "If Senator Vitter gets to stay how come I have to go?"

So, the Lily goes to the Republicans, today, who are singing in the "send Anthony back to Brooklyn in disgrace" Choir. But it was really close--the latest RF in Wisconsin (which even the National Review is having a hard time keeping down) re postponing the recall elections really deserves mention...maybe I'll pretend I didn't hear about that one until tomorrow. After all, if we are paying attention we know that we will run out of days on which to confer this award far sooner than we will run out of people who are worthy of having their names inscribed on the trophy.

Remember the criterion: No matter how cynical I get it's hard to keep up. Perhaps there should be a bronze, a silver and a gold every day.

oh, this is too easy...

2011-05-21T07:42:00.000-07:00

reminder: this blog is about being cynical and how hard it is to keep up with how cynical one needs to be to get by...

So there is a special election going on in New York and a Republican and a Tea Party candidate are splitting the conservative and reactionary Republican vote and giving a conservative Democrat a sliver of hope.

The "traditional Republican" candidate endorsed the Ryan plan, including the replacement of Medicare with a voucher plan. Realizing that this is a problem for her, someone thought it would be a good idea for Representative Allen West (R Florida) to do "robo calls" to voters assuring them that their Medicare is safe in the hands of the Republican candidate.

Is anyone going to also point out to those voters that Rep West, back home, answered the chant of "Hands off my Medicare" with the taunt that he will take his hands off of Medicare when there is no longer a Medicare program.

The Constitution is WHAT?

2011-04-21T12:46:00.000-07:00

Sometimes saying what is real seems like cynicism but I just can't help it.

The Constitution of the United States sometimes gets talked about like this:

We can not hold the constitution in our hands and stand by it to fit our own agenda and then throw it on the ground and step on it when it does not fit our agenda and thoughts. Freedom is a two edge sword that cuts both ways. It provides the freedom we all enjoy and also protects people that do things that is revolting to us. That is why it is freedom!

This is not true, of course.

The Constitution has long been molded to fit our own agendas and, in fact, that's what is supposed to happen.

Take the current fad of Constitutional interpretation called "original intent of the founders." This is a relatively new and radical approach to the document, one that would have many of the people who wrote and ratified it scratching their heads about where it came from. Not all, of course, because there was no single intent of the founders--their work product does not reflect a unity of thought. They barely reached a consensus.

The original intent doctrine was souped up to its current horsepower in the Federalist Society--the Neo Conservative legal organization that reflects the thinking of Robert Bork and Justice Rhenquist (who are succeeded in our time by Justices Thomas and Roberts).

This is a part of the revolutionary movement that has been at work pushing this country to the right since the Reagan era and its work is well described in the book The Wrecking Crew by Thomas Frank. The agenda of the Neo Conservative movement is to transfer wealth from the middle class to the wealthy and to concentrate it there.

As this movement has taken over the judicial branch of government doctrines that facilitate this enriching of the rich have been elaborated upon and extended. Among these are the idea of a corporation as having the same rights as human beings and equating political giving and spending with speech and therefore prohibiting limitations.

Good or bad, this taking over of the judiciary--along with the taking over of the other branches of government--is part of the design of the Constitution. It is meant to be used to lay out the rules for gaining power and for using it. While the legislative and the executive branches can be taken over more quickly, through the electoral process, the judiciary falls into the hands of the dominant political power more slowly--but still it does.

The Constitution makes it more difficult for one particular movement to take power but it does not prohibit that. The Constitution is not intended to create political gridlock and stalemate, although that results at times.

The most crucial problem, in my own view, with the way the Constitution has been shaped over the last 100 or so years is that the republican form of government has been turning into a democracy. The founders were serious about wanting to prevent that but, despite the "republican form of government" clause we have given way to things like recall, referendum and initiatives (to name a few of direct democracy's manifestations).

The attitude that we should vote for people who agree with us is one manifestation of this pernicious underlying democratic principle. In a republic voters realize that situations are more nuanced and balance and compromise are needed sometimes for us to all live together. Therefore we want to elect people who judgment we trust to consider all the facts and, in the process of legislation to do that balancing and compromising--even if it means they don't respond slavishly to slogans.

This democratic principle has led to a form of mob rule. Responding to such slogans (that pay no heed to the nuances and the complications of decisions) people are whipped up when needed (mostly at election time, but on other occasions) to do Neo Conservative bidding, egged on by commentators and politicians who are funded by those concentrating the wealth.

Through manipulation of symbols and slogans, mostly playing on the emotion of fear and emphasizing divisions among us, the current Neo Conservative powers that be are extending the power of the federal (and state) government when it suits their purposes, on the one hand, and limiting it on the other, when it serves the interests of others.

The federal tax code is an example of how federal power is harnessed and enhanced by Neo Conservatives to serve the concentration of wealth. Increase middle class taxes--tax shelters and subsidies for the wealthy--as well as lower tax rates.

The stripping away of regulation over such things as mining and oil drilling is an example of how limiting the power of the government serves that same end of concentrating wealth. The repeal of Depression era laws to regulate financial transactions, of course, turned Wall Street into a casino that made people there rich by bankrupting the system and then had the power to make the middle class recapitalize that system while blaming teachers for the economic catastrophe.

When it makes the wealthy more wealthy the Neo Conservatives will say that using federal power to get 'er done is required by the Constitution. When restraint of federal power makes the wealthy more wealthy then the Neo Conservatives will argue that the Constitution requires restraint.

This is not new and the Liberals did the same thing, as the Jacksonian Democrats did, as the slave holding (and segregationist) state's rights types did, as the Reconstruction era Republicans did . Evangelical Christians play this same game with the Constitution--trying to use it to promote their religion and even to force it on others. It's how it's set up to work although, for those who do not understand that, or don't want others to understand it, rosier sentiments about the Constitution will always be available to cloud the reality.

For them, at least for those who know and don't want others to know, a Lily is in order. For the rest of us it's not cynicism--it's just how things are and how they are supposed to be.

Lillies in the Budget Cuts -- No, seriously, we're just trying to reign in uncontrolled spending

2011-03-11T08:49:00.000-08:00

So here is a little list of "cuts" and "keeps" in the proposed Congressional budget cuts of interest to those interested in keeping their reality/cynicism mechanisms in tune:

WASTEFUL SPENDING INTACT:
$19 billion in subsidies to the oil and gas industry.

PUBLIC PRIORITIES SLASHED:
A 44% cut in funding for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to police the big banks, mortgage and credit card companies and guard against deceptive practices.

WASTEFUL SPENDING INTACT:
$500 billion in tax loopholes that permit companies to ship their profits overseas and hide them in offshore tax havens—including 83 of the top 100 publicly traded companies.

PUBLIC PRIORITIES SLASHED:
Funding eliminated for the Consumer Product Safety Commission to track and inform the public about dangerous products.

WASTEFUL SPENDING INTACT:
$185 billion in orders for obsolete military equipment.

PUBLIC PRIORITIES SLASHED:
$88.4 million less for food safety inspectors who ensure that the nation’s egg, poultry, and meat supply is safe and wholesome.

WASTEFUL SPENDING INTACT:
$1 billion for trade associations for multinational corporations to market their products overseas.

PUBLIC PRIORITIES SLASHED:
Pell Grants to increase access to college for 9.4 million Americans cut by $5.7 billion.

WASTEFUL SPENDING INTACT:
$34 billion in Homeland Security contracts that have been plagued with waste, abuse and mismanagement going back to 2001.

PUBLIC PRIORITIES SLASHED:
All funding for high-speed rail eliminated.

It's a hard rain is gonna fall ... is falling ... in Wisconsin

2011-02-18T06:32:00.000-08:00

I think Wisconsin is much less about unions that it is about fair.

Why should one part of the American people pay to fix this economic/budget mess we all created while others are held harmless?

I was once a public school teacher and when we were hit up for budget "give backs" it was hard for me because others in my community weren't giving back a thing to support the benefit they got from living in a broadly educated society.

My employers were the taxpayers of the school district. While many of them (and I was one, too), were having a hard time economically many were doing very well. It's still that way.

For these the capital gains tax preference remains--even when those capital gains end up as ordinary income and are not invested, when interest income in general is being taxed at a much lower rate than salaried income, when there is a ceiling on Social Security payments of many of them, while every nickle I ever made got taxed for that, while benefits of all kinds shift the burden of funding government from corporate/dividend income and on to people like me who get a paycheck (and not much of paycheck, at that) and don't live off of bonus money.

By the way, much of that corporate/dividend income is "earned" from US government contracts, including contracts given to American companies to provide "foreign aid." Most "foreign aid" goes abroad in the form of American military hardware. It goes to places like Egypt and Israel. In other words, the US government buys arms from American corporations--increasing the stock value and the dividends of those American corporations--and ships the arms to "aid" people in other countries.

Foreign aid, then, is just a scheme to make American corporations and stock holders more money--funded by tax dollars.

I don't think there will be a solution as long as some people just blame others for the problem and are unwilling to do a part to solve it. If I am one who gets a haircut while others don't have to why should I support the "bargain?"

I am not jazzed about privatizing Social Security but if I am convinced that investments are safe from things like the dot-com and housing bubbles then I am willing to talk about that. Send Barney Frank and Elizabeth Warren around to tell me it's safe and I'll talk. Imagine where we would be if the Bush attempt to privatize Social Security had passed just before what we are going through now.

If people see that everyone is getting a share of the suffering they will take their own suffering with a (more) mature attitude.

Doesn't everyone live in this country and share in the benefits and the responsibilities?

We will solve this stalemate when we realize we live in a country so closely divided that no one is going to get enough power to force one side to pay the whole price while the other side goes on its merry way.

Even if some of us, even those among us who are Christians, sneer at the idea of "fairness" if we do not spread the hurt we are all going to go down scratching and clawing one another to pieces--like two cats, tied together, thrown over a clothes line.

Pakistan as a Safe Haven -- A Lily for Obama

2010-12-17T07:32:00.000-08:00

It's making us all nuts--money poured into Pakistan to be a US "partner" in settling down Afghanistan and yet the Taliban lives there, goes across the border to fight, and then goes home to their safe haven.

The Pakistani military and intelligence agencies know where they are but seem unable to do anything to disrupt their operations.

The way to resolve this is not to bluster, bully, beg and wheedle with the Pakistani government or to give them more money, weapons or anything else.

From what "they" let me know, it appears that the solution to this problem lies in resolving the Pakistanis and the Indian struggle that rivals--no, actually surpasses--the tenure of that of the Palestinians and the Israelis. This allows Al Qaeda, the Taliban and anyone else who finds it in their interest to do so, to play off one of these nuclear powers against the other. This is dangerous.

Again, from the information that we have, the Pakistanis find it in their interest to keep India occupied with "Muslim extremists" of the type who attacked Mumbai. This is a perilous strategy for the Pakistanis, of course, as the existence of the Taliban and Al Qaeda on their soil not only impugns their international integrity, it undermines their own internal security.

I don't know how the Indian-Pakistani "crisis" can be resolved, or even whether it can. But I do think that trying to somehow convince the Pakistanis turn loose of their unsavory non-allies any other way than to eliminate the advantage they see in cleaving to them is an example of us pursuing a goal that seems reasonable, even though it is ineffective.

Maybe the President knows something I am not allowed to know about this dynamic, but until I figure out what that could possibly be I have to be cynical about American policy vis a vis both Afghanistan and Pakistan. If one wanted a "bulwark" against Iran, wouldn't peace between Pakistan and India be something to think about?

Or, how about just dismantling our empire in the Middle East and ...

Sorry, Mr. Obama, a Lily for you.

Where's My Right of Conscience?

2010-12-02T13:15:00.001-08:00

So, it's been on my mind for a while now: how is it that "pro-lifers" get to make the government jump through hoops to ensure that none of their tax money gets used for abortion? Most recently, we watched Congress go up and over the top on this during the health care debate without anyone asking how come they get to make those kinds of demands.

I am morally opposed to war on conscientious grounds and it is certainly clear to me where God is at on that--especially considering the amount of rationalizing theological notions and notional holidays our imperial priesthood has to lay down to obscure the issue to condition and manipulate us into going off to kill total strangers for the most secular ends.

Millions and millions of tax dollars spent by my government to kill innocent people--and some that those who prosecute wars want to dub "guilty" to make their deaths OK.

So, when do I get to make the government guarantee that my tax money isn't spent for war because it's "against my religion?"

And if I don't get that guarantee why do to the "pro-lifers" get it?

This is about integrity, of course, but it's also about equality. Why are some people's religious views "more equal" than those of others? And, in this country, given the First Amendment, why is "it's against my religion" a cogent argument in how tax money gets spent?

I think there's a big Cynical Lily Award to give out here, I am just not sure to whom it should be given.

integrity

2010-11-16T04:47:00.000-08:00

I do not defend the use of drones to attack leaders of Taliban inside of Pakistan, or any attacks on anyone at any time.

I do, though, want to say a little something about the integrity of the government and people of Pakistan.

Their condemnation of those attacks comes as they receive millions (billions?) from the United States government to support the effort in Afghanistan and, while doing so, they are tolerating and even supporting the activities of the Taliban in Pakistan that are part of their effort to topple the Afghan government.

If the Pakistani military and intelligence folks were doing what the United States is paying them to do the drone attacks of which they complain might not be happening, or might not be so extensive.

The government of Pakistan is playing this duplicitous game because it has to. The government of Pakistan does not really exercise sovereignty over the territory inside its boundaries.    The government of Pakistan is as afraid of Al Qaeda as it is of that of India.   Most of all, the government of Pakistan should be afraid of the United States--afraid that the money will stop.

Should we be afraid of that? Should we be afraid that the government of Pakistan will be replaced by a Taliban government that has nuclear weapons? Should we be afraid that this government will face off with that India--also a nuclear power?

I am not sure of everything I am supposed to be afraid of, anymore.

I do know that I am afraid of what we have been doing in the Middle East for a good long time, This situation vis a vis Pakistan is but one manifestation of that course of action. This can't go on, and it won't. The consequences of whatever happens from now on are going to be terrible and dire.

We are about to learn what shock and awe really mean.

could it be...

2010-04-26T08:57:00.000-07:00

Now, I am not an expert on all the banking stuff but when the guru of guru's testified to Congress a while back that he could not believe that the people running Wall Street did not act in the best interest of their firms I wondered whether they might not care, at all, about those firms or its shareholders. Seems to me they made a pile of money, personally, while driving their institutions off of the cliff.

A good source on this, it turns out, is available on line.

Where was the down side for them? And when I hear someone say that X% of their savings disappeared in the crisis I have to wonder if a good part of that didn't disappear, at all, it just went from the person's savings into the bonuses of the people who were at the wheel. It's still there--it's just not in the "there" place it was before.

This all came to mind again this morning, listening the preview of the Goldman Golden Guy heading to Congress to talk about how they were not betting against the economy and making money off of the impending crash--they were valiantly fighting to protect their shareholders.

Why, the rhetorical question is expected to come from him to keep the Senators at bay, would we act in a way that would not benefit the bank or its share holders?

There's a Lily in this for the GGG. Cynicism on a stick--both deep fried and candy coated.

If any of the institutions that these guys work for go under won't they just surface again in another institution where, once more, their own bonuses and golden parachutes and such will insulate them from any accountability for failure?

This is especially true since there is a corporate propaganda machine standing by to blame all the failure on the government--Fannie Mae and all that jazz. Even if I am CEO and I drive the ship onto the rocks, on my way to my own personal Bermuda, I can just shrug and tell Fox and Friends all about how it was "Guv'ment regulation and bureaucracy that stifled the free market to such an extent that my valiant efforts on the bridge could not avoid the rocks they kept putting in the middle of shipping lanes."

My Republican father used to say of scoundrels, at least the ones wearing suits, "You have hand it to them."

But times change. Now you don't have to hand it to them. They just take it and claim it was never yours, anyway..

"Snap!" or is it "Click!"

2010-02-17T16:57:00.000-08:00

When I heard Glenn Beck say that we have captured the second in command in the Taliban (although he said that the man was the second in command of Al Qaeda) and that we should "shoot him in the head" I heard a huge snapping or clicking sound in my head.

I have long been mystified as to why so many people want to be mean to terrorists--torture them--lock them away for ever--no trial no due process no nothing except a lot of pain and agony.

But I understand it, now.

It's just sadism.

It's taking pleasure in inflicting pain on people--even if it doesn't help us do anything constructive about the terrorism of which we are so, well, terrified. We know, in fact, that the way we have treated captured terrorists has created support for them and their brothers and sisters still in field.

And speaking of snapping to something...this whole thing about insisting that we are at "war" with terrorists, that these are not criminal acts but acts of war is legitimizing the people who do the terrorist stuff.

Al Qaeda wants Muslims to see them as knights errant, roaming the world to confront the infidel. And they aren't that, at all. They have hijacked Islam and set out to re-configure it as a vehicle to justify their violence that is bent on setting up reactionary theocracies.

And we are helping them by buying into their narrative. They are actually criminals. They are criminals on a grand scale but they are still criminals. They are not soldiers, they do not comprise an army. They are just plain criminals.

It should not be forgotten, though, that their criminality is a response to how the West has controlled and exploited the Middle East for decades. We are not "innocent" victims of this criminality. We need to start implementing policies in that region of the world--throughout the world--based on simplicity, harmony, integrity, community and equality.

When we do that we will have a lot less to worry about from either soldiers or criminals, and national security will be something we can take for granted.

...it's just hard to keep up

2010-02-03T17:07:00.000-08:00

So, here it is.

It speaks for itself.

another Lily...unsafe at any speed

2010-01-30T19:44:00.000-08:00

So I heard Ralph Nader on Tom Hartman's radio show riffing on how bad the Supreme Court decision on corporate political spending is.

Not a word did Mr. Nader utter about how this was his fault. Not a word about how, if he just let Mr. Gore run for president without him sticking his "it doesn't matter which party is elected" nose into things, neither Mr. Roberts or Mr. Scalia would have been in a position to make this happen.

So, a Lily for you, Mr. Nader. You are responsible for something happening and you blame someone else.

No matter how cynical I get, Mr. Nader, it's hard to keep up with people like you.

why should corporations be considered people?

2009-10-19T06:34:00.001-07:00

This is a very big deal and there is a lot of information out there on the subject.

For more background, go here, and also Google Citizens United v Federal Election Commission

In the recent argument before the Supreme Court one of the issues was how corporations differ from human beings. I am not sure that is germane to the public policy reasons why a corporation should be treated differently under the law this purpose or for that one, but it took up a significant part of the time during the argument.

Here is an interesting comment from Justice Scalia

"Most corporations are indistinguishable from the individual who owns them, the local hairdresser, the new auto dealer -- dealer who has just lost his dealership and -- and who wants to oppose whatever Congressman he thinks was responsible for this happening or whatever Congressman won't try to patch it up by -- by getting the auto company to undo it. There is no distinction between the individual interest and the corporate interest," Scalia said. "And that is true for the vast majority of corporations."

A number of fallacies in that but the questions it begs for me is this: if there is no distinction between the individual interest and the individuals who own them why should the individuals who own them care, one way or the other, whether those corporations are more limited in their political rights than they are as individuals?

Why would the individuals who own those corporations not be satisfied exercising their own political rights and be seeking, instead, to exercise them through a corporation?

One answer of many, I think, is that some of those who control larger corporations (as opposed to those who "own" them) have access to a lot more money through that control than they have to money as an individual. Unions are often criticized for spending members' money to support candidates that this member or that member do not support. Why should corporations be able to support political candidates with the money that belongs to shareholders who might not favor that particular candidate?

Recently there was quite a stir that Rush Limbaugh might be part of a consortium of investors who will bid to buy the St Louis Ram football team. If he became a stockholder in that corporation how would he feel about the fact that, between 1989 and 2009, more than 98% of the political contributions of the Rams (and anyone identified as earning income from the team on campaign reporting documents) have gone to Democrats?

Would Rush think it was unfair that a pot of money in which he has an equity interest should be supporting a socialist, fascist, Democrat party intent on destroying America?

Would it be fair to force him to put up with that?

I have to give the Lily to Justice Scalia, with a shout out to Justice Roberts and Thomas for the cynical way in which they are analyzing this issue.

Corporations exist to give groups of human being "super powers" and "super protections" in the economic realm. Corporations can do things that human beings cannot. There are all kinds of good reasons, from an economic standpoint, to "be" a corporation--as well I know. But no one should have super powers or super protections in the political realm, should they?

Well, of course they do. That's why this situation is just one more iteration of the basic problem: spending money is not exercising political speech--not withstanding the contortions of Buckley v. Vallejo. The fact that one can think it is the same just indicates how beguiling analogies can be, and how much they can distort reality.

The fact that the way campaigning is done these days (spending huge amounts of money to manipulate masses of people through the media) means that the more money one spends on campaign contributions the more valuable one is as a supporter to someone running for office.

If I can make a captive audience of a politician--say I find out that the person in the center seat next to me on the airplane is a member of Congress--and talk to them for longer and even more persuasively than anyone else does on a particular issue am I going to have more influence on how they vote on that issue than if I give them more money than anyone else to run for office while mentioning how I see that same issue?

Money is far more powerful as a means of persuading people locked into this current cash intensive way people run for office.

The answer would be to amend the Constitution to say that only individual human beings can contribute to political campaigns and that those human beings are limited to a modest sum of money (say $100 at the most) so that in a real way every one is equal (or almost so) in the eyes of the politician.

Why would the opinion of a CEO of a health insurance company get more weight than mine if, dollar for dollar, the two of us were equal? A politician would then, in determining how to vote, be forced to consider which of us made the most sense on the issue.

Could one run for office the way that's done now if the flow of money to politicians was restricted in the way I suggest? Of course not. And that would be a good thing. The appeal to people's emotions through manipulation of symbols through the mass media would be far less effective (although it would not, of course, disappear) than it is now. Candidates might have to do more personal contact (themselves or through people motivated to work for them by something other than money) with voters. They might have to...

Who am I kidding?

Think about how a Constitutional amendment comes to be. Are the people who are on top of the current system in any way about to do something like this?

I awarded the Lily several paragraphs above. Maybe I should have just stopped there.

because it works

2009-10-05T06:59:00.000-07:00

The American political community's cohesion has been seriously compromised by the cynical tactics that makes co-operation and compromise difficult. The huge amounts of money at the disposal of those who use these tactics to gain and maintain control may well be the means by which our Constitutional republican form of government will be destroyed. Money = speech, indeed.

One of these tactics is the smearing of people, getting them fired or forcing them to resign. Once that happens the idea is "reload and repeat"--to move on to a new target. The basis for the attack is always a distortion of an actual situation and the person upon whom the heat is being raised most recently is Kevin Jennings, who works at the Education Department.

The whole right wing propaganda apparatus is repeating the distortion about him over and over, ginning up demand from Congress and the base to fire him. If this plays out as it has in previous situations, the palaver over Mr. Jennings will soon be such a distraction that he will resign (and have his reputation ruined, in the process).

(Note: one of the sites to which I link, above, has had the integrity to correct a crucial, germane and material factual error in its original smear report--congratulations to Fox News--and the other--shame on you--Human Affairs for proving you don't care about truth only about what works to whip up your base--has not.) (Yes, Fox News corrected a factual error that discredits the substance of its report!)

Here is a fact check on the substance of this situation.

But the resignation for which the smear artists are howling will not end the distraction because the distraction is the point. There is a lot of good stuff going on in the Department of Education at the moment and a lot of it is not to the liking of big piles of money that fuel "conservatism" today. All the babble about "homosexual agenda" is a cover for the Obama administration's efforts to strengthen public education--a prime target of the right for economic and religious reasons. The point of all this is to discredit those efforts and slow down change we can believe in to improve education rather than let it disintegrate and be replaced with Christian schools for the lower middle class and classy college prep schools for the wealth (there is no middle class in the right wing vision).

The secondary benefit of all this to right is, of course, to discredit the Obama administration in general.

So, the Lily, today to the New York Times, who can accept the award on behalf of those to whom I linked above and all the rest it it joins in creating the cacophony of distortion that repeated enough times become believed by enough to people to give them the successes they are after--to stop education reform and keep public schools crippled until they die for lack of support and to pull the Obama administration down..

In the long run these "successful" tactics will create, if they have not already, a country that is not governable except by by dictators and the charlatans they employ to keep the lies coming.

When pulling the community apart becomes the means to govern then the republic is dead and the country will have moved into a new phase. We are near that now.

Dennis Kneale is either incompetent or ...

2009-08-10T17:52:00.000-07:00

Dennis Kneale from CNBC seems as though he might be bucking for a job with Fox.

He went on and on tonight about how the only way "green" energy could become economically viable--and compete with oil-- is if it didn't have government subsidies.

I have to wonder about someone who is an economic reporter and doesn't know how much the primacy of oil depends on all kinds of subsidies and tax breaks from both federal and state governments.

Arguing as though there were some kind of level playing field between oil and "green"--as though oil earns its primacy through free market competitiveness--is either just ignorant or its dishonest.

I know that the world is made up of two kinds of people: those who believe the world is made up of two kinds of people and those who do not, but is there a third explanation for the position he takes?

So, the Lily to Dennis Kneale--who either doesn't know what he is talking about when he portrays oil as independently more viable in the "free market" or who darn well knows that he is demanding that wind and solar and such succeed without subsidy while going up against a heavily subsidized oil industry.

Maybe the subsidies should be removed from both--and maybe the government should subsidized energy sources that are better for the way the planet works and that support independence from foreign oil.

But "economics reporters" need to either say what they know is true about subsidies to various competing industries or, if they don't know it's true, go and learn about how the American economy actually works before the red light of the TV camera goes on.

So, Dennis, congratulations. You win today's "Lily."

"No matter how cynical I get, it's hard to keep up."

Lily Tomlin

Bonnie Tinker

2009-07-03T08:41:00.000-07:00

My friend Bonnie Tinker died yesterday.

She was at the Gathering of Friends General Conference, where she went to teach her class on non-violent communication with The Other--all those Others we encounter. It is a class about transformation of both self and the Other.

I was going to be with her, as I was last year, as her elder, her support person as she taught the class. Last minute complications arose and I could not go.

Both of my girls sought to console me, last night, as though I might be thinking that I should have been there, that if I were this might not have happened.

But I was not her bodyguard, or her guardian angel. I was not with her every minute last year and would not have been with her this year any time she was on a bicycle.

"What about that butterfly thing?" my youngest asked, "the butterfly in the Amazon who beats its wings and that causes..."

I told her that was a notion, something we can never know, something that even if it's true our wondering about it cannot improve our condition or anyone else's.

Then I told them what I did know, stuff that the wondering about could improve our condition. .

I told them that working with Bonnie Tinker changed me--changed us, because they were along much of the time.

Sometimes I dreaded a call from Bonnie because she was involved with hard, hard stuff and was calling to involve me and my family in it. And I knew we had to be there, that we wanted to be there; it's just that it was so hard, what she took on, it demanded so much. Sometimes I wasn't strong enough (yet?) to be responsible--to respond as I wanted to--to her call. And sometimes I was.

Bonnie's example, her support and her encouragement constantly reminded me of my potential to do the things that I really wanted to do--the things I knew I was supposed to do but was afraid I never could. I do my best work under the supervision of responsible women.

It was, and is, just so hard.

She also showed me how to face opposition--from whom I would expect it and from whom it was a betrayal--with a love that put me standing in a place where none could ever hurt me.

I am one of many who will miss Bonnie.

I am also one with whom her spirit will never stop working.

A Two-fer Day

2009-06-16T13:39:00.000-07:00

The other day I heard a commentator say that it was stupid to say that harsh rhetoric in the media and elsewhere in the political discourse of the Republic was "dangerous to our democracy."

She went on to say words the effect that "no one would object to the fact that political debate sometimes gets sharp and contentious."

I was in the car at the time and, although the speaker could not see me, my hand shot into the air.

I object to sharp and contentious political "debate" such as we have seen, for example, around the latest Supreme Court nomination. In fact, I object to sharp and contentious debate anywhere.

This kind of stuff locks people up, freezes them into opposition, makes it difficult if not impossible to do business with one another.

The danger, here, is that the discourse that allows people to call one another "murderers," and "traitors," and all kinds of other stuff of that ilk is so divisive that it makes the give and take of a self governing republic difficult to do.

The inability of the political parties to compromise with one another, on both the state and national levels, has created a gridlock that has left serious problems unaddressed for the better part of a decade. Who, after all, can compromise with "murderers" and "traitors" and expect good results. Who can even talk, let alone listen, to such people?

The rough and tumble of such things as "Tiller the baby killer" isn't harmless. The words matter.

And I think that some people who defend this kind of discourse, and dismiss it as "political correctness" or some such shibboleth, know full well what they are doing. There are those who are positively dis-interested in a "give and take" type of government. They want to rule as the Bush Administration did: going into power on a razor's edge (or perhaps no edge, at all) of a "mandate" they governed as though they won five votes to one.

I supported Mr. Obama because he said that wasn't a way to go about things and he has been trying to change that culture. In the end I know he will use the votes if he has them to get health care and climate change legislation--even if not one Republican supports it. But I admire his effort to compromise and bring some along some Republicans, to try to change the culture of overpowering opponents without any concern about their positions.

So, the Lily is for people like Rush Limbaugh--he is one of those who knows darned well that he is using language in a dishonest way to overcome those with whom he disagrees without any accommodation toward them, at all.

No compromise. Compromise is, apparently, now un American.

not rooting? not encouraging?

2009-06-16T13:25:00.000-07:00

So, the idea is that Dick Cheney isn't really hoping that the United States will be attacked, again, so as to justify the illegal and inhumane treatment that the Bush Administration used to get information from people they believed had it (or, as some people would have it, to get false information about an Al Qaeda-Iraq connection out of people who could credibly be characterized to know of such a thing).

Some people believe that this is a set up: Cheney comes out and says that the Obama administration is "dismantling" the structure that "kept us safe" after the attack on September 11 in the hopes that "if it happens" it will be a boon to Republican electoral fortunes.

Does Cheney hope that will happen?

The other theory is that Cheney is selling the "we got useful information out of torture" idea as a prophylactic against indictment and conviction (of himself and those who, apparently, followed his orders) for the illegal program, or selling that idea so as to influence public opinion.

I don't know what, if any of these things, Cheney has in mind. It's entirely possible that he really believes what he is saying and he is trying to influence decision making to stop what he sees as eroding our security structure. Less likely things have, in my experience, turned out to be true.

But I do know this. If the parties were reversed, here, the entire right wing chorus would be singing in four part harmony about how comments like these were going to encourage those attacks and make them more likely to succeed in the same way disclosing blue prints of nuclear power plants would.

Cheney's remarks, made by an Al Gore, would be said to be telling the "enemy" that we are weak and vulnerable and therefore are encouraging (I believe the word the right favors in such situations is "emboldening") them to take a crack at an attack.

Remarking that a Republican administration was acting in such a way as to endanger national security would be called "treason" if it were done by a Democrat or non-partisan person.

How do I know that? It's not like I have to speculate. That's what they said, and the people who read their talking points in the media, said any time anyone objected to or ever questioned something proposed (or done in secret) by the Bush/Cheney administration.

No Lily, here.

Eight Is Enough for Court "Balance."

2009-06-11T07:36:00.000-07:00

It's about integrity...

So, the Republicans want to give due attention to the solemn task of advising and consenting on a Supreme Court nomination and they want to spend as much time as they think it takes to review the record of Sonia Sotomayor . They say there are so many cases that it's unfair to rush the confirmation hearings. They didn't care to do that for nominees from President Bush, but a lot of things they did for President Bush are now not the right thing to do, anymore.

Do't think that's true? Well, aside from running up huge public debt there is the insistence, now, that war funding bills not carry funding for anything else as they did back in the day when it was conservative pork being carried...I digress. It's hard to focus on one example of a lack of integrity when so many others have their hands waving in the air to be recognized.

Back to the Supreme Court nomination...

Some in the media believe that the delay insisted on by Conservatives is a part of fund raising. Both sides will do it but the Conservatives need to shake down their base, at this point, more than the Progressives do. Others think that the Party of No is just dragging its feet to keep other things from getting done as they try to run out the clock til the next election when they hope, through the Fox style propaganda they are developing, they might win a few more seats and more power to frustrate change.

I wonder, though, in my own little cynical, bottom of the barrel corner of the world, if that's all there is to it.

If Justice Souter is gone and the court cranks up operation in October one justice short won't that work to the advantage of the "strict constructionalist" who also hold to the modern and radical doctrine of original intent of the founders (quite to the contrary of the intent of the founders)? It may cause a number of 4-4 ties. These in some cases will work out to the advantage of the Right, and in some may prevent them from denying things like redress of grievances for wage discrimination and the like.

I don't know for sure but if the retiring justice wasn't one of "theirs" might they not think it worth it to create an albeit small period of time in which the court can hear and make decisions in which there is one fewer justice who was not a safe vote for them, anyway.

So, there it is, in my view--a Lily Award for Senator Sessions and the gang.

Remember what Lily Tomlin, our patron saint, here, said: "No matter how cynical you get--it's hard to keep up."

One more step for Rush...a giant step backwards for us all?

2009-04-08T13:32:00.000-07:00

"On March 27, Limbaugh stated of Obama's economic policies: "I have warned you and warned you again: If President Obama succeeds with this, our nation fails. Our nation is unalterably changed for generations."

so the man was quoted by media matters

Note in passing that "unalterably" may conflict with "for generations," and think about it from Rush's point of view, the point of view of those he epitomizes.

If President Obama's leadership takes us away from the capitalism that he holds dear--if people have value beyond their ability to make economic contribution, if liberty comes to mean something other than the ability to make as much money as one can by any means one can get away with, then, indeed, "our" "nation" fails.

If limits that used to hold the predatory materialism that Rush favors are re-instated then the "nation" of which he sings (a "nation" more in the sense of a people than a particular country--a people comprising a socio economic class--those for whom this predation works primarily because their wealth and power protects them from being its victims) will indeed fail.

I wish it so although I know that it cannot be "unalterably" held in check.

Experience tells me that what Rush fears is what the New Deal did--for generations.

But not forever.

I think Rush "gets it"--he understands how our current system works and what it actually does. The question in my mind is whether he really believes that, all things considered, it creates the greatest good for the greatest number of people, that it's the best way to set things up.

Does he really think that no one has value except in so far as they are able to create economic value?

Hard to get inside someone's head.

The quote of Rush from Media Matters is one of a compilation of quotations that portrays Obama as the worst person in the world--or the United States, at least. These portray him as the enemy of "our" way of life, out to destroy the country and what it stands for.

For all our sakes I hope nothing bad happens to the President.

For Rush's sake, I think he ought to hope so, too.

Does anybody really know what time its? Does anybody really care?

2009-03-19T04:13:00.000-07:00

I found this and I shook my head.

"ABC News produced a heartbreaking tale of woe about harried professionals scheming to reduce their incomes to avoid higher tax brackets. A dentist told the reporter she was contemplating cutting “her income from her current $320,000 to under $250,000 by having her dental hygienist work fewer days and by treating fewer patients.”

"Neither she nor the reporter appeared to have any idea how marginal tax rates work. To wit, she’d pay the higher 36 percent rate only on income above $250,000. The current rate is 33 percent. Hence, Dr. Happy-Tooth’s brilliant plan would save her exactly $2,100 in taxes at a cost of $67,900 in foregone income.

"No wonder people like her vote Republican."

And for Democrats, I might add.

People who report and comment on the news are smart enough to figure this stuff out and at the same time it's entirely possible that they really don't get it.

Still, I wonder: ESPN would never send someone out to cover an upcoming three game series between the Yankees and the Red Sox who would say that one team or the other would sweep the series because it had a pitcher against whom the other had not had a hit in seven years. People who cover baseball know the game well enough to know that pitcher could not pitch all three games. That's not how baseball works. Pitchers rarely start games, except in the most dire of circumstances, any more frequently than once every four days.

And baseball reporters know that.

And, by the way, those who play the game know that, too.

So, in the story alluded to, above, we have someone covering the impact of taxes on earnings--and someone paying those taxes--both of whom are ignorant of how taxes work!

One of them is misleading an audience and the other is contemplating a course of action that will cause serious economic detriment to herself.

If this is ignorance or if it is a guileful attempt to mislead others it does not portend well for democracy or reflect positively on the human condition.

I think I'd rather believe that the dentist and the reporter are doing that, rather than believe that they are so ignorant about something so vital to their own well being that they are doing self destructive things as they try to maximize their well being.

I'd rather believe that someone would lie to damage the other side in the ongoing class war, on the one hand, and the war for audience, on the other. Wowsers!

I'd rather believe people are that dishonest than believe they are that stupid. I don't know that I do believe that, but I know that's what I'd rather believe.

I guess that means I get the Lily, today.

Oh, Ma...When is my bailout coming?

2009-02-18T04:15:00.000-08:00

Congressman Eric Cantor voted for the bank bailout bill, advocated it, as Congress gave the Bush Administration permission to essentially drove its limos past the banks with Hank Paulson hanging out the window throwing money.

Now he is saying that we have a "culture of bailout" and he wonders, apparently but not really ironically, when his bailout is coming.

His wife is a managing director of a bank. That bank has been reported as changing its tax status so that it would qualify for a bailout and received one. So, his wife--his family--has already received its bail out.

I can see him in political black-face (after a verse or two or "Barack the Magic Negro?), on his knees for the big finish...

"I'd cast a million votes,
For (some of those bank) notes,
My (wife's) baiiiiiiiilllllll outttttt!"

More remarkable, however, is that the good Congressman did not tell anyone as he cast his vote for the bailouts that he would benefit from it.

OK. A Lily to the good Congressman. It has been said that he recognizes that there is a vacuum right now in Republican leadership and he intends to flow into it. Can a vacuum, however, fill a vacuum? I guess it can, in the party of "No."

"No matter how cynical I get, it's hard to keep up."

Lily Tomlin

They will take it but do the bankers need our bailout money?

2009-02-03T04:27:00.000-08:00

An interesting comment from Secretary Paulson some months back when suggestions were made to limit the compensation of the people who run the banks. He said that if Congress did that these bankers would refuse to participate in the bailout scheme.

Would not participate?

It was "common sense" at the time that if the bailout money was not given to the banks the banks would go down and along with it the whole economy.

They would not participate?

Could it be that the people who control the banking industry don't care if there is no more bailout money for them?

Would they--wealthy far beyond our commonplace dreams of avarice--be willing to let their banks go out of business to retain the power they have over the government?

Do they care so little for the middle and bottom level employees of their banks, and for the middle bottom and lower level stockholders in the country, to destroy their lives utterly while they sit, in comfort, on their personal wealth in order to bring President Obama and the Democrats to heel?

Will they just refuse to participate in the "recovery" if the terms do not continue to please them, perfectly willing, if the terms do not continue to please them, to retreat into the compounds of wealth until the rest of the country burns down?

Richard Wolfe, a commentator, says that the banks are going to need more bailout money and, while the banks might, do the people who run them? Can they just let the current banking system go down and then move into control of the system that replaces it?

Is it true that banks come and go but there will always be the bankers?

Will they sit on their hands and hire enough Congressmen and think-tank pundits to convince enough people that their behavior is reasonable and necessary to restore prosperity, while the attempts to change "business as usual" in the financial system are misguided fantasy, socialism and, yes, "class warfare?"

These people are wealthy.

They don't need our bailout money.

We need them to need our bailout money. But they don't.

The Lily, today, to me.

bi-partisanship is a four letter word

2009-02-02T17:17:00.000-08:00

The Republican Guru Grover Norquist was recently quoted to the effect that "bi partisanship is the equivalent of date rape."

There's an image!

I see his point, though, and I see his point of view. I don't agree with him, but I understand where he is coming from.

He sees the world as black and white, us versus them, we are right and they are wrong. Politics is a zero sum game. If someone else is in power that's unacceptable. They have no right to govern because they are wrong. He is smart, anyone who disagrees with him is not only wrong but criminal or crazy.

Makes complete sense that there can be no reconciliation or cooperation, if that's how one sees the world.

That is not, however, the way the world really is.

It is true, though, that the last eight years were dominated by a continuing "date rape" perpetrated by the Republican Party--even when the Democrats were in the majority, toward the end. A president with the slimmest margin of victory in history (if, indeed, he had any such margin) governed as though he received 80% of the vote and he got away with it.

There was no give and take, during the Bush administration. It was all take--unless you worked for a living and received wages, then you gave, and gave, and gave.

Mr. Norquist seems to be projecting, then. What his "side" did is what he thinks will be done to him because that is what he thinks reality is.

It would be nice if it could be shown that he is wrong--that compromise is possible in which everyone gives a little to get a little.

I don't know if that will happen, but there is a danger even if it does.

It is entirely possible that so many compromises can be made that what is done is ineffective and then the doer will be made to look wrong in the future when the compromise turns out to have sabotaged the mission the legislation set out to accomplish.

The income tax, for example, was so watered down by concessions made to get it implemented that it's not really progressive and there are plenty of ways that middle class tax payers have had the burden of funding government shifted to them (can you say capital gains income versus income on salaries--including social security).

And asking for compromise after compromise after compromise can become a tactic to blunt the effort and so ensure Democratic failure that Republicans can run on in two years.

Date rape. Yeah. If Norquist continues to use that phrase then, like "class warfare," those I hear use it the most will be, in my mind, the most likely to engage in it.

So, a Lily to Mr. Norquist.

a (modest) green proposal

2008-11-10T09:19:00.000-08:00

I don't understand all I know about such things but when General Motors comes to DC looking for a bailout/infusion of capital it seems to me like a time for a sit down on a number of issues.

I'm fine with loaning them money (or buying a piece of their action) if they will agree to a couple of things.

1. there should be a target for phasing in a requirement that a certain percentage of their production is in hybrid auto technology attaining a certain mileage standard

2. there should be a target for phasing in a requirement that the rest of their fleet attain a different but significantly higher mileage and emissions standard than is now required.

3. that the recipients of this help agree to play their part in the general proposal that follows.

The federal government will also initiate a program to underwrite providing car buyers of a certain (modest middle class) income who want to trade cars of a certain profile (non-green) in for new, greener vehicles with an "augmented" trade-in value to ease the burden of increased cost of the green technology.

The car sellers would destroy the cars traded in and certify their destruction. They would get a tax credit (which perhaps would be split with the car companies) for the documented full amount of the trade in allowance they gave the buyer.

The cost of this augmented trade-in and destroy program would be in part funded by a substantial rise in the federal gas tax and a phasing out of subsidies (direct and indirect) to oil companies.

This proposal would

a. "save" the American auto industry and put it on a sustainable footing, benefiting workers and shareholders, local governments and everyone else who rely on the cash it generates.

b. "green" the auto industry, itself, and result in a gradual increase in the number of "green" automobiles on the road and decreasing the number of "ungreen" vehicles on the road with with them.

c. allow more American consumers access to such cars by increasing production and lowering the cost to them of converting

d. lessen America's demand for and reliance on foreign oil

e. spur green transportation technology

f. decrease driving (although the price per gallon increase is recouped by those who purchase higher mileage vehicles)

I could think of many more advantages, and probably can, over time, come up with ways to hook in more strategies to move forward into the post-petroleum age.

Oh, today's Lily....

2008-11-05T13:19:00.000-08:00

Yes, the cynicism doesn't stop...

Dick Armey, a one time (and perhaps a future) member of Congress--House Republican Leader and noted conservative--analyzed the Republican loss in the way Republicans (and Democrats, now that I think about it) are apt to do: we acted too much like them and the voters punished us for not being true to our values.

The idea is that over the last eight years the Republican party left behind the small government, fiscal conservatism and individual liberty type values traditional to conservatives and, because they did the voters turned them out.

What?

Because Republicans acted too much like Democrats the voters punished the Republicans by turning them out of office and replacing them with Democrats?

"Well," said the R voters, according to Mr. Armey, "the Republicans gave up their good guy ways and started to act like the bad guys always do so we decided to kick the good guys out and replace them with a bunch of bad guys who will keep doing all the things we hate, all the things we punished the Republicans for doing."

"What?" I asked from the shower, addressing my radio, from where Mr. Armey's voice came. "Let me get this straight. You're so upset with what you claim is profligate spending, collective security and big government that you've elected a bunch of people who will give you more of those things you hate?"

"Sure," I heard Mr. Armey say, in my head. "Sure. We gotta be what we really are and stop acting like..."

Like I say, I've heard this from both R and D die hards after a serious defeat.

"Well," I said, putting even more words into Mr. Armey's mouth, "Don't look around at what going on. Just go with what you know. And good luck."

Then I remembered who I was dealing with. Mr. Armey is not stupid. He's just in a position that he has to hide what he's really trying to do, along with a lot of things he doesn't know to begin with.

So, the Lily to Mr. Armey for the cynical manipulation of the rank and file of his own party so that he can get them back under his control.

No matter how cynical I get, it's hard to keep up.
--Lily Tomlin

How am I going to know?

2008-11-05T13:06:00.001-08:00

I could go on for a while about the election of Bark Obama--what it means and what it doesn't mean to me.

I'll sum it up.

I chose Obama over Hillary because he seemed to be saying that we need to get people together and work things out together while she seemed to be hanging on to the approach that we get things done by consolidating our power and riding down on our enemies to defeat them.

I like what I saw as the "Obama approach" because it is like (although hardly identical to) what is called "Quaker process."

I wish he would have talked about that more in the campaign but he obliquely referred to it from time to time, frequently enough to keep me going.

Now, we see.

He has won by a substantial margin and only the most partisan would claim that he does not have a "mandate" to move forward as he has talked about doing. But one of the ways he got that mandate was by trying to move beyond the red state-blue state, left-right approach--or at least claiming that's what he wanted to do.

I'll know it's what I voted for if he approaches problems in an inclusive way, listening to those with whom he disagrees and trying to fashion compromises that both get the job at hand done and that build enough support for those compromises to get them implemented.

If a man with a mandate can govern as though he just barely won he can get things done and unify the country.

We have just lived through eight years in which someone who just barely won swaggered around like he had a mandate and we are living with the aftermath.

"Look upon my works, Ye Mighty, and Despair."

what's the right answer?

2008-11-03T05:33:00.001-08:00

When people say Obama is a Muslim we jump to say that's not right: he's a Christian.

Why don't we say "So what? A Muslim can't be President?"

Yeah, I know. The "real world" and all that.

I can say it, though, even if the campaign "can't."

But that's not such a big whoop--in fact, it's just an indication of how meshed with empire I am, how my identity in Christ is compromised by my identity with the global capital empire for which this "nation" stands, that this nation serves.

Colin Powell, on Meet the Press a couple of weeks ago, told a stirring story of a gravestone at Arlington National Cemetery. It was that under which is laid a 19 year old casualty of the the Iraq war and at the top of which is the crescent and the star.

Powell was saying that anyone can meet the "test" and that there should be no presumption based on the external indicators. If one can show one is sufficiently committed to this country and endorses the myth of redemptive violence as the means to maintain its pre-eminence in the world then one is in the club.

Most Quakers do not buy into the myth of redemptive violence, at least insofar as its implications in our own lives are clear to us. But we should recognize at the very least that integrity would require those among us who do buy into it to acknowledge that passing the "test" is not based on being part of one group or another. (Of course, integrity would require all who support a war to fight in or actively participate in it as integrity would require someone "supporting" a religion to actually practice it rather than merely tithe...I digress)

Of course, groups (as well as individuals) seek security in redemptive violence and what is "at stake" in the national/spiritual life of most Americans today is dominating one group or another to keep the "American Standard of Living," as our current leaders have sworn to do, "off of the table."

For Americans to realize that Muslims can serve the American Empire as well as Christians and Jews can is really not such a great leap forward.

I guess for me to try to point that out is not only fairly depressing as I realize what it's about but not good for my own spiritual condition. It's a bit like "favoring" gays in the military--advocating that anyone be allowed to destroy the image of Christ in themselves.

But, on the other hand, it's what separation of church and state is about, isn't it?

In school, years ago, I learned that if one is unsure of the right answer one should choose the alternative labeled "C." Having been a teacher, now, I know that's a myth.

But as I cannot help but touch the side of the airplane as I board I cannot help but say, in regard to this, the correct answer is "C."

For Christ.

that's what it's about, Joe...

2008-10-14T12:58:00.000-07:00

Joe S said this morning that when he ran for office the first time his opponent was a man and it was ok for both of them to make fun of one another, to take shots at one another, to be mean and sarcastic to one another. The next time he ran against a woman and he wasn't able to do that. Political correctness had set in.

Can I suggest that the change between the two elections represents a step forward rather than something to be lamented?

Isn't it good that something has happened to increase civility in political campaigns?

The first year I worked in the state legislature I remember a briefing for new comers in the lobby corps that included the re-assurance that one did not have to give members sexual favors in return for support on legislation.

I wondered about that. Why did someone think it appropriate to say something like that?

Why?

Because, I now know, there was a lot of "grab ass" of various kinds going on in the legislature before I got there and that there was a change going on.

What caused the change?

The increased number of women who were members of the legislature.

Gee, was that a bad thing? The boys could not cut up and engage in horse-play like they used to.

I suppose that some of those good old boys lamented the passing of the times of whiskey bottles in the bottom drawyers and sexually harassing pretty young aids.

But I am not going to suppose that it would be great to go back to that way of operating, or that women should put up with that kind of nonsense going on around them.

Oh, Sigh

2008-10-07T05:25:00.000-07:00

"I don't need any lessons on telling the truth to the American people..." said Senator McCain, continuing on to say that if he did he wouldn't seek counsel in that regard from a a Chicago politician.

What's the debate going to be like, tonight?

The Democratic Whatever It Is Committee (the DWIIC?) is now running an ad of the Good Senator saying that the American people are smart enough to know that people who run nothing but negative ads has no vision for the future or doesn't want to lay that out at the present time.

How weird it is that such footage can be played by the speaker's opponents with such confidence in it being perceived as irony by the public! Is McCain's credibility completely upside down?

And Palin. Palin shows they're failin'.

O'bama is "palling around with domestic terrorists" and Reverend Wright...

Maybe Governor Palin knows that her ticket is toast this time and she wants to get as much attention as she can so that in four yearts, or eight, she can come back as a re-invented figure who reads the magazines and knows Supreme Court cases, and such. Will she be the front runner for the R nomination in 2012?

Clarence Page said that Palin knew that the debates are a TV show and she played it that way. She could become very skillful in the medium.

Or will she go back to Alaska in an irretreivable disgrace, blamed for the loss or just with so much negative baggage...

But Nixon had a lot of negative baggage and back he came.

"But You, Governor Palin, are no Richard Nixon."

Oh, the Lily? McCain, of course. He has to know he's not telling the truth to the American people. O'bama is not a Chicago politician. He has not been a part of that machine. If O'bama is a Chicago politician then McCain is a Hanoi politician.

Is this never going to be over?

Could this year be the rhyme line for 1964? Is this another horrendous defeat for the Republicans such that it sets up a countering victory like Ronald Reagan's?

I should stop writing before I start to rival McCain for today's Lily.

The Tool of Mavericks

2008-10-05T06:21:00.001-07:00

Sarah Palin has a rhetorical tool box that served her well in the debate last Friday, generating talking points interspersed with personable affectations--at least personable as seen by some people's sensibilities.

Unlike the two interviews she did, when the reporters were able to ask her to be specific about something she said and showed that she didn't really say anything, at all, in this debate she was able to skip over the surface like the flattest of flat stones. When Biden called her on things she was just able to to repeat what she said, without any supporting fact or information, and say that Biden was "wrong."

The plan, now, is to keep her away from anyone who can ask her a follow up question.

She winks, she mugs, her folksy outside the beltway style--her beauty contestant personality: she's joined the "Team of Mavericks."

No matter how cynical I get...

Famous Person...

2008-10-05T06:10:00.000-07:00

She killed him, was the assessment of the "Famous Person" quoted on the McCain website after the Palin Performance the other night.

The "Famous Person" turns out to be Peggy Noonan, former Reagan speech writer.

What, did someone see her, recognize her as a famous person, and just could not come up with her name at the time and still couldn't get it off of the tip of his tongue before the quote had to go up on the site?

"Famous Person" attribution may have kept us all from knowing the statement was the assessment of a very biased person.

As I watched the debate I knew that Palin was "winning" in the sense that she was allowing her campaign's base to breathe, again, allowing them to say that she was good and capable without those around them spraying whatever liquid they had in their mouths.

Cute, perky and murky with one misstatement after another.

Fact is that she did kill him.

Long before last night she killed McCain's last hope to become President.

At least, that's how I think history is going to write the story.

Lily to the one who put "The Famous Person" attribution on the McCain web site.

how can she lose?

2008-10-01T19:10:00.000-07:00

If the vice presidential debate does not end up with Sarah P. rolled up in a ball on the floor, her crisp suit sweated through and thumb in her mouth, then she will have won.

And how can Biden hope to do well? He's either going to be accused of beating up on her or patting her on the head. She pats herself on the head, of course, and she beats up on herself. Perhaps Mr. Biden should skip out on this thing and let her stand there and do it all to herself. Even, then, though, she would win. Sarah may be Palin' but she'll win by a TKO no matter what happens.

"I hereby stand by all the mistatements I have made" said Dan Quayle.

Yeah. Me, too.

Miss Congeniality.

Not hardly, but really.

So the Lily today goes to me.

How can I be anything but cynical, today?

it's just so hard to keep up.

Watching Morning Joe

2008-09-24T04:44:00.001-07:00

More spent in three days to support the American military establishment than spent on development aid for Africa in a year.

More money has gone into CEO bonuses on Wall Street than the entire world has invested in Africa in a year.

A "Lily" For Our Time

2008-09-18T05:41:00.001-07:00

I heard that Congress is flummoxed about what to do in the midst of the financial crisis. They don't know what to do.

It's a whole new game, they say. They don't know the rules.

That's ironic. Of course they don't know the rules. Congresses abolished a lot of the rules and that's why we are where we are. As one commentator put it, the financial world has had no grownups in charge for a while. We used to know how to put real value on financial instruments--you had third parties do it it instead of the people who used the instruments to convince other people to lend them (or give them) money based on that value.

"Well, you know, this here piece of paper is worth a lot of money--cause I say it is."

There's a good start--stop that nonsense.

Just start by going back and looking at the oversight that has been abolished.

This is not a new game. It's a very old game.

The game is called, now "privatizing profit and socializing loss."

My old Daddie used to call it "everyone wants socialism for themselves and free enterprise for everyone else."

And the Republican leadership in Congress is saying that we should all be concerned the size and the frequency of these bail outs.

Sigh. That's why the "Lily" goes, today, to Republicans in Congress. Cynicism on a stick.

When Republicans thought we were over run by crime they didn't wonder whether it was a good idea to pour all those resources into cops and prisons--they were were worried by what is was they said made all those cops and prisons "necessary:" crime.

We should, yes, be concerned about the size and frequency of these bail outs and I think the place to concentrate our concern is on how these became necessary. They became necessary because the ideology of the freedom in the market place displaced the ideology of responsibility and sound financial judgment. And that didn't happen by accident. People made a bundle on making it happen.

How could anyone possibly think that the way to financial strength was letting people make money by creating transactions between people who had money to loan and people who could never repay those loans and then make more money selling the right to collect on those bad loans to someone else?

They couldn't think that, of course. What they really thought was about the campaign contributions they would get from the people they let do that. And now that it's gone gunny-bag they want us to think that the issue is how we get out of the hole they put us in--not about the hole, how they put us in it and how we stay out of another one it the future.

I wonder who will accept the Lily on behalf the the free market ideologues? Herbert? Is Friend Hoover in the house? If not, call the McCain campaign. They have a couple of guys there who were very helpful in creating this climate of letting predators be predators and the prey be, well, prey. Prey--predators call those people "whiners."

The risk of failure was separated from the people making the transactions. I make money doing this and then sell the situation (known, technically, as a time bomb) to someone else. When the whole system goes down I may have to pay a little bit of what I made back to recover from the catastrophe but not as much as I made creating it. And the people I sold the loans to--and the people I got into the loans--will be right there with me paying more taxes to restore stability. They lost everything and they have to pay to recreate the system while I--who made a bundle on their losing--have to pay a lot less than I made to pay my "fair share" in the recovery.

My end of paying the recovery is smaller than what I made and everyone else--after losing so much, has to pay even more.

Is this a great country or what?

It's called "capitalism" and that's how it works.

Uh-oh. People might start to say I'm engaging in class warfare.

Another good question, this one from Barney Frank: how is it than in our "democracy" one person has the power to decide whether or not to loan $85 billion dollars of tax payer money to an insurance company, and to decided, in his own discretion, what the terms will be?

I don't know that it's a bad idea. But perhaps it's a warning to not let things get this way, again. What's gonna happen if someone finds out of that his brother in law runs the company he decided we should all bail out? (in a way, by the way, his brother in law does--his class brother in law).

And now that I think of it, when Congress gave the power to do that, how much was that like giving George Bush the power to go war if, in his sole discretion, he wanted to do that?

How many times can Congress be talked into giving people so much power? I guess the answer is as many times as they get scared into doing it.

And they were right to be scared, in both circumstances, because both the foreign and financial policies in which we have been engaging for a long time could not help to lead, regardless of short term gain for some of us, to long term disaster for all of us.

You can't be a Quaker and not know that. You can't be a human being with a moral compass--other than making money by exploiting others--and not know that. Which, I guess, explains why so many people don't seem to know it.

It's hard to figure out which of our testimonies is most implicated, here. It's an example of how we can use any one of them to analyze most any human plight. Start with simplicity, head into rest. Choose equality or integrity, community or peace. The lack of (respect for) any of them in our policies (and public morality) is a good way to come to understand the situation.

You cannot have KISS without SPICE.

And just remember, boys and girls, there are those who can with a straight face and a modicum of persuasiveness, tell us that the war in Iraq and the unfettered capitalism are examples of simplicity, peace, integrity, community and equality.

I will be surprised, frankly, if they don't.

As Lily said: "...it's hard to keep up."

class warfare

2008-09-12T18:35:00.000-07:00

So, Bill O'Reilly says to Barak Obama that restoring the taxes on the top margins to the pre-Bush levels would be "tax warfare."

One of these days I'd like someone to say, in response to this "argument," that the changing of those marginal rates downward by the Bush administration was also "class warfare." The destruction of unions, the tax structure favoring the wealthy, the subsidies and tax credits handed out to people and corporations who are in that $250,000 a year + class while similar breaks and subsidies for middle income families are cut--all that amounts to redistribution of the wealth and class warfare that is waged by the "side" wearing the same colors as Mr. O.

There is no other answer that has integrity and in the end none that really make ssense.

You cannot win that argument, Barak, until you frankly say that groups are constantly vying with one another in this economy about how the income is divided and that this is a legitimate vying and that we need to acknowledge that and put it on the table where we can openly engage in some rule making to govern the process and make it fair. That would simplify all this considerably, wouldn't it?

The way it is right now it's an unregulated war and a denied war--so those waging it aren't scrutinized or held in check by concepts of fairness applied to their behavior...not exactly harmony, is it? Peace? Equality? People who have it can portray themselves as exploited by taxes and never have to explain how they exploited others by using the government to get it, in the first place.

Our incomes are not "ours" in the sense that no one else contributed to our making it. We are part of a system and we take our incomes out of a system, benefitting from the efforts and investments (especially public investments) of others. We all owe the system so as to keep it working for us and for others as it does. We are all in this together. It's an interdependent community.

Why is it so radical to propose that people who take more out of this economy--and have the power to structure it so that they do take more out than others--should not be required to pay more to keep it working for them?

Who is offended when people who sit in the best seats pay for the highest priced tickets?

Class warfare? Duh!

Say it, Barak. Own it. It's true.

And as long as we deny it then it cannot, as it is the function of the truth to do, set us free.

This is a test...

2008-09-10T08:53:00.000-07:00

Will half truths and outright lies, spoken over and over, at high volume, become truth?

Or will the truth, spoken plainly and often, be recognized and vindicated?

That seems the test before the American electorate at the moment.

I am, as they say, "in the tank," for Barak Obama.

Even in my partisanship, however, I can say with integrity that the McCain-Palin campaign is so far off of the farm it can no longer hear the rooster crowing.

I understand that the people who are in charge of that campaign--the people who are now in danger of losing control of Washington, DC, a control they enjoyed as the result of being in charge of the Bush Administration--believe (as I guess we all do) that if they lose power the world will be a much worse place. So they justify what they do...

The ends justify the means.

A lie repeated often enough will become the truth, and the bigger the lie the more likely it is to become the truth.

Not, by the way, consistent with the faith and practice of Friends.

So, the wall of noise is built and the test is before the American people.

I believe the moral condition of the American people is such that there is an odds on chance we will fail. Our culture has so compromised us that we cannot see the truth--or refuse to see the truth in all its difficulty and inconvenience--when it's in front of us. We like the lies. They make us feel comfortable.

As a contemporary prophet once wrote: "your corrupt ways have finally made you blind."

And when we reach the end we see that the means were really all that ever meant anything, anyway.

Giving them what they want...

2008-06-27T07:59:00.000-07:00

No, no, no...

Charlie Black saying that a terrorist attack would help McCain has to based on some fairly complicated logic or a lack of integrity.

If there is a terrorist attack on this country won't it show that after all these years of grandmothers being frisked and illegal phone taps and putting panties on the heads of Islamic men we are not safe from terrorism?

We have had red alerts and orange alerts, we have had the administration telling us about this or that planned terrorist attack being foiled, attacks about which they were not free to elaborate for national security reasons. If there is no attack then McCain can say, "Hey, it's working, that's why I want to continue what Mr. Bush has started." So, if there is an attack he can say that we need to stay the course?

Seems to me that another attack shows the bankruptcy of the "war" metaphor, the proponents of which try to humiliate anyone who says it's a law enforcement problem (like the fist World Trade Center bombing--the perpetrators of which are where, now? Oh, yeah, in prison.)

Not that an attack would not work that way. It has worked like a charm in the Middle East. All the extremists know that any time a settlement is imminent all they have to do is attack one side, or the other, and the victim will throw over the settlement table--in fear of its own people who demand revenge and whose war mongers will say that they were right, that "going soft" invited the other side to attack them while pretending to be talking peace.

It even keeps the violence going when the "fundamentalist" Jewish guy kills the Jewish peacemaker--because it replaces Israel's peace guy with Israel's non-peace guy.

So, yeah, it probably would help McCain if there were another terrorist attack. It just shows that most of the American people don't get what's going on, here. If you think that winning a "war" against the United States is in your interest then do what is necessary to make sure that the people who want to fight you get or stay in office. To not attack makes the people who want to make peace with you stronger. And if you (we) are manipulated this way we end up giving up on peace and giving the people who thrive on this nonsense what they need to keep going.

Peace is in the interest of neither Al Qaeda or John McCain's election.

Madame Prosecutor and the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy

2008-06-22T08:59:00.000-07:00

I dunno what Hillary wants to do.

She was my choice going in but I got Obama-ized very early by the echo of Bobby Kennedy I kept hearing in what he had to say, by the fact that his approach was more near to the Quaker approach that Hillary's was.

I wish her well and I really hope that somehow, someway, she could be named Attorney General. I can imagine her pursuing justice (and perhaps a little something on the side, for herself) in going after all the people who should be in the dock over what they have done in the last eight years.

I'd love to have Dick Cheney watch her argue to a jury, the jury called to hear the evidence against him.

One can dream.

So?

2008-03-20T07:11:00.000-07:00

The reporter asked the vice president--after he said the "surge" was generally acknowledged to have accomplished a great deal--about the fact that the vast majority of both the Iraqi and American people wanted the war over, wanted American troops to leave.

"So?" he replied.

She quickly asked "You don't care what the American people think?"

He pieced together a reply to the effect that one cannot guide policy by the changing winds of public opinion.

I would have liked to have seen the reporter let that "So?" hang in the air for a good long time, a silent civics lesson, a silence underscoring the vice president's frank and stark revelation of the essence of what's going on. Mr. Cheney is a practiced interviewee, he might well have sat the silence out, demanding the next question without a word. How great would it be, after a minute or so of silence if, not getting another question, he just stood up and left?

Of course, he might have elaborated on his rhetorical dismissal of the criticism implied in the question. The reporter's second question was, after all, just an elaboration of her first.

For a long time I have wondered about how the American people have turned against this war and yet that makes no difference. The rejection of the policy is apparent in public opinion polls and in the last election. It's been clear for quite a while, now. Yet the war goes on as though it still had high approval ratings.

It may well be due the fact that the executive branch controls the making of policy to the exclusion of legislative direction. Does "the president controls foreign policy" mean that the legislative branch--which is the policymaking, as opposed to policy executing, branch of government--have no power over the President in this regard?

Apparently Dick Cheney thinks so, as so does the President. They think so because they have the power, apparently, to keep going despite what anyone thinks, and because they think that they have the legitimate Constitutional authority.

I have no doubt that they really do think they have the authority, and they really do think they are doing the right thing for the country and for the world.

He claims to be creating a shining city, while standing amid the rubble, the mounting carnage, and then, when asked about the fact that few others see anything other than the smoke and the death, he replies "So?"

Imagine, during the 2000 election campaign, that he was asked "What would you say to the American people if the vast majority of them opposed a war that your administration was prosecuting and that had cost billions of dollars and almost 4,000 American lives?"

Would he even be vice president today if he had replied, then, "So?"

My follow up to "So?" would be...

Is what we are doing consistent with the values we espouse? Or do we cast those aside as idealistic and unworkable in this "real world" situation?

Is what we are doing creating an inclusive framework of relationships? Or are we building a world that leaves some people out?

Is what we are doing providing benefit to all from the system of which they are a part? Or are we exploiting some for the benefit of others?

Is what we are doing careful of what we have, using as little as needed to do necessary things? Or are we wasteful of resources or of lives, using them extravagantly in things of no lasting value?

Is what we are doing making people easy with one another? Or are we making people afraid of and angry with one another?

(Of course, the question is "is what we are doing" not "are we claiming/intending/hoping that what we are doing." The answer to the question is the result, not the stated intention.)

It's a good framework of analysis for most any political question, for any question. Integrity, community, equality, simplicity, peace. The Fruits of the Spirit. They all describe love; charity, mercy.

It's the faith and practice of Friends.

It's not so different, if different it is at all, from the faith and practice of most all spiritual traditions. It's just so different from how our cultures have conditioned us to actually live.

So?

Make sure half the voters in my state get their voices heard...

2008-03-07T04:39:00.000-08:00

The Republican Govrnor of Florida wants the illegal primary results in his state to count and says he is fighting to make sure that the voters of his state have their votes counted, even if those voters are from the other party.

I wonder if he thinks that the voters of the other party in his state had their votes counted in 2000?

Oh, George II--oh, the rest of us

2008-02-15T06:05:00.000-08:00

No matter how cynical I get it's just so darned hard to keep up.

The hope that dwells side by side with that cynicism, and is larger than it is (most of the time) pushes me back where I belong but sometimes I just want to dwell on it.

Now we have the President saying that if the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is not renewed now there will be a "gap" in our security because he won't accept any more extensions and he will veto any bill that gives the telecommunications companies immunity from civil suits.

Leave aside who it will that is responsible from any consequences from a lapse in the law if he uses his veto pen, at least for a moment.

No, let's not. One thinks of the hero of Blazing Saddles holding a gun to his own throat and threatening the crowd "One more step and the ______ gets it." When the crowd steps back, one of them saying "Wait a minute, Boys, I think he means it," our hero retires and asks how they can be so dumb. It's a question that reverberates through the decades.

But there will be no gap if FISA in its current form expires. FISA in its current form foresaw a future stalemate and, by its terms, its provisions remain in place until this summer even if it is not renewed.

So, who's so dumb here? Is it George in that he doesn't know this? Hmmmm. No. It's us because we don't know it. We're dumb because our news coverage hasn't been telling us this since Congress and the President started lining up for this game of chicken.

It's about the hero and the villain (you choose which is which) fighting on the brink of the canyon, where the river wends its way a thousand feet below. Except they really aren't on the brink of a canyon and the "below" into which one or the other will fall is three feet or so and there's plenty of padding to break the loser's fall. It just looks dramatic and dangerous because of the camera angle from which we are viewing it.

Say it isn't so, George

2007-12-14T05:12:00.000-08:00

This begins with my 17 year old daughter who can keep a score book and explain the infield fly rule. I brought her up right.

She's also smart. Being able to keep a book and explain esoteric rules is not an indication of intelligence. A survey of people who can do those things makes clear the difference between knowing what one is talking about regarding baseball and possessing intelligence. Take any one of a number of baseball commissioners, or managers, or fans, for that matter--as a subset, to save yourself time--in doing that survey.

She began her senior (high school) thesis a couple of months back and she chose to compare the baseball steroid investigation with the Red Scare of the fifties.

The aptness of that didn't hit me until yesterday when I listened to sports talk radio in response to the Mitchell report on steroids and baseball.

The people doing the show, and almost all of the callers, assume that all the players named in the report are guilty of using steroids. At one point, one of the hosts of the show said that he didn't need any proof to know that a certain player used steroids; all he had to do was look at the guy, the way he acts, and his performance.

I know what he meant, and I understand perfectly what he meant. He is putting together circumstantial evidence (which is a completely valid kind of evidence, by the way) and drawing his own conclusions based on what he knows and believes to be true.

Fine. But having been a lawyer and dabbled in being a judge I have learned that this can be darned dangerous and that before we do anything other than talk about stuff, we need do do something other than this kind of "proving."

I don't want to defend any of the players, here, because I don't know what they did or did not do.

I want to defend the players' right, however, to have some kind of due process before we go putting asterisks after their records or deciding they should not be in the Hall of Fame.

The sports talkers say there is plenty of evidence for us to consider the charges true. Good. If it's so easy to prove then let's prove it. Baseball should set up some kind of a process--with the cooperation of the player's union--and present the evidence to a fact finder, with the players involved having the chance to defend themselves and to confront the witnesses against them. (Saying, by the way, that they declined to speak to the Mitchell investigation--in essence, that they refused to talk to the prosecutor before the indictment was handed down is not the same thing). If it's so obvious, let's do that.

Due process, of called a "legal technicality" by many who have never deprived of it.

What is so like the red scare is not just the rush to judgment against people who are accused of something that everyone is in a hurry to say they are against.

Some of the players are accused on the basis of some hard evidence (receipts for payment of steroids, for example) while some are accused (as some were accused during the communist witch hunts) on the basis of statements made by people who, themselves, stand accused of illegally providing steroids (a controlled substance) to players; they are accused of being, in essence, "drug dealers."

Does that sound like people who are in jeopardy for being communists naming people as communists to save their own skin? The name Ronald Reagan, head of the Screen Actors Guild, who provided names to the McCarthyites comes to mind.

Maybe the players accused solely by unsavory types are guilty. Maybe the unsavory characters, in addition to trying for lenient treatment (if that's what's going on, and I don't know that it is), are telling the truth.

People's lives were ruined when, with no proof other than allegation, labels like "communist" or "fellow traveler" were attached to their names. People's lives are also ruined, in more subtle ways, when they attach such labels to others with no proof beyond allegation.

I also want to know more about what George Mitchell, part owner of a baseball team, means when he talks about the player's union as a source of the problem, here. And I am a little concerned that someone who is a part owner of a team is the investigator, here. There are all kinds of aspects of this that I think need to be on the table (again, I don't know that there's anything going on here, but we owe it to players accused and to ourselves to examine this aspect of the situation). Could it be that the agenda here, at least in part, is to advance the owner's cause in the constant struggle between the union and the owners? Can we be sure that Mr. Mitchell did not protect Red Sox players because he has a stake--emotionally and financially in that team? I know Senator Mitchell has credentials--but America is not about credentials and, as a former prosecutor and judge he knows the way that the appearance of impropriety can undermine an investigation and prosecution. Why, then, did he agree to do it?

Again, I don't know; we don't know. We owe it to ourselves and to everyone involved, here, to find this stuff out before we go asterisking records or trashing the union.

I am saying that the American way is to prove allegations like this in a certain way when life, liberty and property/the pursuit of happiness is on the line. And, for these players, those things are on the line. Their reputations--their ability to use their status as major league players for whatever advantage they can, their chances of getting into the Hall of Fame, their ability to live their lives beyond the reach of innuendo--are at risk.

Ours are, too. Is it going to be that any or all of us can be brought down this way? Is it going to be that any or all of us are going to bring people down in this way?

The possibility is that the herd--we--are being stampeded, here. What's wrong with a little due process to make sure that's not true?

It's the difference between and indictment and a conviction. We say we respect people's rights and that we want people to get a fair shake. Integrity would indicate, then, that we prove things about people before we punish them with asterisks and bans from the Hall of Fame.

So, does our response to this show our integrity? Or does it show we really don't care about innocent until proven guilty? Does it show that we are willing to give people, when we disapprove of what they are accused of doing, less than a fair shake, less than the kind of shake we'd want to get?

Another aspect of this, getting back to my daughter, is that she is a San Francisco Giant fan (there is no accounting for choices kids make, sometimes) who dislikes Barry Bonds. She is personally convinced he is guilty of steroid use. She saw the innuendo and the potential for slander of this whole steroid thing months ago even though she would be among the last people on earth to apologize for or defend Barry Bonds. I am pleased to see that she wants to make sure that even people she doesn't care for, even people she believes are guilty, get their day in court and are not unfairly brought down by the court of public opinion.

That's integrity.

That's--ahem-- my girl.

I don't know if she got that from me or not, so although I'd like to repeat, at this point, that I brought her up right, I'll confine myself to saying that I am as pleased with the way she is growing up as I am concerned about the way that most people seem to be showing a lack of integrity, here.

Oh, Joe! A Lily for you...

2007-12-12T02:43:00.000-08:00

Oh, Joe! A Lily for you...

It has been a while since I awarded a "Lily," my own personal prize. I chose that name for statements that engender cynicism. The award is named after Lily Tomlin, who reputed to have said "No matter how cynical I get, it's hard to keep up."

Joe Scarborough wins for his recent defense of water boarding. A part of that defense was asking a rhetorical question that implies very strongly that water boarding is not torture.

When, he asked, did the liberal media, when did the people in Manhatten, when did the people in West Hollywood decide that water boarding was torture?

"I wasn't," he said, "at that meeting."

Joe is a commentator, discussing issues of the day every day. He has access to more information that I have, and more time to take it in, check it out and verify it. . So, I am cynical about his integrity in making this statement. It is well enough known for me to know that, it wasn't a meeting where that decision was made. That was decided at a trial. More than one trial. Three of them are described, here.

"In the war crimes tribunals that followed Japan's defeat in World War II, the issue of waterboarding was sometimes raised. In 1947, the U.S. charged a Japanese officer, Yukio Asano, with war crimes for waterboarding a U.S. civilian. Asano was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor.

"On Jan. 21, 1968, The Washington Post ran a front-page photo of a U.S. soldier supervising the waterboarding of a captured North Vietnamese soldier. The caption said the technique induced "a flooding sense of suffocation and drowning, meant to make him talk." The picture led to an Army investigation and, two months later, the court martial of the soldier.

"Cases of waterboarding have occurred on U.S. soil, as well. In 1983, Texas Sheriff James Parker was charged, along with three of his deputies, for handcuffing prisoners to chairs, placing towels over their faces, and pouring water on the cloth until they gave what the officers considered to be confessions. The sheriff and his deputies were all convicted and sentenced to four years in prison."

NPR, "Waterboarding: a tortured history"

It wasn't a meeting that decided that water boarding was torture. It was a law cases--it was trials.

So, if Joe Scarborough doesn't know that, what's he doing commenting on the news of the day? This is the kind of thing that politicians do (and he is a former Congressman)--they use cleverly worded statements that don't really lie but convey and promote untruth. Propagandists--that is people who want to persuade people of something that benefits the propagandist without regard for the truth of the matter--lie; sometimes they lie by commission and sometimes by omission, but they lie.

Later in the same show, Joe said to a guest "If you are going to be on my show, David, you have to provide accurate information."

A Lily for Joe. The category is Integrity.

Settle down, Mr. Matthews...

2007-12-04T05:14:00.001-08:00

Hey, Chris, long time, first time. I love Hardball and download the podcast every day because I can't catch it on the air.

You're a brilliant guy but lately you're showing that you are as vulnerable as some of the rest of us to getting someting a little wrong and then going on about it.

On a recent Hardball you asked Governor Huckabee about the candidate's emphasis on his religion in advertising and in debates. Later you said later that a religious test was being erected to holding office and have gone from there to talk a lot about the emphasis Republicans are putting on candidate's relilgion. Again last night you, and another reporter on your show, talked about a religious test for office being created among Republicans; that they are violating the US Constitution.

The Constitution, in Article Six:

"The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States."

This means that the state and federal governments cannot make any aspect of a person's religion an official qualification for office. Just as a person may be required to be of a certain age, or residency, or professional certification (this applies to appointed offices, as well as elected), or even--until subsequent amendments--race or sex, a person may not be required to be of a certain religion.

All of this goes to government action.

It does not prohibit people voting for someone based on that person's religion--either the religion of the voter or the religion of the candidate. It also does not prohibit anyone asking a candidate about religion or anyone or group of people saying that they will only support someone of a certain religion or that they will oppose someone of a certain (or of no) religion.

So, Chris, you can be critical of people because it's not a good idea to make religion (or a lack thereof) a test in the voter's mind--and I agree with you, it isn't--but it's not really correct to say that people are prohibited from doing that. They can do that, all they want. It is not Un Constitutional.

Like I say, love your show...

what the old man said made some sense...

2007-11-24T16:26:00.000-08:00

"I feel strongly that there ought to be fair justice."

George W. Bush
Washington, D.C., Sept. 20, 2007

The good people at Slate, with whom I am so frequently in unity, regularly runs a feature called "Bushisms." It holds the President up to ridicule for stumbling over his words. The quotation above is cited there as an example of the President's frequent inability to express himself coherently.

There are times I think that it's not fair to do this kind of thing to him. It's well known that he is mixing up what he says and we all know what he means. He is not really so inept as to think that "Is our children learning?" is acually correct, although I don't buy this thing about him "actually being a brilliant guy." He is not the sweetest peach in the box, but he is not a moron, and he is not a village idiot come a wanderin' out o' Texas.

So, since we all agree he is bright enough to find his rear with both hands, it aseems to me sometimes that ridiculing him for his inevitable slips of the tongue is a little like making fun of a stutterer.

And, in the case of this particular statement, I think it may not actually be a mistake--I think I agree with what the President actually said.

If one thinks of "justice" as a product, a commodity, an outcome that is dealt out by a court (in effect, as a decision) then there is such a thing as fair and unfair "justice." I am sure that many people don't feel that the judgment that was made in their case was "justice" (ask anyone involved in a divorce or, perhaps, about a traffic ticket) and that there are many who feel that factors other than pure equity or pure application of law to facts are often determinative--especially when members of one group come up against those of another, or against the state (which amounts, of course, to coming up against another group).

The Old Testament prophets were always talking about "judgment" in this sense when they decried justice for sale, through bribery ("gifts") and favoritism toward the powerful (as opposed to doing what the law said in regard to widows and orphans).

So, justice is a synonym for "fair" only when it is not corrupt, when the decisions, the judgments handed down by the courts, are consistent with the policies of the various constitutions of the states and the federal governent and of the laws that flow from them. If those policies are frustrated in the administration of justice then, indeed, it is fair to say that justice is "unfair."

So, like the President, I feel strongly that there ought to be fair justice. Fudge--I do hate it when I find I agree with him about something. Well, he can't be wrong all the time.

on waterboarding and why it cannot be torture...

2007-11-21T05:27:00.000-08:00

Waterboarding cannot be torture and keep a long line of people--from privates to the President of the United States--out of legal trouble; criminal legal trouble.

Waterboarding has been successfully prosecuted by the American government for more than 100 years with both its own citizens and members of at least one foreign army as defendents. The crime charged was torture. People went, as they say, down for this one.

As a great American prophet used to say, "You can look it up."

If the new attorney general nominee had said that waterboarding was torture, during his confirmation hearings, then the attorney general nominee would have been saying that Americans committed the crime of torture and that the President was complicit in that he ordered the crime be committed.

Conspiracy? Accomplice liability? Pick 'em, but charge him: let the jury decide--that would be my prosecutorial strategy (of course, I was only a prosecutor for a very short period of time and never got beyond driving under the influence cases more than a time or two).

The President has been called a lot of dirty names, so far, but it seems that one of them might (should?) be "defendant."

That can't be good.

At least, it can't be good from his point of view.

What is good from the President's point of view is that he appears to be able to have the same "complete confidence" in this new attorney general that he had in the old one. It was confusing to hear the President express such confidence in Mr. Gonzales, someone who was held in almost total contempt by almost everyone. How could anyone have such confidence in the ability of such a person to function as attorney general?

Well, silly me, it was not AG the AG's ability to function as AG in which Mr. Bush had such complete confidence. It was, rather, in the many times proven ability of AG the AG to lie, forget and do whatever else was necessary to keep anyone who was trying to figure things out from following the converging trails back to Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney...whomever. AG was trustworthy in that his loyal service to the Bush administration was not constrained by the perimeters of either law or ethics. (And Mr Gonzales may, yet, be going to go down for this. Perhaps he should hope he is indicted and convicted before Mr. Bush is. If the prosecution moves adroitly Scooter Libby may be the only law breaker in this administration who will benefit from a presidential pardon. The "pardoner" may be in need of a pardon, himself, before they are in a position to benefit from one.)

What also cannot be good, aside from the direct results of employing torture--getting a bunch of bogus information upon which to lay dumb plans and build stupid policies--is the (at least) one inevitable result of employing torture: others will do it to our military people and we will have absolutely no legs--moral or legal--to stand upon if we let this "just go by."

Way to go, George.

Just one more way in which the integrity of the Republic and the Constitution upon which is is based has been compromised and perhaps broken beyond all repair. Which successor of yours will have the grounding, the moral compass, to resist going through all the doors you (and Mr. Cheney) have opened and legitimized?

We are going to be paying for your presidency for a long time to come, in more ways than one.

It all comes from riding a high horse down the low road, from telling everyone you are off clearing brush when, actually, you are off planting more in which you can hide.

President Bush has shown himself to be the kind of person who, when he speaks, one can safely assume that the opposite of what he says is true. In fact, it is at one's peril that one relies on the truth of anything he says. He is the kind of person once described as one whose dog will not come when he whistles.

At Last...At Least

2007-09-22T16:13:00.001-07:00

I finally heard George Bush say that something was too expensive. It had nothing to do with the war, and nothing to do with tax cuts, nothing to do with energy...

It was poor children's health care...

He said he will veto a bill that would keep it going in fifteen states...

Hey, Dude, where's my country?

2007-08-18T10:02:00.000-07:00

I never identified with that rhetorical question until this morning.

I read that the Bush Administration failed to accept "no" for an answer from the Senate in the "advise and consent" process for high level executive appointees. Seems the Senators had som reservations about a person nominated to fill an undersecretary of somethin or other position that oversees, among other things, mine safety. They had concerns about this person's safety record as a mine operator.

It's not just the questions this begs in light of recent mine disaster in Utah.

It's also the question of circumventing the process. If someone is not confirmed they're not supposed to get the job. It's a process in which both sides have to agree for the appointment to be confirmed. But the Bush Administration has just ignored that, completely disregarding process.

This time it's the harmony testimony that is implicated. And integrity.

getting toward election time...

2006-05-04T17:26:00.000-07:00

With the primaries on the horizon and the general election not far behind, with the balance of power in Congress is in play. The conservative leadership is putting itself on the cross, so to speak, and once more cheapening religion by manipulating believers into supporting wedge issues. Being blessed as peacemakers is not what the Republican leadership is after.

What's coming?

It appears we are going to get a couple of really conservative judges. Some of thee will be from the former Starr team who worked so hard to reduce the power of the presidency when Bill Clinton held it and now work hard to enhance that same power now that George Bush holds it. Like the God they insist wrote the Bible, word for word (a notion that was only developed about 400 years ago), the US Constitution is not really the same today as it was yesterday and will be tomorrow. Apparently the Constitution's meaning varies with which person is in power.

This judge issue is one of my personal favorites. The Republicans blocked judge after judge on ideological grounds during the Clinton years and now they howl about how the president should be entitled to pick anyone he pleases. The Republican long run strategy is to name enough federal judges--who sit for life--so as to create a conservative judiciary that will be legislating their ideology long after the current conservative majority is cast out of office by the normal cycle of American politics.

This is a total lack of integrity on the part of Republicans who, having blocked on ideological grounds, now moan that it's unfair for anyone to ask any questions about a judge's ideology. The whole system is twisted, now, by partisanship and who knows when, or if, that can be fixed.

Aside from litmus tested judges we are also in for some flashy votes in Congress. Gay marriage, broadcast decency, a 10 commandments act, cloning ban, "protecting" in God we trust on the money and in the pledge of allegiance. These are the kinds of things that make the base go wild but that most centerist voters just tune out. These trivial issues do not mobilize, one way or the other, most voters who have their minds on serious questions (like health care, the deficit, our bankrupt transportation system, the structure of the tax system, etc). So "legislating" on these will be viewed by the center as more background noise to be ignored and will stoke the base at the same time.

We won't be seeing legislation about abortion or stem cell research which would awaken the voters in the center. The majority of Americans, including those in the center, who will hold the key the upcoming elections, do not agree with Bush and his base on these issues. Attention drawn to these issues will show that a lot of senators and representatives that go to Congress in their name don't agree with them on these kinds of issues that have great impact on how we live.

So, the Bush administration and Congress will give Dr. Dobson and the like something to chew on. They will not move on the issues that really have effect on the day to day lives of Americans because the Bush position on such issues, while drawing cheers from the base, are unpopular with the swing voters.

It's after the election, of course, that we are going to hear more about the things the administration is currently doing to prepare us for war with Iran...

The Democrats are not without fault in all of this and a number of them will be playing along with this strategy so as to fend off challanges from conservatives who have been picked and funded by the Republican National Committee to try to knock off members considered "vulnerable."

That's what we are in for from now until election day. It's not even "business as usual." It's politics as always.

Timothy Travis

just no end to it...

2006-03-28T19:02:00.000-08:00

More on the same Supreme Court case discussed below...

Justice Scalia openly discussed the legal principals underlying this case and, before hearing arguments that were held today, he summed up the appellant's side of things by saying "Give me a break."

A judge, like a juror, who has his/her mind made up before hearing the case is not allowed to sit. In the case of a judge, though, and in the case of a justice, no one can enforce this ethical duty. It's up to the integrity of the judge, or justice, involved.

Awarding two "Lilies" in one day. It really is hard to keep up.

In Case You Were Wondering...

2006-03-28T14:46:00.000-08:00

taking the Lily Tomlin prize

2006-03-28T13:54:00.003-08:00

"No matter how cynical I get, it's hard to keep up."

Lily Tomlin

I'm going to call it "The Keeping Up" Prize and if I ever get around to creating a statue for winners I'll call them "Lilies."

And todays winners are two US Senators: Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Jon Kyl, R-Ariz. They filed a brief in a Supreme Court case to which they were not parties, a "friend of the court brief." In this brief they argued that a certain law applied to a case before the court. They claimed that an exchange they had on the floor of the Senate, at the time the bill was passed, made clear to all who would vote on it that this law was meant to apply. Therefore, their brief tells the Supreme Court, the law should apply.

http://www.slate.com/id/2138750/

The problem is that this exchange, that supposedly told all Senator what they were voting on, never happened on the floor of Senate. It was inserted in the Congressional Record (as most anything can be). It was a made up conversation (complete with made up interruptions and statements alluding the fact that the speaker's time was expiring). No one on the Senate floor heard it and so the argument that it shows that the intent of people who voted in favor of it was that it was meant to apply to this case before the Supreme Court today shows a complete lack of integrity on the part of the two US Senators involved.

There is plenty of stuff in the record of the actual debate on the Senate floor indicating that many Senators expressed their view that the bill was not intended to apply to this Supreme Court case. In fact, the entire record on the Senate floor indicates that the law as not intended to apply to this case. That's the exact opposite of what Graham and Kyl argue in their brief to the Court, based on their made up conversation that never happened. Since the legislative history of the law was clear that it was not intended to apply to this particular case something had to be made up to argue that it should.

You don't have to be a Quaker to be concerned at this kind of thing. You just have to know right from wrong.

Am I the only person who gets this?

2006-01-17T18:01:00.000-08:00

WASHINGTON - Iran may yet end up on the docket of the United Nations Security Council for restarting its nuclear-fuel program. But even if the international community can agree to punish it with economic sanctions, will those actions succeed in stopping Tehran's pursuit of nuclear technology - and possibly a bomb?

so says the Christian Science Monitor, January 18, 2006

Why is the international community thinking about punishing Iran for restarting its nuclear weapons program? Why isn't the international commuity thinking of punishing the countries that currently have nuclear weapons for encouraging other countries to get them?

Iran is hot to get nuclear weapons because George Bush has clearly shown, in his disparate treatments of Iraq and North Korea, that if one has nuclear weapons one survives even if one's action do not please Washington DC. No one has pulled down any statues of Kim what's his name and the reason for that is that he has nukes. Saddam is on trial for crimes against humanity because he did not have nukes.

When I hear western leaders talking about the dangers of nuclear proliferation I just stand in dumbfounded awe of what is either clossal arrogance or most remarkable lack of insight the world has ever seen.

No one should have nukes. But the last people on earth to be objecting to their spread, with integrity, that is, are those who have them. Any country that has nuclear weapons today, and objects to other countries getting them, has adopted a policy of hypocrisy that will no doubt lead to the spread of nuclear weapons and, eventually, to a catasprophe of as yet unexperienced proportions.

sometimes one just has to shake one's head...

2006-01-14T09:22:00.000-08:00

Washington Times reports:

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy belongs to a social club for Harvard students and alumni that was evicted from campus nearly 20 years ago after refusing to allow female members...
Judge Alito's "affiliation with an organization that fought the admission of women into Princeton calls into question his appreciation for the need for full equality in this country," Mr. Kennedy said Wednesday.

Kennedy spokeswoman Laura Capps said there is "absolutely no comparison" between the Owl Club, a social group, and an organized effort to "exclude women from getting an education" at Princeton.

"It's a social club. It's like a fraternity," she said. "He has been fighting to break down barriers for decades."

This Quaker's take is that there is no reason for social clubs to erect barriers along sex lines. Excluding women (or men) from a club or a function or a conference really says that there is something about women (or men) that makes them unsuitable for the company of the other sex in that context or for some activity that the other sex wants to engage in.

And if that's the case what is the activity in which the one sex wants to engage that is so unsuitable for the other that a rule, rather than natural inclination or lack ability, is enough to preserve the integrity of that activity? Perhaps the desire to exclude the other sex is an indication that it's really an unsuitable pursuit for either sex.

Excluding either sex from any activity by rule only proves that those who want the rule believe in sex stereotypes that do damage to the other sex and to their own understanding of themselves. People who harbor misconceptions about the other sex also harbor misconceptions about their own. One cannot believe foolish ideas about the opposite sex without believing in foolish ideas about their own.

Privacy --why do I really value it?

2006-01-08T06:44:00.000-08:00

from

http://dailykos.com/

January 8, 2006

"In a nutshell, the Chicago Sun-Times ran a story two days ago about a Web site that sells phone records, for cells and land-lines, for $110 a pop. The company boasts on its own Web site:

"Give us the cell phone number and we will send you the calls made from the cell phone number.

"So I went to their site, plopped down $110, and within a day I had a list of every single phone number that called my cell, or that I called from my cell, for the month of November. I even had the dates the calls were made, and for a premium I could find out how long the calls were."

So, is this a scary thought?

It was to me when I read it and then I wondered why it was.

I recognize that someone could do me harm with this informaton but they wouldn't need this information to do me harm. Someone who really wanted to do me harm could do it without this information.

I can see how I would be concerned if I were making calls that would indicate that I was doing things that I would rather not have other people know about because I was acting "in the dark," and I didn't want want that behavior brought into the light. If I were cheating on my spouse, for example, or doing criminal stuff, or making personal calls on work time and such.

So my take on this is that I would rather that this information were not available like this and I would love to know how they are doing this. It seems to me that I expected that this information would be confidential but I cannot point to some specific assurance I have ever received, at least not in regard to cell phones. I thought that after some Congressmen were embarrassed that some of their cell phone calls were inadvertantly overheard on other phones that a federal law was passed about intercepting cell phone calls but I'm not sure about that.

I do know that people have wierd notions about privacy--notions that are not supported by law. For example, video cameras in public places designed to detect and deter crime are perfectly legal because in public places one has, legally, no reasable expectation of privacy. But, given the state of technology, today, where does one have a reasonable expectation of privacy?

I remember when photo radar was debated in the Oregon legislature it was obvious that some members were uncomfortable about where a car (and its driver) might be photographed and with whom. They were obviously concerned about photographed drivers being in more trouble than a mere traffic ticket.

Although I do agree that people should not be allowed to get a list of all phone calls made from a specific number I also wonder about why this is such an odious idea to us. There are, no doubt, real threats to us posed by such access, but I think, too, that some of our fears in this regard have to do with the fact that we are too often up to things that, if revealed, would compromise us in the eyes of our employers, our families and our communities. In other words, whatever else such revelation would do, it might also reveal the corruption within our whitewashed sepulchers.

More 21st Century Integrity

2005-12-28T10:33:00.000-08:00

"This nation sits at a crossroads. One direction points to the higher road of the rule of law...The other road is the path of least resistance" in which "we pitch the law completely overboard when the mood fits us...[and] close our eyes to the potential lawbreaking...and tear an unfixable hole in our legal system."

Is it Senator Ted Kennedy complaining about President Bush ignoring the laws governing government tapping of phones and "mining" e mails?

No...

It's Tom Delay (currently under indictment) urging that President Clinton be punished for having an affair with an intern.

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/edcut?pid=45006#comment

why do they hate us?

2005-12-23T16:47:00.000-08:00

It's not our freedom they hate ... it's that of the United States that is personified by our United Nations ambassador, Mr. Bolton. He' s just the epitome...

Los Angeles Times latimes.com

"It was always expected he would be controversial. Bolton came to the post by the political back door: President Bush appointed him during a congressional recess after it became clear that the battle over his confirmation was going to be a long one.

"The ambassador clearly relishes a fight. He recalled that when he was applying at law firms for a summer job back when he was a young man, one lawyer told him to rethink his desire to be a litigator, saying that most of his interactions every day would be with people who wanted to "rip your clients' lungs out."

'"He asked me, 'Is that really what you want to do?' And I thought about it and I said, 'Yeah, that is exactly what I want to do.' " '

A Quakerly take on this might be that someone who wants to do the work of peace making (ostensively the mission of the United Nations) might wish to have just such an attitude: where else would one dedicated to the values of the Sermon on the Mount want to be, as Jesus wanted to be with the sinners? One who wanted to reconcile differences with other nations and build enduring structures for peace would, of course, want to work among those who hate the United States.

But that is not, of course, why Bolton wants to be with people who dislike the United States. He's not interested in peace making. The United Nations to him, and to the current administration, is really just one more weapon in the global war for American hegemony, it's one more front in the war to keep the Great American Party going. This war has been going on for so long, now, that we are acclimated to it and we don't call it a war, at all. We call it "The American Way of Life.."

And that is why they hate us.

in case you missed it...

2005-12-22T09:29:00.000-08:00

only a lawyer would enjoy reading someting like the intelligent design decision but there is some interesting stuff in there about how far people will go to try to force others to accept their religion. For example, the case relates this interesting incident:

In the midst of this panoply, there arose the astonishing story of an evolution mural that was taken from a classroom and destroyed in 2002 by Larry Reeser, the head of buildings and grounds for the DASD. At the June 2004 meeting, Spahr asked Buckingham where he had received a picture of the evolution mural that had been torn down and incinerated. Jen Miller testified that Buckingham responded:

“I gleefully watched it burn.” (12:118 (J. Miller)). Buckingham disliked the mural because he thought it advocated the theory of evolution, particularly common ancestry. (26:120 (Baksa)). Burning the evolutionary mural apparently was insufficient for Buckingham, however. Instead, he demanded that the teachers agree that there would never again be a mural depicting evolution in any of the classrooms and in exchange, Buckingham would agree to support the purchase of the biology textbook in need by the students. (36:56-57 (Baksa) (emphasis added)).

Case 4:04-cv-02688-JEJ Document 342 Filed 12/20/2005 Page 108 of 139

Buckingham was a school board member and one of the major supporters of the intelligent design program.

putting a few pieces together...

2005-12-20T06:27:00.000-08:00

Mona Charon writes:

"...Iraqis once again demonstrated their eagerness for democratic practice by standing in long lines at voting places around the nation. How can the United States possibly leave this job unfinished? To leave is to fail."

http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/monacharen/2005/12/16/179494.html

"President Bush is making selective use of an opinion poll when he tells people that Iraqis are increasingly upbeat.

"The same poll that indicated a majority of Iraqis believe their lives are going well also found a majority expressing opposition to the presence of U.S. forces, and less than half saying Iraq is better off now than before the war."

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=1423308&CMP=OTC-RSSFeeds0312

This Quaker's take: The lack of integrity snowballs as people gradually lose sight of the Truth, mesmerized by the ventriloquist voice of gods they have created to serve as the benefactors in their fertility cults.

⁹ "Therefore I bring charges against you again,"
declares the LORD.
"And I will bring charges against your children's children.

¹⁰ Cross over to the coasts of Kittim and look,
send to Kedar and observe closely;
see if there has ever been anything like this:

¹¹ Has a nation ever changed its gods?
(Yet they are not gods at all.)
But my people have exchanged my/their Glory
for worthless idols.

¹² Be appalled at this, O heavens,
and shudder with great horror,"
declares the LORD.

Jeremiah 2

"And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, and it's a hard,
And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall."

Bob Dylan

Merry Christmas for Christ/The Spirit is born...and dies...and is reborn...in the hearts of all people every day.

"...the Quaker conviction that covenantal participation is based not on doctrinal confession but on hearng and following God's voice."

Douglas Gwyn
Covenant Crucified
(Quakers and the Rise of Capitalism)
p. 193

Oh, that we really were so dangerous...

2005-12-16T05:20:00.000-08:00

from http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10454316/

"WASHINGTON - A year ago, at a Quaker Meeting House in Lake Worth, Fla., a small group of activists met to plan a protest of military recruiting at local high schools. What they didn't know was that their meeting had come to the attention of the U.S. military.

A secret 400-page Defense Department document obtained by NBC News lists the Lake Worth meeting as a “threat” and one of more than 1,500 “suspicious incidents” across the country over a recent 10-month period.

“This peaceful, educationally oriented group being a threat is incredible,” says Evy Grachow, a member of the Florida group called The Truth Project.

“This is incredible,” adds group member Rich Hersh. “It's an example of paranoia by our government,” he says. “We're not doing anything illegal.”

My take on this is that it's too bad we're not actually dangerous...

It's not hard to understand how a peaceful, education oriented group is considered to be a threat. The Jesus movement, a peaceful educatonally oriented group, was a threat to the Jewish establishment of its day for the same reason that Quakers, another peaceful educationally oriented group, was a threat to the Puritan establishment of its day--both worked, in essence, to unite the practices of the society in which they lived with the vision of the covenants with God that they espoused.

But that is not what our current "peace" movement is doing. What Rich Hersh says, above, is true: what we're up to is not "illegal"--it's not even dangerous to anyone except the particular leadership of the moment. We do not pose the kind of danger to our culture that Jesus and George Fox did. Our peace movement is an "anti a particular war" movement. When the war in Iraq is over, when George Bush is gone from the White House, our peace movement will fade back into the woodwork of history, its lasting influence negligible. Not really dangerous, at all.

The Jesus movement and the Quaker movement (the "Lambs War") both sought a fundamental reordering of society from the grassroots. Each sought to turn its culture away from the hollow forms of its day, and from the frustrating, alienating social and spiritual practices and relationships that divided people and made them prey upon one another, rather than praying with one another. Each sought to turn its culture away from materialism and the other "doctrines" that lead people to shove everything except God into that God shaped hole in their heart. Each sought to turn people away from the things they pursued to satisfy themselves which were actually the very things that were making them crazy (Both John the Baptist and James Nayler, if they walked around downtown Portland long enough to acclimate themselves to the cultural trappings, would understand perfectly well what was going on and what the antidote is).

Our current peace movement is not dangerous in this way. Our current peace movement speaks little of the dynamics of our society that make war the natural outcome, not an irrational abberation, of the pursuit of its values. Our current peace movement speaks little to the kind of cultural conditioning that includes things like two national holidays a year that amount to little more than info-mmercials to sell/condition us on the idea that killing people is the way to establish peace and to find security.

Yes, there is a part of this peace movement that is not animated by the simple belief that it's just the war in Iraq that is wrong but, rather, that war is a logical and necessary manifestation of a system that humans have developed to rely upon for their "security" instead of God, who have placed creaturely well being above spiritual well being, who have, to paraphrase Isaiah (and Jeremiah and...), gone over to the dark side.

If the day ever comes that the vision of this element in the peace movement grows into a significant presence then it will be as dangerous to our fallen culture as a whole as the current peace movement seems to be to the current administration.

For the moment, however, the peace movement is not concerned with spirituality and is content to leave the culture of the SUV in place. For the most part the peace movement is as spiritually disoriented as the Bush Administration and for so long as it is will have a similar, transitory impact on the unfolding of events.

Not Getting the Message...

2005-12-12T05:14:00.000-08:00

"In Washington, Adam Ereli, a State Department spokesman, said the
administration was determined to achieve greenhouse-gas reductions not
through binding limits but through long-term work to develop cleaner
technologies."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/10/international/americas
/10climate.html?th&emc=th

There is, in short, no reason to change the way that our
conditioning/culture keeps people consuming, consuming, consuming to
make some people who control the production wealthier, wealthier and
wealthier...

(the Bush administration sent someone named "Adam" out to give the
world this message. What's funny is that it doesn't strike them as
ironic enough to avoid doing). (I believe, myself, that there are no
coincidences where the Spirit is at work revealing Truth to those
looking for it.)

The message is that we should just rock on, that there is no reason
for us to throw off and repent our worship in the fertility cult of
ever expanding capitalism and development...there is no reason for our
party to ever end. That's what say our high priests of prosperity and
materialism. (we don't pay temple prostitutes to ensure we get a good
harvest, rather we pay investment counselors and brokers and insurance
agents to ensure we get a good return on our investment.

Because technology will save us (this is not really a new message, is
it?)...we don't have to save ourselves from the consequences of our
debauchery...machines will save us--but, of course, even if their plan
works out they will only "save" the earth, not our souls...there's
still the matter of the impact/karma of the debauchery that will work
out in our personal futures.

The Bush administration (and the bi partisan prosperity machine it
whose agenda it pursues) assures us, again, that there is no reason to curtail
the profits by easing off on the ruthless exploitation of the earth and
of other humans. There is no reason to find simpler and healthier ways to
live (finding, for example, things other than SUVs to fill the God
shaped holes in our hearts). We can also make additional profits by
the technical means we will use to keep the party going!!! Machines
will make it possible for us to orgy on while continuing the exploitation of the
earth and other human beings. It's win-win.

Rhetorical question: where is John Woolman when we need him?

Rhetorical answer: we all have to be John Woolman, ourselves.

"In all our cares about worldly treasures, let us steadily bear in
mind that riches possessed by children who do not truly serve God are
likely to prove snares that may more grievously entangle them in that
spirit of selfishness and exaltation which stands in opposition to
real peace and happiness, and renders those who submit to the
influence of it enemies to the cross of Christ."

John Woolman's Diary

It has to come from the center...

2005-11-09T05:28:00.000-08:00

The current struggle between Congress and the Administration over how detainees in the "war" on terror should be treated has come to center on our "torture policy." The Adminsitration is actually splitting over this and Vice President Cheney is becoming more isolated, with even the President now making comments indicating that he does not favor the use of torture.

It's good that so many members of Congress are following Senator John McCain's lead in attempting to control this aspect of the Adminsitration's treatment of detainees. It has many in the adminstration thinking along these lines...

From the Washington Post (Monday, November 7, 2005)

"The other side of the debate (from Mr. Cheney) are those who believe that unconventional measures -- harsh interrogation tactics, prisoner abuse and the "ghosting" and covert detention of CIA-held prisoners -- have so damaged world support for the U.S.-led counterterrorism campaign that they have hurt the U.S. cause. Also, they argue, these measures have tainted core American values such as human rights and the rule of law.

"The debate in the world has become about whether the U.S. complies with its legal obligations. We need to regain the moral high ground," said one senior administration official familiar with internal deliberations on the issue, adding that Rice believes current policy is "hurting the president's agenda and her agenda."

Torture makes us look bad, is what they are saying. The President's handling of detainees, at least in regard to torturing them, has apparently pricked the conscience of a significant number of Americans and that's making the way the Adminsitration is doing business difficult to sustain. If Congress gets puts a stop to torture of detainees who knows what other aspects of Adminstration policy about how these people are treated will come under scrutiny? And if it comes under Congressional scrutiny it's possible that it will, eventually, come under Congressional oversight and control. So far the President has had few limits placed on his discretion and that is how he wants to keep it.

As welcome as is the news that torture is falling out of favor in the Adminsitration, this is not really a victory, at least not from One Quaker's Take. A new incident of terror, a fresh flurry of propaganda, a new media push, some additional spin could very well turn the fickle public back to favoring torture.

Much better would it be to hear something like this from the Presidential Press Secretary:

"We know that there are many who, out of their fear and frustration, want us to torture people to stop terrorism. But our prayer and worship and meditation is leading many of us in the Administration to re-realize that the use of torture violates the most basic tenets of every spiritual tradition that can be called a "World Religion." We have been led by the Spirit moving in our hearts to realize that we have lost our way and are generating karma, for ourselves and for others, that diminishes the domain of God on Earth, that threatens the security of everyone on the planet and that will outlive the current conflict to ignite many more, for decades to come. Therefore, the President has ordered all armed forces and intelligence agencies under his command to cease any current use of torture and will meet with Congressional leaders today to plot a strategy to get an anti-torture bill to his desk as soon as possible."

Wouldn't that be great?

Of course, if the Administration were to become animated by the Spirit in this way it would not be long until our entire orientation toward the rest of the world--and not just our response to 9/11--would look radically different.

We can pray.

"There is a principle which is pure, placed
in the human mind, which in different places
and ages hath had different names. It is,
however, pure and proceeds from God. It is
deep and inward, confined to no forms of
religion, nor excluded from any, where the
heart stands in perfect sincerity. In
whomsoever this takes root and grows,
of what nation soever, they become brethern
in the best sense of the expression."

John Woolman

Feed the Hungry...this one just speaks for itself...

2005-11-08T20:34:00.000-08:00

The food stamp cuts in the House measure would knock nearly 300,000 people off nutritional assistance programs, including 70,000 legal immigrants, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
[...]

About 40,000 children would lose eligibility for free or reduced-price
school lunches, the CBO estimated. [...]