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

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

"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

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...

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?

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

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

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

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...

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...

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

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?

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...

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

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

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...

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...

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...

"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...

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

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...