Ramona's Voices

Fighting the vast Right Wing with Pea Shooters, Part One: Books and Bookmakers

2012-01-31T17:07:00.169-05:00

We progressive types are working overtime these days marching, rallying, sitting, petitioning. We place ourselves prominently on Twitter (with our #p2, #OWS, and #CTL hashtags) and on Facebook. More and more of us have taken to writing political blogs. Our blogrolls feature other bloggers, other writers who work as hard or harder than we do in trying to sort out the truths behind America's astonishing decline and the Rightward drift that led us here. Our job is to route out the bad guys, to expose them and make sure justice take its course. Some days we actually think we're winning.

Silly us.

This is not David and Goliath, with the little guy getting a chance at saving the day through luck and pluck. Not anymore. This is Goliath stomping David into the ground. There's David, bleeding and broken--but look! He's still breathing! David's crowd takes that as a sign of victory and moves on. The next time they'll try peashooters.

In the 21st century--a century only slightly over a decade old and already the leading contender for "modern century most likely to return to the Dark Ages"--we the people are millions of little Davids and Big Business is one huge Goliath. We wee Davids actually thought if we worked hard and built up our troops and used truth as a weapon, we might some day be able to take Goliath down. We thought we might be able to survive and maybe even thrive without too much breakage or damage to our dignity. We thought we could do it not by might (because we aren't the mighty ones, they are) but by using corny throwbacks like common sense and good will and solidarity.

Boy, were we wrong!

I'll give you one small example of Goliath's power and why we don't stand a chance:

Ever been in a Books-a-Million store? I hadn't either until I came south, and I went in innocently enough, as anyone would. It's a bookstore, after all, and I do love bookstores. But I didn't have to spend much time there before I began to see a trend: I am the kind of person they hate. I am the enemy, fagawdssake! I realize I'm in the south and the south is hostile to avowed liberals, but come on--let me at least get to the humor section before the attacks begin.

This is what I encountered mere feet inside the door the other day:


At Books-a-Million, Myrtle Beach 1/25/12

This is an end cap in the main aisle. The titles change periodically, but the lean to the right never goes away. (I apologize for the poor photos. I took them with my kindergarten grade cell-phone camera, quickly so nobody would notice, because I was, after all, standing in plain view, because that's where these hostile books can best be seen.)

There is another Books-A-Million outside a huge mall a few miles from this smaller mall. They have an all-rightie-all-the-time end cap in their main aisle, too, so this is not just some Bubba manager's idea of fun, it's store policy. (In case you're wondering, I've looked all over for the liberal end caps. They're not there.)

So then it came to me that if I buy something in a BAM! store (that's their nickname), I'm aiding the enemy. So I don't. Now I plan my trips to Books-a-Million as one would a reconnaissance mission, a stealth activity: Let's see what rotten propaganda they're pushing now.

Once I get past that ugly end cap, I spend some minutes rearranging books on the shelves so that the few liberal or even moderate books cover some of that junk. (Pathetic, I know, but it's the best I can do ever since I took that stand against vandalism.)

Then I grab something to read and sit at a table in their Joe Muggs Cafe (My own little sit-in I calls it, since I read their books and magazines and never buy anything, but so far no one seems to notice.) I should mention that BAM! publishes a monthly Book Page magazine highlighting their latest books. Mark R. Levin, a Right Wing radio personality and "the #1 bestselling author of Liberty and Tyranny and regular Fox News contributor" is on January's cover. (Last month it was Glenn Beck). Levin has a new book out called, "Ameritopia, The Unmaking of America". Before I saw that cover, I confess I had never heard of Mark R. Levin. (Go ahead and strip me of my Rotten Persons Investigator badge--I know now that his new book, "Ameritopia" is at the top, the very tip-top, of this week's New York Times non-fiction bestseller list! )

So I took a look at the new book by this guy who--my god! NYT Best Seller!--I really should have heard of by now. I turned page after page and, okay, as a new Mark R. Levin reader who is also a liberal, I'm as biased as biased can be. But even I am shocked at how badly this book stinks!

Let me tell you, he's no Glenn Beck.

From the Introduction:

In Ameritopia I explain that the heart of the problem is, in fact, utopianism, a term I discuss in great detail throughout the book. Utopianism is the idealogical and doctrinal foundation for statism. While utopianism or statism or utopian or statist are often used interchangeably, the undertaking here is to probe more dceply into what motivates and animates the tyranny of statism. Indeed the modern arguments about necessities and virtues of governmental control over the individual are but malign echoes of utopian prescriptions through the ages, which attempted to define subjugation as the most transcendent state of man.

And the first lines of the first chapter, "The Tyranny of Utopia":

Tyranny, broadly defined, is the use of power to dehumanize the individual and delegitimize his nature. Political utopianism is tyranny disguised as a desirable, workable and even paradisiacal governing ideology. There are, of course, unlimited utopian constructs, for the mind is capable of infinite fantasies. But there are common themes. The fantasies take the form of grand social plans or experiments, the impracticality and impossibility of which, in small ways and large, leads to the individual's subjugation.

And it goes on. This book, I remind you, is NUMBER ONE ON THE NEW YORK TIMES NON-FICTION BEST SELLER LIST. The book came out on January 17--less than two weeks ago--and already over 1200 people have reviewed it on Amazon, 876 of them giving it Five Stars.

It's a runaway best seller and from where I'm sitting (In BAM!s Joe Muggs cafe) I'm concluding that something besides this book is stinking to high heaven.

Consider this:

After the closing of Borders Books in 2011, Books-a-Million became the second largest bookseller in the United States, behind Barnes and Noble. They operate some 200 stores in the south, the northeast and in the midwest. They've now taken over dozens of empty Borders stores and opened Books-A-Millions in their space.

And they sell millions of books on their website. If you go on their site and click on the "Political Science" category, as I did yesterday, on the very first page you'll find a mess of right wing and conservative books, from the current to the moldy old. Glenn Beck is prominent, as is that guy, Mark R. Levin. Laura Ingraham is there; so is Sarah Palin. So is Bill O'Reilly, not for his most recent book about Lincoln, but for his memoir, published way back in 2008.

Bill Clinton and Zbigniew Brzezinski are there, too, but from what I can tell, they're mere tokens. (Unless maybe they said something bad about Obama. . .) But I have to wonder why old books by the Righties, some more than three years old, are at the top of their list when so many other, newer books might better deserve to be there.

Mark R. Levin's "Ameritopia" is his second book for Threshold Publishing, a Simon and Schuster imprint that exclusively publishes "conservative" books, many of which rise to the top of the NYT best seller list. Levin's book, "Liberty and Tyranny" (There's that word again) also hit the top of the NYT bestseller list, and now he, along with Glenn Beck, is Threshold's star. Mary Matalin is its Editor-in-Chief. (I looked hard for a liberal arm of Simon and Schuster (a CBS company), or any other publishing company, and--no surprise--there are none.)

In a telling article about Threshold in Politico, July 21, 2009, it's clear that any liberal expecting to write a best-seller might better stick to fiction:

Adam Bellow, executive editor at HarperCollins, noted that conservative publishing first took off in the 1990s, with the New York houses initially resistant — until the possible payoff became obvious for books taking shots at liberals. (Bellow edited Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism” for Doubleday.) Now, going forward, he notes there are challenges ahead for upstart imprints like Threshold.

“If you’re setting up an imprint, you’re taking on a real financial challenge,” Bellow said. “You have to have screaming commercial best-sellers. You have to keep delivering them year after year. The success at Threshold, which took a while to find its legs, has been largely to do with Glenn Beck and Mark Levin. And the success of those books is that these authors have enormous media platforms.”

Bellow, who’s editing Sarah Palin’s much-anticipated memoir, said he expects that at least through Obama’s presidency, publishing houses will stay committed to churning out conservative books for at least one reason sure to keep publishing executives — whether right, left or in between — pleased. “Feeding that market will continue, because it’s going to be profitable,” he said.

So here's what I'm thinking: What's to stop BAM! from manipulating the market? (They also own a book distribution company.) What's to stop Threshold? What's to stop any of the Right Wing top guns--the Koch Brothers, say-- the people with all the money? What's to stop them from buying up tens or even hundreds of thousands of these books and sitting on them? (It's been done on a smaller scale. Remember the fuss about Newt Gingrich during the congressional hearings just before they gave him a big, fat noogie? Seems he got some Big Guys to put up $150,000 to promote and/or buy up his book, Window of Opportunity to make it look like people were actually reading it.) And what's to stop 800+ stooges from churning out magnificent reviews for a book that nobody in their right mind would actually read through to the end?

Does anybody really believe that the average reader is clamoring for more of the same from Mark R. Levin? (That same Mark R. Levin who gushes his thanks to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity in his Ameritopia acknowledgements?) Unless you're hopelessly in love with the words "utopianism", "statism" and "tyranny", there's nothing juicy in there, no matter how hard you look. It's one dry, endless paragraph after another.

Just as radio and TV stations can promote their own and manipulate their viewership into believing that their way is the way it is, the way it should be, and ever will be, so can book stores, simply by advertising and placement. But this appears to be beyond simply leading a horse to water. I'm guessing somebody is buying up and pushing those books, and I'm guessing it ain't the general public.

But to be fair, in that same BAM! store I managed to find a slim volume called "What it means to be a Democrat", written by George McGovern and published this past November by Blue Rider Press, a new imprint from Penguin.

Sen. McGovern's book was one of first on Blue Rider's list to make it to the bookstores. It's a tribute to publisher David Rosenthal (fired by Simon and Schuster after 13 years), who chose a book so important in its own way, but with virtually no chance at bestsellerdom. That little book, so honest and true, so meaningful to those of us who work to make the Senator proud by living by his ideals, will never reach the top of the NYT best-seller list. And what a crying shame that is.

Above all, being a Democrat means having compassion for others. It means putting government to work to help the people who need it.

It means using all available tools to provide good health care and education, job opportunities, safe neighborhoods, a healthy environment, a promising future.

It means standing up for people who have been kept down, whether they are native Americans or African Americans, women, immigrants, or the homeless.

It means taking care of the mentally ill, of seniors, of vulnerable children, of veterans--and making sure all people are treated with respect and dignity.

Introduction to "What it Means to be a Democrat" by George McGovern.

(If you want to join me in purchasing Sen. McGovern's book, I've made it easy for you. You can click on the Amazon link on my website sidebar. It's at the very top of my list. I thank you and I know George thanks you, too.)

(Cross-posted at dagblog, where there are comments aplenty)

FRIDAY FOLLIES: From Orly Taitz to Gabby Giffords: From the Ridiculous to the Sublime

2012-01-27T10:44:00.002-05:00

When the whole SOPA/PIPA blackout was going on, most of us, like the sheeple we are, just grabbed something someone else did and closed up shop, but The Oatmeal, like the creative peeple they are, got creative. You can see it here.

Carlsberg Beer, like the creative peeple they are, (I didn't know that about Carlsberg, did you?) pulled a stunt involving tattooed bikers in a movie theater. You can watch it here.

I'm always looking for writing gigs (paid writing gigs--hint-hint) but this isn't exactly what I had in mind:

Magazine Editor, Yorkshire - WEC International
Submitted: 10/01/12 ; Closing Date: Open
Editorial of WEC magazine (Worldwide) and other publications. Involves planning, commissioning and editing articles, within Media and Communications team.
A part-time role, perhaps from home, or at Leeds centre with other editorial/journalistic tasks (compare: Journalist/Press Officer vacancy).
Skills required: planning, organisation and gifted with words. An English qualification preferred.
This post is unsalaried as all WEC workers trust God to meet their personal needs.
www.wec-int.org.uk/magazine

There's a state senator in Oklahoma I think Newt Gingrich might like to meet. Newt may think he's the king of zany ideas, but this guy Ralph Shortey could just give him a run for the money:

Oklahoma GOP State Senator Ralph Shortey is on a mission to finally put an end to his state’s allegedly rampant cannibalism problem. Alarmed after his own research, which consisted of reading a nameless report stating that companies have used stem cells in the production of food, Shortey introduced a bill that would prohibit the manufacturing and sale of food “which contains aborted human fetuses.”
Shortey explained his reasoning to local radio station News Talk Radio KRMG in Tulsa:
There is a potential that there are companies that are using aborted human babies in their research and development of basically enhancing flavor for artificial flavors.
Shortey was unable to provide any specific examples of the problem he’s trying to curb, and admits that it’s possible there aren’t any human fetuses in Oklahoma’s food.

I don't know what's in the water in Newt's Georgia, but a judge there ordered Barack Obama to court to defend himself against more birther allegations. He didn't show and neither did his lawyers, but guess who did? Right! Orly Taitz!

On Thursday, lawyers raised two arguments for why Obama should not be on the ballot. One contended an 1875 Supreme Court opinion says only a “natural born citizen” -- someone born in the U.S. and whose parents were U.S. citizens -- can be president. (Obama’s father, who was from Kenya, was not a U.S. citizen.) The other alleged Obama’s birth, social security and passport records are forgeries.

California lawyer Orly Taitz, a leading proponent of challenges to Obama’s candidacy, made the latter argument. She turned and faced the gallery -- and the TV cameras -- during her opening statement, prompting Malihi to tell her: “Counsel, please address the court.”

During closing arguments, as Taitz began referring to documents that were not in evidence, Malihi pointedly asked, “Counsel, are you testifying?”

Taitz abruptly halted her arguments, took the witness stand and began testifying. Malihi soon cut her off.

Those Moments Sublime:

Free Press photo

Jim Fitzgerald, one of Detroit's best and favorite columnists ever, died on January 11. He was the writer I most emulated and tried so hard to imitate when I was writing columns in Detroit area papers in the 1980s. What a foolish nut I was! But I blame Jim for what I did. He made it look so easy breezy.

Elmore Leonard wrote in an introduction to Jim's book, "If it Fitz":

"The thing that amazes me about Jim Fitzgerald's columns is they can veer off in unexpected directions, appear to be topic-hopping, observe llamas and Lee Iacocca in the same piece, but always manage to get back in time to arrive at a perfectly logical conclusion. Within this sometimes astonishing structure is an essay composed of clear, expository sentences."

Yes, all of that, but he could be screamingly funny, too. He was quite a guy. I hope he knew that.

I found an interview where Jim talked about his writing and how he does it. The interview took place in 1987, when I was writing in Detroit, but I've never seen it before. I don't know why it surprises me, considering how dutifully I studied his style, but my working methods are very similar to his. Sort of here and there and everywhere until it all comes together.
Now if I only had his talent. . .

This was the week when Gabrielle Giffords stepped down from her place in the House. This is what a politician who loves her country more than herself looks like:

And this is how the house expressed to her how we all feel about her:

___________________________________________

Cartoon of the week:

Bruce Plante - Tulsa World

Out with the Good and In with the Bad: It's Just So Yesterday.

2012-01-25T17:25:00.001-05:00

Here it is nearing the end of January and at long last, after 17 Republican debates--count 'em, 17!--we're down to two actual contenders and a couple of valiant bench-warmers. While Ron Paul and Rick Santorum work hard to make some headway, it looks like it's Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, neck and neck, fighting it out for a chance to clobber the current White House occupant and show this country what a real president looks like.

Brian Blanco/European Press Photo Agency

Mitt the Peacemaker, the soft-spoken everyotherman, knows going in hell never be able to out-mean Newt. Newt the Hysterian has perfected condescending bulldoggedness until it's a veritable political art form. Nobody does it better. His opponents drool at the scope of his talents, awestruck by his ability to use those tools to sidestep any attempt at a messy question. Bad Newt! Bad Newt! And (sigh. . .) the crowds love him.

Mitt Poor Mitt stammers, stutters, fast-talks until he's blue in the face, ripping into Newt with all he's got, and nobody cares. So the decision has been made: No more Mr. Nice Guy! He goes for the jugular in the Tampa debate but barely strikes a nerve. It's anybody's guess where he'll need to go from here. It won't be pretty--a thought that goes against gentle Mitt's Bain--um, grain, but it's not as if he hasn't had to take people out before.

So there goes Good, off to fend for itself while the candidates get their Bad mojo going so they can become crowd-pleasers, too. Rick Santorum tried it the other day when a woman in his audience went off on President Obama's legitimacy. She wouldn't call him "President" because he shouldn't be there. “He is an avowed Muslim," she said, "and my question is, why isn't something being done to get him out of our government?”

Santorum could have done what candidate John McCain rightly if reluctantly did in 2008 when a woman in his audience repeated that same "Obama is a muslim" mantra. To McCain's everlasting credit, he stopped the woman dead, saying, "No ma'am, that's not true." But Santorum side-stepped it, feeding the woman's fears with, “Believe me … I’m doing everything I can to get him out of the government.”

When the press called him on it later, he Gingriched it, huffing and bluffing, “It’s not my responsibility as a candidate to correct everybody who makes a statement that I disagree with. There are lots of people who get up and say stuff in a town hall meeting and say things that I don’t agree with, but I don’t think it’s my obligation, nor should it be your feeling that it’s my obligation to correct somebody who says something that I don’t agree with.” (And he's appalled that they would even suggest such a thing. Appalled! Wait--frankly appalled!)

Ron Paul says the housing mess is "all government manufactured. The best thing you can do is get out of the way." This from a man who wants to be president. Of the United States. Because the last thing we need is some huge honcho giving us advice. Or telling us what to do. So if you elect him, rest assured that he will not do his job.

But then, not 24 hours after that last debate in Tampa, Barack Obama gives his State of the Union address. It's an elegant, impassioned plea for fairness, a love song to the people, a nudge back to sanity. It's more than a promise to get things done, it's an outline of how it will happen. The scorched earth is greening up. Hope is on the horizon. And Gabby Gifford's smile lights up the universe.

AP photo/Saul Loeb

Krauthammer concedes that "Obama has set the right tone." Daniels rebuts with faint praise. The Twitterverse goes wild! Good is off the mat and on its feet, ready for another round.

And Four Horsemen can be seen riding off, their banshee howls echoing, then fading, then gone.

It's Our Anniversary, Barack's and Mine. I Hope it's not our Last

2012-01-20T12:08:00.002-05:00

January 20, 2012. Today marks the beginning of Barack Obama's fourth year as president. Three years ago today he stood out in the cold and said, "Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and begin again the work of remaking America." He promised "an open government" and "a new beginning." I've been around for many televised inaugurations, starting with JFK's when I was but a mere child/adult and, for me, this one equaled or might have even surpassed that one for good, old-fashioned stirring moments.

In most circles this has probably gone unnoticed, but today is my anniversary, too. Three years ago, on this exact day, because Barack Obama stirred my soul and gave me hope, I began writing this blog. I didn't even think about actually doing it until around mid-morning, when it suddenly came to me that this was one of those portentous days that I shouldn't let go by unnoticed.

I was heady with joy but understandably reluctant to go whole hog predicting the end to all our troubles. We were not anointing a savior, even though eight years of hell seemed finally to be at an end. I was trying to remain calm; trying to keep in mind all of the promises made by politicians over the years that had never been kept, either because there had never been any intention or because they didn't know what the hell they were getting themselves into.

I started it this way:

Today is January 20, 2009. Inauguration day for Barack Obama, and it can't have come soon enough. It's true that he's been de facto president since November, 2008, when George W. Bush unofficially, without fanfare or hesitation, turned the job over to him, but today it became official. What a day it's been! They're estimating the crowds at 2 million strong, a sight unseen on any Presidential First Day in modern history.

And ended it like this:

I have no grand illusions about a rapid return to health for this country, just as I have no illusions about the impact my words will make in the overall scheme of things. I'll admit that I'm overwhelmed right now with the events of the day. I'm feeling more than a little inarticulate and possibly even shy about expressing how it feels to have our country back. It may not be the best day to start a blog after all. But start it I have, and now I'll give this day over to the Inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama, America's new president. The bands are playing, the sun is setting and all's right with the world. For now.

On January 20, 2010, in the blog marking our mutual first anniversary, I wrote this about last year's blog:

Oh, the joy in my heart as I wrote those words. Take THAT, you lousy, bloated, insufferable faux-Capitalists. The Sheriff's saddling up and the posse's not far behind. We're off to save the ranches! Widows and orphans, help is on the way!

But lest you think I was totally naive, I also wrote: 'I have no grand illusions about a rapid return to health for this country.' No, I had no grand illusions, but I did have dreams...[Ed: About the repetition of those words "grand illusions": I didn't even notice until now that I had repeated them in two blogs a year apart. I must have seriously meant it.]

...I keep reminding myself that the Good Man took on what amounted to a national nightmare. There were no easy fixes, and nobody pretended there would be. But I would have slept better this past year if only I had been able to see the president as a 'people person'. Was he ever that? I don't know. We might have made him into our own images, taking much needed comfort in an illusion of our own making. Maybe he is what he is. But what is he? After a full year of hosting him in The People's House we're no closer to knowing where he stands, or, more importantly, where he's going.

Last year, on January 20, 2011, I wrote this:

I knew this anniversary day was coming and that I would want to write about it, but what would I say as I stood beside Obama saying farewell to Year Two, heading into Year Three? That all of my wishes came true? That all of my fears were justified? That nothing much has changed? That I now know what kind of man my president is?

I can't say any of those things. I am at times proud of my president, disappointed in him, enraged by his actions or inaction, fearful of the direction he is taking us.

I'm impatient and feeling increasingly impotent as I'm forced to watch more and more jobless citizens give up, more and more home-owners become homeless, more and more of the sick and dying having to give over their lives to insurance company paper-pushers. I want the wars to end. I want the corporate giants to finally understand the consequences and do something about their destructive practices. I want the GOP and certain members of the Democratic Party to fulfill their obligations to the citizenry--the entire citizenry--in a time of unparalleled crisis, and act like a responsible governing body. I want our president to be a leader of the people.

Are you sensing a trend here? Are you thinking that my enthusiasm is taking a downhill slide and that this year should be the one where I finally admit I was wrong about the whole thing? Well, think again. After watching the clown shows passing for the GOP debates over the past few months, I'm more determined than ever to help make this current president the next president of the United States.

My God, did you see that mess last night? Have you been watching the remaining Four Horsemen in action? Is there a serious contender among them? Would you really, sincerely want any one of them leading this country? (If you can answer "yes" with a light heart and a straight face, I think you're in the wrong place. I would point you to the right place, but I don't think there is one.)

I'm still disappointed. I'm still impatient. The slow pace of change is maddening. But there is no denying there is change in the air, either because of President Obama, in spite of him, or because of forces having nothing to do with him--take your pick--and I'm hanging in there for the long haul. Finally, the people are awakening. Our people. We're on the move and we're not turning back.

I'm with my party and my president and if I have to slap them upside the head once in a while to get their attention, there's a far better chance at success with them than with that other bunch. (You know that bunch is trouble when the moderates in their party are ostracized and/or banished for thinking even slightly good thoughts; when the ones that remain feel the need to make it clear they're only going after the job as leader of this fair land to make it easier for the marauders to take over completely.)

So that's where I am on this, our third anniversary. Sure, I was hoping the honeymoon would never end and the gifts would keep on coming, but there it is. Reality strikes. It hasn't been all roses, but it hasn't been all thorns, either. Progress has been made. I'm looking forward to the year ahead, and I'm going to work hard to get Barack Obama re-elected.

That's where I'm headed. Just so you know.
__________________

In other news: FactCheck looks at the truthiness of the GOP debate last night. It's here.

And I found this on their sidebar:

Q: Does Obama plan to deny emergency brain surgery for patients over 70?
A: No. A man claiming on a radio talk show to be a brain surgeon lied about that, and about a meeting of two associations of neurological surgeons, those associations say.

See what we're up against?

(Note: Friday Follies will return next week.)

Georgetown

2012-01-17T12:44:00.006-05:00

Boston-based Bain Capital LLC more than doubled its money on GS Industries Inc. – the former parent company of Georgetown Steel – under Mitt Romney’s leadership in the 1990s, even as the steel manufacturer went on to cut more than 1,750 jobs, shuttered a division that had been around for 100 years and eventually sank into bankruptcy.
Bain Capital spent $24.5 million to acquire GS Industries in 1993, according to an investment prospectus for the company that was obtained by the Los Angeles Times and reviewed by The Sun News. By the end of that decade, Bain Capital estimated its partners had made $58.4 million off its investment in GS Industries, according to the prospectus.
Bain Capital’s partners also earned multi-million dollar dividends from GS Industries and annual management fees of about $900,000. But by the time GS Industries filed for bankruptcy protection in 2001, it owed $553.9 million in debts against assets valued at $395.2 million.
(David Wren, Myrtle Beach Sun News, 1/14/12)

Read more here: http://www.myrtlebeachonline.com/2012/01/13/2599863/romneys-bain-capital-made-millions.html#storylink=cpy

Georgetown, South Carolina is a mill town; one of the few left in the United States where goods are actually produced and not just assembled. It is the home of International Paper and ArcelorMittal Steel, and the sounds and smells generating from the sites are an actual comfort, not just to the townspeople but to anyone who detests the thought of factory shutdowns and an idle workforce.

Harbor - Georgetown, SC

At first glance, Georgetown looks like almost any other town across the country--a main drag dotted with fast foods and box stores and gas stations, neighborhoods rich and poor and somewhere in between (The happy surprise in Georgetown, if you venture off the highway, is its carefully preserved historic district and beautiful harbor)--but since Mitt Romney's run for the presidency and the revelations of the destructive, worker-eating practices of Bain Capital, the company he once headed, you might see Georgetown in a different light. You might see it as yet another poster child showing the effects of bullying outside influences with voracious appetites fed largely by avarice and greed.

ArcelorMittal Steel Mill, Georgetown, SC

The Georgetown steel mill, it turns out, was one of Bain Capital's many victims. Who knew? Not middle managers. Not the union leaders. Not the laid-off workers. Not even, apparently, anyone who reported the stories of bankruptcies and shutdowns throughout the years, essentially blaming the problems on the Chinese and the tumult of the times.

During the upheaval of American labor over the past few decades, Georgetown's mill took several direct hits. China was, in fact, producing cheaper (albeit lower quality) steel. Jobs were, in fact, being sent by ruthless Americans to cheaper markets overseas. Domestic car sales had declined and so had the need for the particular steel products coming out of Georgetown. No one saw the need to dig further to find a deeper, underlying reason for the failures. On the surface, there were plenty.

This isn't the first time the press has descended on Georgetown. I went to the union headquarters yesterday and met with the Steelworkers local president, James Sanderson. (Who told me just minutes into our introduction, "I'm going to be on Ed Schultz tonight!" And he was. Good going, James!)

Sanderson said when the Democrats came to nearby Myrtle Beach for a debate in 2008, the candidates got wind of a shutdown at the mill. They all rushed to Georgetown so they could each stand in front of the forlorn, shuttered factory and make promises to the hundreds of unemployed potential voters there was never a chance in hell they would be able to keep.

Nobody knew then what role Bain Capital had played in the inevitable failure of Georgetown Steel. They bought it and gutted it and profited from their own piracy and nobody knew it had even happened that way until Mitt Romney decided to run for president and the digging began.

As David Wren reports in the Sun-News article:

Less than a year after taking a controlling interest in the Georgetown plant, Bain Capital cut the employees’ profit-sharing plan twice – lowering the plan’s hourly rate from $5.60 an hour to $1.25 per hour. Most of the workers didn’t learn about the cuts until they received their paychecks. The profit-sharing checks eventually disappeared altogether.

Sanderson, in a September 2000 report in The Sun News, called Bain Capital anti-labor and said “they’ve forced a labor dispute at every location” during contract negotiations. Sanderson agrees that China’s cheap steel imports on the American marketplace hurt the Georgetown mill’s production and profitability.

“But if they [Bain Capital] had only invested in the mill instead of taking everything from it, we would have been able to sustain that [dumping] like we had in the past,” he said.

John Ethridge, a retired Georgetown Steel worker, said Bain Capital “treated us like dirt.”

“They brought a bunch of people in here who thought they knew how to do our job, but they had no idea what they were doing,” Ethridge said, adding that needed equipment and plant upgrades were often delayed or ignored.

Ethridge, who worked at the Georgetown mill for 35 years, said Bain Capital was more interested in how much money it could take from the plant rather than investing anything into it.

By the time GS Industries filed for bankruptcy protection, the number of employees worldwide had been cut by more than half.

Read more here: http://www.myrtlebeachonline.com/2012/01/13/2599863/romneys-bain-capital-made-millions.html#storylink=cpy

After decades of uncertainty, of lay-offs and down-sizing, of bankruptcies and shut-downs, of revolving-door ownerships, the American company formerly known as Georgetown Steel , now the foreign owned ArcelorMittal, is up and running again. On a smaller scale, but running nonetheless.

ArcelorMittal scrapyard - Georgetown

The union is still in place and James Sanderson is still union president. Their four-year contract, equitable by any labor standards, is up in September. It's anybody's guess about where they'll be heading, in light of the stepped-up efforts by South Carolina's Governor Nikki Haley to make sure South Carolina remains a Right-to-Work state. (Precipitated by the actions of the National Labor Relations Board when it went after Washington state-based Boeing for moving one of their units to South Carolina, allegedly to get out from under unions. The action was dropped in December, but I'm guessing Gov. Haley isn't going to forget it.)

In South Carolina the sun shines bright on Romney and Bain Capital these days and I know at least a few people who are basking in it, trying to make the most of it (James Sanderson, for one; his boss Leo Gerard for another, his activist son Jamie for another; and me). But from afar comes Robert Reich, also speaking on The Ed Show, not about Georgetown but about the troubles at Steel Dynamics, an Indiana steel mill taken over and victimized by Bain Capital.

He explains in pure Reich-style what Bain Capitalism really is:

Bain Capitalism is not product capitalism, it's financial capitalism. It's moving money. It's getting as much money from the public sector as possible.

Financial capitalism is not real capitalism. It doesn't create new jobs, it doesn't put people to work, it actually ends up reducing the number of jobs. it displaces people, it puts risks on average working people, it lowers wages. Financial capitalism is what we've had in this country for the last two or three decades and it's all centered on Wall Street. It's not about making good jobs with good wages and making things.

Last night during the Republican debate in Myrtle Beach, Gov. Nikki Haley was seen smiling and nodding vigorously when Rick Perry jawed on about "South Carolina's war with the federal government", as if it was 1865 all over again. How does Rick the Wretched think we got to this place? Wasn't he the one who coined the term, "vulture capitalism"? Can you run for president or governor without understanding the necessary symbiosis between the Fed and the states in order to combat and destroy the Bains of the world and save your cities, your states, your country?

Well, yes, you can run but should you win? In a sane world, you shouldn't. In a sane world you couldn't. (Quick reminder: Mitt Romney, the founder of Bain Capital, is about to be anointed top nominee for president by the Republicans.) That's our national nightmare these days, that total disregard by our leaders of a pervasive evil forced on us via the private sector despite absolute, indisputable proof that Bain Capital is just one among hundreds of companies whose only reason for existing is to destroy the fabric of America for profit . That malignant neglect is the reason the fight goes on and the bad guys keep getting away.

In a free market economy as defined by this new bunch of "patriots", the only bad guys are the good guys. Apparently that's us and we're toast.

Shack and water tower in the shadow of the mill - Georgetown, SC

FRIDAY FOLLIES: Books on the move, Fallon's Bowie moment, and the return of Aslan

2012-01-13T12:10:00.006-05:00

Yes, it's FRIDAY FOLLIES! I know, it's been a while, and I keep getting requests to bring it back so here it is. (Two requests so far, one of them a relative, but still. . .) I have no explanation for why I've neglected it for so long. I could say I just wasn't feeling it but that's so unprofessional. My only regret is that I let so many good FF candidates slip by over the weeks. But remember, it doesn't have to be Friday for things to get really oddball. Check out my blog on the lesser-known candidate's debate in New Hampshire last week. It's Here. That one's good for at least three or four FFs.

But today is Friday the 13th and I just felt I had to participate. From Wikipedia: "The fear of Friday the 13th is called friggatriskaidekaphobia (Frigga being the name of the Norse goddess for whom "Friday" is named and triskaidekaphobia meaning fear of the number thirteen)." It's that kind of day but it's really not as bad as you think. On MSNBC this morning someone from CNBC actually looked up how many times the stock market closed higher on all of the Friday the 13ths since the stock market opened its doors and it turns out that it closed higher 56.7% of the time! (What a relief, huh?)

But closer to home, it's just eerie that yesterday (the day before Friday the 13th) I discovered that the building I was in had no 13th floor. It was unnerving, to say the least. I don't enter tall buildings very often anymore so I was shocked that I was that surprised, if even for a moment. Of course! I should have remembered that every self-respecting building in the world pretends the floor above the 12th is the 14th floor, cunningly avoiding the prospect of zombies lurking in the hallway preparing to murder any person foolish enough to agree to take a room on that frigging floor.

On things politic, this little video from Our Peeps is pretty clever (The acting stinks, but I imagine they'll be working on that.):

Well, it's cute all right, but I'm not sure it's the best way to get the message out. As hard as this is to hear, we might want to take lessons from the. . .the. . .the Chinese. Yesterday, when an anxious Beijing crowd heard that their local Apple store wasn't going to be selling the new iPhone 4S as promised, they attacked the store with raw eggs, causing a riot and a dispatch from Reuters, and now you're reading it here. That's how "viral" works.

Read the rest of the story here

Or you could dress up like David Bowie, I suppose, and do a pretty good imitation while skewering a certain football star who must really be feeling like a certain martyr by now:

Those moments sublime: There is a bookstore in Toronto called "Type". It's one of those great independent bookstores that make you long for the old days when bookstores were cozy and the owners really liked having you there and if you didn't buy anything, that was okay, but if you did you had a good feeling knowing you were helping those lovely people keep the doors open.

When I first saw the video gone viral called "The Joy of Books", a magical Fantasia-like happening in their store, I worried about the owners. As great as that store looks, I wondered how it was that they had so much time on their hands they could do what they did here. (Because time on your hands is what it would take to pull off this amazing video.) But it turns out it was a project by local art director Sean Ohlenkamp, who had done this same thing on a much smaller scale with his own bookshelves at home. Here's the backstory, if you want to know how it was done. And here is Type's brilliant webpage, where you can watch it again in more comfortable surroundings.

(Confession: I got a Kindle for Christmas and I love it for what it is. What it isn't is a real live book. I'm not at home so I can't tell my books how much I love them, but if they should happen to get wind of the new addition (not anything like an edition), I want to assure them they will always come first in my heart.)

Those moments sublime #2:

In this remarkable video a little girl stares down a lion at New Zealand's Wellington Zoo. In the comments there were those of course who were outraged that a parent would keep on filming when their child is obviously being threatened by a giant lion, but others (like me) saw it differently:

Dee in New Zealand wrote: "What an annoying life, kids knocking on your windows and people staring into your lounge."

But BB in Hampshire totally got it: "Doesn't she know the story? its Aslan needing help in Narnia again."

Cartoon of the Week:

Rick McKee - The Augusta Chronicle

Another First for the Great State of New Hampshire: The Great Debate of the Lesser-Knowns

2012-01-08T16:07:00.002-05:00

Yesterday morning, after watching "Up with Chris Hayes" (My never-miss-if-I-can-help-it, hands-down favorite political show on TV maybe ever -- except for "The West Wing" and Rachel Maddow), I was aimlessly flipping channels, looking for something equally smart and fun (as IF!) when I got to what I thought should be C-Span but realized it couldn't be because I thought I saw a wizard.

But I did! I did see a wizard! This particular wizard (on C-Span) looked like a bearded Harry Shearer and talked suspiciously like Harry Shearer would talk if he were playing a bearded wizard pretending he was running for president in the foremost state of New Hampshire.

This wizard was wearing a wide-shouldered mustard-colored, oddly flecked jacket and a very very very tall black wizard's hat with what looked like a boot sticking out of the top of it. He was seated on a dais along with five other white guys who claimed to be Democrats and who all had managed to get their names on the primary ballot in that all-important-if-you-want-to-be-president state of New Hampshire.

(NOTE: It doesn't take much to file for POTUS candidacy in the Granite state. You have to be 35 years old and have lived in the U.S for 14 years. You have to be able to put up a $1,000 fee, unless you're indigent and can prove it, in which case the fee is waived. And you have to be able to convince two other people to serve as your delegate and alternate at the convention.)

This wizard's name is Vermin Supreme and let me tell you, he's no Harry Potter. Not unless you think Randall Terry is Voldemort and he deserved what he got at the end of this vital forum, so important for all those white guys, Republicans and Democrats alike, who can't get on the debate stage with the Big White Guys in order to tell the country why they should be president. Of the United States.

But I'll get to that.

So. What I had caught on C-Span three days before Tuesday's first primary election in the entire country was the last few minutes of a re-broadcast of a two-hour program called "Lesser-Known Candidates in New Hampshire Presidential Primaries". There are 44 candidates for president on the 2012 ballot in the crucial state of New Hampshire and in order to be fair to all of them, 32 of the least known (those who were not a part of a national debate) were invited to hold forth in the auditorium of the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at St. Anselm College in Manchester on December 19, 2011.

The Republicans held the first hour and the Democrats the second. (A smart move on the part of the planners who no doubt remembered Vermin Supreme from when he ran before, in 2008, in the exquisitely positioned state of New Hampshire. Who wouldn't want to make sure he was the last thing anyone would see before the cameras turned off, hoping against hope that everyone will have left by then, anyway?)

There were 10 Republican presidential candidates on the stage, pristine in their whitebreadness and raring to go. The first, Bear Betzler, started things off by announcing that he's "not that into politics", but he did believe that the most important thing this country needs to do -- the very most important thing -- is balance the budget.

Timothy Brewer is running on the "Afterlife is possible, everyone lives forever, you can't be destroyed" platform. Mr. Brewer announced that something big is going to happen on December 21, 2012 and if you elect him president he'll be in a position to fix it.

Dr. Hugh Cort is a famous counter-terrorism researcher and his message to the people is that Iran is planning a nuclear attack in the near future--16 months or less--and if you want to know more about it you can Google "Hugh Cort American Hiroshima". The end.

Randy Crow posted over 600 articles on his website before he himself brought it down. . .
. . .planes were flown into the World Trade Center by remote-control bombs. . . something, something.

John Davis told the audience that a couple of years ago God spoke to his heart to run for president. He (John) wanted to do something nobody had ever done before so he decided to visit every county in the United States. So far he has visit 1712 of them and the message he's getting from the people he's been speaking to is that people aren't happy. He's "pro-God, pro-family and country, pro-second amendment, pro-doing the right thing." Oh, and "We can't have God's blessing when we kill a million babies and take prayer out of schools."

Christopher Hill was next and talk about a duck out of water! He's working for "people in the middle class that are watching it disappear and homeless people that need our help." In a broken voice he said, "We're called the lesser-known candidates. Well, tonight we stand for the lesser-known Americans", and my heart went out to him. Someone needs to tell this good man that if he wants to be president and a Republican both, he's going to have to stifle that kind of talk.

Jeff Lawman (aptly named, as he will tell you) says he follows the "traditional Republican platform" which, to him, means "the role of the capable is to assist the needy." He's running a zero-dollar grass roots campaign. (Oh, Jeff. Jeff, Jeff, Jeff. See last sentence in above paragraph.)

Benjamin Linn: "The reason why I'm running is because America is in a big mess right now." He's pro-life and pro-family and pro-marriage between a man and a woman because "marriage between a man and a man or a woman and a woman is not normal."

Michael Meehan: "I am not a politician, I'm a real estate broker and there's no work so, uh, let's go into politics, right?" He's been traveling the country and what he's finding is that "yes, people are scared but I'll let you in on a little secret. People are nervous." He asks questions, and, "They don't answer me stupid. They think about it before they say it."

And then there's Joe Story: "The 10 Commandments served as the basis of our common law when America was born as a nation. Christian principals defined our existence. The supreme court affirmed that we're a Christian nation with liberty of conscience to all man, yet today America is in trouble. We've failed to hold our elected officials accountable and we've become spoiled by the benefits that a government with unlimited funds have provided to us. We have to take control and pray."

And that, wrong-headed as it may have been, was the closest anyone on the stage came to remembering why they were on the ballot in the Number One State of New Hampshire.

So then came the second hour and it was the Democrats' turn.

Ed Cowan (edcowan2012.com) is a writer-thinker who has been published on three continents. Go to his website to see what he stands for.

Bob Greene: "I have a Ph.D in Physics. I have some very good news for you. I'm here to tell you about thorium, an overlooked energy alternative. A lifetime supply for a single person is about the size of a golf ball. Go to greeneforoffice.org to learn all about it."

John Haywood, Durham, NC, is for replacing for-profit health care with a public plan modeled on the British health care system. Their system is run on about 42% of our cost and what we would be looking at is a savings of over a trillion dollars a year. John is totally sincere, and I'm with John, of course. Really nice meeting you, John. John??

Edward O'Donnell followed John and I was finally beginning to think there was something real going on here. Ed said, "We need love, kindness, tolerance, friendliness, forgiveness, second chances, and old-fashioned kindness." Ed is so passionate about this he says no guns, ever, anywhere. Not even for hunting. And while we're at it, how about a non-violent foreign policy? That was sweet and so refreshing. So long, Ed.

So now we come to Vermin Supreme, the bearded guy with that impossible wizard's hat. His opening statement started like this: "Gingivitis has been eroding the gum line of this great nation long enough and must be stopped. For too long this country has been suffering a moral and oral decay in spirit and incisors. Our country's future depends on its ability to bite back. We can no longer be a nation indentured. Our very salivation is at stake. Together we must brace ourselves as we cross over the bridgework to the 23rd century." (For full Vermin coverage, see video here.)

Vermin happened to be seated next to conservative Right Wing "Democrat", Randall Terry, who warmed up the audience even more by saying, "I just want to know what did I do wrong, God, that I have to be on after that!" and then went on to attempt to answer his own question: "Barack Hussein Obama may well go down as the worst president we have ever had. The worst. He is at war with life, liberty and justice. . . (something here about an unelected oligarchy). . .We've come to the insane place as a nation where we have killed over 52 million of our own children by abortion and that blood, like the blood of the slave, is crying out to God for judgment. We will nevverrr restore the greatness of this nation while we are killing our own offspring."

Poor John Wolfe (Chattanooga, TN) came next and I admit I was still dazzled by those other two and didn't pay much attention. I did catch that he believes our policies "are favorable to Wall Street and not to Main Street", and "We need a progressive." Well, yes we do, John, and more power to you for getting it. Too bad about the wizard and the wacko and your placement on the stage. It's the luck of the draw. It's how it goes.

And so it went. Until we came to the Grand Finale, where Vermin the Wizard glitter-bombed Randall Terry after singing a campaign song to the tune of The Chicken Dance, thereby proving once and for all (or until 2016, whichever comes first) just how very important these First-In-The-Nation New Hampshire primaries really are.

(Oh, by the way, I don't want to have to watch that two-hour debate again, so if you happen to watch it in its entirety could you count the times anybody mentioned the word "jobs"? The closest I could come to a count was when the real estate guy said he was out of one.)

It's 2012 and the nuts just keep on coming.

2012-01-01T07:57:00.000-05:00

Good morning and Happy New Year! (The exclamation point is always required after "Happy New Year", if I'm remembering my Strunk and White correctly. Also, "Happy New Years" is incorrect. So is "Happy New Year's.")

I'm writing this from North Carolina this morning, getting ready to be on the road in about an hour, heading for our Snow Bird digs in South Carolina. So before I get into this, let me be clear -- there are a lot of very nice people in the Carolinas. A lot of them -- smart ones, too. But the ratio of normal to nuts seems to be narrower in these parts and after many years of making this journey I tend to prepare myself early for the looniness ahead.   (Remember the Jesus "There's Hell to Pay" billboard? That was near Myrtle Beach. There's a companion billboard somewhere in my picture files. I'll dig it out one of these days.)

So I turned on my laptop this morning and it was as if some grand instructor in the art of insane hilarity (or hilarious insanity) was saying "Ha! Top this if you can down there in the land of cotton!"   Right. Even the Iowa caucuses will seem tame ever after. Here's what stopped everything this morning and made me sit at my laptop for one quick post:

In the 1980s a young Barack Obama -- AKA Barry Soetoro -- was part of a group of students who had been teleported to Mars via something called a "jump room."   He was seen at least twice on Mars, and it's pretty certain that his DARPA appointee, Regina Dugan, was there, too.

So here's Joshua Holland's piece in Alternet, and here's the full story. Enjoy. And remember that it's the dawn of a new year and this is just the beginning. (Maybe you saw this already. I've been traveling and missed a lot, but don't you just love it?)

I really do love starting the new year off like this. It'll go downhill from here, I just know it, but for now it's a hearty hoot and a cup of good cheer.

See you soon.

Merry Christmas. Happy Holidays. (And I mean that sincerely)

2011-12-23T08:20:00.003-05:00

On Christmas Day, 1914, only four months into the brutality of World War I, a spontaneous miracle happened on the Western Front. On that day German and British soldiers laid down their arms and gathered together in No Man's Land to share food and cigarettes, sing Christmas carols, and play a few games of football.

On other battle lines along the front, "Merry Christmas" signs were hastily constructed and held up to cheers from the other side. Without orders and in spite of warnings from their superiors, the soldiers on both sides declared a truce for, at the very least, one magical day. For some, the truce lasted for days into weeks, or until new troops replaced those who had been involved. There are reports that it happened the next year and the year after that and each year on Christmas Day until that terrible war ended.

For generations, Christmas has held that kind of Good Will magic, and no matter who we are or where we are or how we got there, that holiday spirit endures. For a few days out of the year millions of us do our best to take kindness to a whole new level. We wake up with a song in our heart, feeling.good. We want to do things. Not to others but for others. For a precious few days near the end of the year we like people. We really, really like them!

Unless we don't. Unless we're those few "It's Merry Christmas, Dammit!" people and someone nearby has the nerve to either ask for some life-changing help or to say "Happy Holidays!" out loud.

"Happy Holidays!" That simple phrase, known for what seems like forever throughout the world as a perfectly acceptable seasonal salutation (preferable in almost all circles to the truly lifeless "Season's Greetings"), turns out to be a secret code for declaring war on Christmas.

Did you ever in your life think the day would come when "War" and "Christmas" would share space in the same three-word phrase? Neither did I. But it is the notorious 21st Century, and so far it's not a century noted for common decency, let alone common sense.

I'm out of the woods and in the big city now, and I'm happy to report that "Merry Christmas" is everywhere. So far nobody is showing signs of preparing for battle against Christmas. Our December has not suddenly turned gray. Tanks are not on the move anywhere. There are no soldiers in freezing, muddy trenches. The War on Christmas is a lie. So who's making this up? The Scrooges. The Grinches. Those nasty, wasty Grinches who don't have a clue about the true spirit of Christmas. That's who.

The why of it is more elusive. There are dozens of reasons, none of them good, but Fa La La and Fiddle-de-dee, who cares? It's Christmas and 'tis the season!

Still, I feel the need to say this plain: I, a secular-liberal, love my Christmas. Christmas is in my blood, pagan as my blood may be, and I've been celebrating it for what seems like an eternity. Through new births and great losses, through times thick and thin, this is the one Happy Holiday season that I wouldn't ever want to miss.

I love Christmas carols as much as I love sweet secular Christmas songs and it's okay because it's Christmas.

As much as I love the Chinese Restaurant scene in "The Christmas Story", it's also possible to really, really look forward to interpretations of Luke 2's nativity scene.

I can accept that the White House Christmas card needn't be, and, all right, shouldn't be religious, but, at the same time, there is a sacred meaning to Christmas. Churches across the country celebrate the birth of Christ, each in their own way. It is as it should be.

The White House Christmas Card, 2011

So when I say I want to wish you Happy Holidays and a very Merry Christmas, you'll just have to trust that I mean it from the bottom of my heart.

(Cross-posted over at Dagblog)

Attention: The job opening is for POTUS. Dilettantes need not apply.

2011-12-12T22:50:00.002-05:00

When I was a little girl during FDR's time, I remember people in my family talking in hushed, reverent tones about the President of the United States -- as if he were someone so special you mustn't use your normal, everyday voice. I grew up thinking there was no one in our beloved country who could top the President when it came to being all-wise and all-caring. I believed that there was something other-worldly, even God-like about Presidents, and I felt safe.

I came of age in the 1950s, in the midst of the McCarthy witch hunts, and all childish notions about the government as citizen protector flew right off the newborn TV screen and into the wild blue yonder. The Army-McCarthy hearings were televised live, and for the first time in my life I knew real, hair-raising fear. I understood then the latent, potentially evil power of the government and it terrified me. Eisenhower was president, and, while my concern over his seeming disengagement from the whole vile circus nearly got the best of me, it didn't deter me from my original thoughts about the presidency in general.

There is the president and then there is the presidency. One is fleeting, the other is our most cherished institution.

I've worked my way through many presidents since then and even the worst of them haven't been able to move me away from that belief. We have certain built-in expectations of our presidents, tempered always with the recognition that they're only human. They will not always do our bidding. They will often make mistakes. They will sometimes fail in the most spectacular fashion. But the underlying hope is that when they wake up every morning in the White House -- the house on loan to them by the people -- they'll remember who they're supposed to be and resolve at the very least to do no lasting harm.

But what I'm seeing now is that venerable institution moving further and further away from any kind of special honor and more and more into celebrity/CEO status. It is no longer cherished, no longer looked on as both a rare privilege and a breathtaking responsibility. For proof, take a hard look at the Republican Party's current lineup of potential presidential nominees. Unless something major happens, the president's opponent will be one of these frontrunners: Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, Rick Perry, or Michelle Bachmann.

Look deeper: There is not a serious candidate among them. They make it understood that they want to be known as presidential without the annoying duties historically relegated to the presidency. "Duties" is the one word in the job description that gives them the most grief, and the one they're each aiming to adjust once they're in office. What I'm getting from their debate discussions is that they're falling all over themselves to see who can diminish the office of the presidency the fastest. (The possible exception might be Mitt Romney, but he's keeping mum, waiting to see which way the wind will blow.)

I don't know. If one cared, one might want to pass along to them that this is not your ordinary CEO gig. Yes, there may be some question about whether the President of the United States is still looked on as the leader of the free world, but there's no argument that he (and someday, she) is the sole keeper of the Executive branch of our government. When you have a country the size of ours (over 300 million people spread out over almost four million square miles) mired in unnatural disasters of epic proportions, the last thing any serious candidate for the highest government office in the land should be advocating is an end to government interference. Yet in the course of some 16 debates so far, that seems to be the recurrent theme. It's as if, in all the grand hoopla, they've forgotten just which job they've applied for.

If they talk at all about joblessness, homelessness, uncovered illnesses, or any other deliberate misery cast upon certain segments of the 99%, it's to place the blame for such predicaments squarely on either the existing governmental busybodies or on the millions of affected people who have the gall to think they're the victims here. Their fix is to turn the country over to God and the private sector -- neither of which, it should be pointed out, the president will have any control over if their dearest wishes come true.

Their goal, the destruction of a central government, is one that no president before them would have considered, even in the wildest wanderings of their most vivid imaginations. It's not the kind of remedy past seekers of the office were inclined to entertain.

On the other hand, it's exactly the kind of thing we came to expect from someone like Herman Cain, a guy with way too much money and ego, a guy who only just wanted to sell his book and thought the way to do it would be to run for, Holy Pokemon! President! Of the United States!

But okay, this did not get past me: Through no great feat of his own, and despite gaffes that might suggest "astonishingly bad comedian" rather than "honorable POTUS", Cain rose to the top of the GOP nominees list and stayed there for a frightfully long time before toppling. That means there are a whole lot of people out there who just aren't getting what I'm saying here.

That is just painful.

Just because I call myself a Journo doesn't mean I are one

2011-12-08T11:43:00.004-05:00

This morning blogger John Aravosis, over at AMERICAblog, wrote about blogging vs. journalism after finding an article from AP about a ruling against an Oregon blogger who claimed protections as a journalist while fighting a defamation suit brought by a lawyer she called "a thug and a thief".

According to the AP article, a federal judge ruled that Crystal Cox ( from her website: Investigative Blogger, Reputation Manager, Real Estate Broker Owner, Good Life International ) "was not a journalist and cannot claim the protections afforded to mainstream reporters and news outlets."

From AP:

"The judge ruled that Cox was not protected by Oregon's shield law from having to produce sources, saying even though Cox defines herself as media, she was not affiliated with any mainstream outlet. He added that the shield law does not apply to civil actions for defamation.
Hernandez said Cox was not a journalist because she offered no professional qualifications as a journalist or legitimate news outlet. She had no journalism education, credentials or affiliation with a recognized news outlet, proof of adhering to journalistic standards such as editing or checking her facts, evidence she produced an independent product or evidence she ever tried to get both sides of the story.
Cox said she considered herself a journalist, producing more than 400 blogs over the past five years, with a proprietary technique to get her postings on the top of search engines where they get the most notice.
'What could be more mainstream than the Internet and the top of the search engine?' she said."

I predict that before this is over, every blogger who writes about politicians and public people will weigh in on this one. (At BlogHer, blogger LisaWasHere fills in some of the blanks, including the judgment: a whopping 2.5 million dollars!) So here's my take, for what it's worth.

Some bloggers are journalists. Some journalists are bloggers. If a blogger wants to call herself a journalist, it's a free country and the blogosphere is about as free-wheeling as it gets. But if you go so far as to call a public figure a thug and a thief, remember your journalistic standards: You had better have some proof to back that up.

When I was writing columns and features for newspapers and articles for magazines, I had to submit bios. If, in any of my clever little biographies, I called myself a journalist, you can chalk it up to my being new and full of myself and foolish enough to think that just using the word made me one. (I would say I never did, but knowing that early me, there's probably at least one silly bio out there just waiting to prove me a liar.)

There are dozens of sources for journalism ethics, if any "investigative blogger" wants to make use of them. The Society of Professional Journalists makes theirs public, and it's a pretty good one. There are others out there for the taking, and they're not hard to find. It's not about popularity, it's about digging out and telling a compelling truth.

I don't know what's going to happen to Crystal Cox now, and I really don't doubt that she has done some good work as a conscientious blogger, but I have to question whether high rankings in search engines actually adds to her creds as a journalist. I mean--really. That nutty assertion may have just lost the case for her.

Going by that line of logic, one might consider Andy Borowitz and websites like The Onion prime examples of true journalistic wonderfulness. They both try to shine light on rotten politicians and public figures, they're good at it, and their rankings on Google are right up there. (By the way, Crystal Cox's page rank is 2 points below mine at Ramona's Voices. So much for that argument.)

(I loved this book. I don't have it anymore. I'm going to ask for it for Christmas)

But the point of all this is that we bloggers do need to take stock of who we are and what we're doing. Blogging is a brand new source of communication, and if the standards aren't yet written in a rule book somewhere, we have to go by our own gut feelings about ethics and responsibility. We owe something to our readers, as few as they might be. We are opinionists and muckrakers but we aren't necessarily journalists. The differences might be vague at the moment, but all it takes is one judge slapping a 2.5 million dollar fine on one of us to get our attention.

So can we talk about this? It looks like it's that time.

Added 12/9: As expected, there's much more to the Crystal Cox story. Kashmir Hill at Forbes dissects the huge award and sheds light on why the jury thought it was more than appropriate: It's here. After reading the Forbes piece, the distinction between blogger and journalist takes a back seat to what would be really nutty behavior, no matter who's doing it. Whew!

Newt to 'Really Poor Children': Buy Your Own Damn Ice Cream

2011-12-02T17:01:00.000-05:00

Newt Gingrich is obsessed with the plight of poor kids these days. He's been all over the place talking about them, and I have to confess, the jollier he gets about his remedies for their plight, the more nervous I become. It's an odd turn of events and one rife with suspicion. It's Newt we're talking about. Newt, who eats mean for breakfast and swallows the seeds.

Newt, who put a contract out on an entire nation, namely ours, and is still fretting over the insistent existence of a labor movement that was scheduled to die circa Reagan. (He's got another, bigger contract ready to roll on Day One. Fair warning.)

Newt, who sings "Only I can make this world seem right. Only I can make the darkness bright. Only I and I alone can thrill me like I do and fill my heart with love for only me."

And encores with the stirring, "For what is a man, what has he got? If not himself, then he has naught. To say the things he truly feels and not the words of one who kneels. The record shows I took the blows and did it my way!"

That Newt.

(Let the record show Newt has so far ignored the first lines of the above tune. The part where it says, "And now the end is near and so I face the final curtain...". Yesterday, in fact, Newt told ABC's Jake Tapper he WILL BE THE NOMINEE. I guess that means all debates are off now?)

Ordinarily I wouldn't care about Newt's $60,000 per speech blabbings about stupid child labor laws and how really poor kids from really shiftless families will resort to stealing unless he steps in and puts them to work, but after some lengthy and intense investigation, I find I have barely an ounce of faith in this current century's sanity. That dimpled nasty man could very well be running things come January, 2013.

There are some who defend him by reminding us that there's nothing wrong with kids doing a little work. The kids feel good about themselves and the upside is that, as Newt says, they can buy their own ice cream someday. Nice, really, that. In a sane world we might actually picture our sweet darlings helping out and getting paid a tiny reward, leaving everybody happy, happy, happy.

But that's not what Newt means and that's not how he put it. This is how he put it:

“Start with the following two facts. Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works, so they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday. They have no habit of staying all day. They have no habit of ‘I do this and you give me cash’ unless it’s illegal.

I come around to this question. You have a very poor neighborhood. You have kids who are required under law to go to school. They have no money. They have no habit of work. What if you paid them part-time in the afternoon to sit at the clerical office and greet people when they come in? What if you paid them to work as the assistant librarian? What if they became assistant janitors and their job was to mop the floor and clean the bathroom?”

That's not helpful, that's hateful. And full of hidden meaning. What does it mean when Newt says, "You have kids who are required under law to go to school"? Will there be an addendum to Newt's 2ist Century Contract on America abolishing school attendance for "really poor kids" so they'll have more time to do all that rewarding work?

When the kids take over as assistant clerks and assistant librarians and assistant janitors, what does that do to the work hours of the real clerks, librarians and janitors? I'm reading between the lines and seeing part time jobs with no bennies for everyone as part of Newt's grand plan. He's Newt, after all, clearly not Mr. Empathy. If you've followed Newt at all you know how strongly opposed he is to equality of the masses -- the kind of thing any signs of empathetic weakness might very well lead to.

Lots of kids work after school and weekends now, even amongst the "really poor". It's what kids do when they get old enough. They baby-sit, they do paper routes, they cut lawns, they wash cars, they run errands. What they don't do any longer is work in sweatshops under conditions that could maim or kill or rot the spirit.

From Utata Tribal Photography: Lewis Hines, photographer, 1906 "Hines kept detailed notes on the children he photographed, including comments they made as he interviewed them. The twelve year old boy in the [above] photograph was unable to read or write. He'd been employed by a textile mill in Columbia, South Carolina for four years, since the age of eight. He told Hines, 'Yes, I want to learn, but can't when I work all the time'."

Any student of history will tell you the reason we aren't allowed to work kids like that any more is because the laboring masses organized and put a stop to the exploitation of children by the privileged few. Newt the Historian seems to have forgotten that.

But on to other things Newt, because, again, there's a mighty strangeness afoot: The Great One told Sean Hannity over at Fox, apropos of nothing, that, "I helped lead the effort to defeat communism in the Congress.”

And, okay, I have to ask: How many communists were there in congress? Were they as hard on us as the teabaggers in congress today? Can you give us a few tips on how to get rid of subversives?

Black Friday as Myth-Buster

2011-11-28T07:01:00.000-05:00

After the Thanksgiving Day gluttony is over and after our teams have either won or lost (Our biggie between the Lions and the Packers went horribly awry for my loved ones, poor dears.) and after we've taken our tryptophan-induced naps, the next fun thing to think about, talk about or plan for is Black Friday, our annual Big Huge Shopping Extravaganza. It's the day when primitive survival skills kick in and the absolutely-must-haves traditionally go nuts and stampede in scenes that make even NatGeo-watchers go "Wow!".

(Rumor has it that Black Friday is the one day of the year when China pays homage to US. They would make it a national holiday, except everyone is busy at work manufacturing things for our Christmas rush.)

There's a myth in this country that goes like this: America is broke. Aside from a paltry few tax-evading King Midas wannabes, nobody else has anything much. That's the story.

Our jobless, our homeless, our soup kitchens, our empty former homes, our overflowing ERs--that's all real. Painfully real. But what's also real is the hefty percentage of 99 Percenters who spread out at the stroke of Black Friday to go whole hog spending astonishing amounts of ready cash and pay-later credit on stuff.

It's an American tradition contrived and perpetuated by the merchant class and, really, who are we to tell people (other than Congress) how to spend their (our) money? But a group known as "Occupy Black Friday" , an off-shoot of Occupy Wall Street, while admirably opposing the longer open hours which would take employees away from their own families on Thanksgiving, and endorsing the efforts to buy locally, took it one step further and came up with the idea of boycotting, instead of occupying, the major chains on That Day. (The Occupying part wouldn't work at all, you see, since millions of shoppers would already be camping out and milling around, waiting for the doors to open.)

Attempting to show the strength of the masses by boycotting major retailers on that all-important shopping day is one of those ideas that seems okay on the face of it, but which, in reality, is doomed from the start. It's a whisper in the wind, a dusky dot in the night sky, and here's why: I've been boycotting "Black Friday" for years now and nobody has ever noticed. Multiply me by, say, several hundred thousand and we still wouldn't be noticed. It's a happy tradition, the official start of the Christmas shopping season. Even in the worst economic downturn in decades, it's still a force bigger than all of us.

Okay, granted, this year, for whatever reasons, it seemed more intense than fun. A woman took to pepper-spraying other shoppers threatening to get too close to the prize she was after. A man slipped a DVD under his shirt, not to steal it but to prevent it from being stolen from him, and got himself shoved to the ground and bloodied for his efforts. People were knocked around and bruised. There were grim reports of shootings and parking lot robberies. But to the victors went the spoils and it's those success stories that make it all worthwhile. (More to come the day after Christmas. Another happy tradition.)

As might be expected, the activities at "Occupy Black Friday" came to the attention of the folks over at Fox "News" . Their idea of the perfect smack-down was to tell people to go out and shop 'til they drop. That'll show those damned Occupiers. Hah!

Now, I really hate to think Fox had that much influence, but this year Black Friday alone took in $11.4 billion, a 6.6% increase over last year, while the Thanksgiving weekend broke all sales records with a staggering $52.4 billion spent over four days. It was a jump of 16% over last year's sales, with record numbers of shoppers spending even more bucks on average.

No stats yet on the sales outcomes of Small Business Saturday, a truly sensational idea, even if it did come from American Express.

Today is Cyber Monday (designated by the online merchants who felt left out, no doubt), the lead-in to Cyber Week (Because why stop the momentum of a very good thing?), and on to Christmas, the Big Kahuna of cash heavy, gift-giving holidays.

So about that whole "America is broke" business. We're looking into it. We'll have to get back to you on that.

Feeling Guilty about Giving Thanks. It's a Liberal Thing

2011-11-24T07:41:00.001-05:00

This year we've decided to stay home for Thanksgiving. Our nearest family is 350 miles away but every year but one (and now this one) we've managed to be together for this holiday. We'll be seeing them all in three weeks or so for the Christmas holidays, but I'm missing them acutely today.

My guy and I have always done the planning and the cooking so I've never had much time to think about the Giving Thanks part, even though it's always in the background as we putter happily around the kitchen, never deviating from the traditional meal they've come to expect -- nay, demand: Turkey, dressing, mashed potatoes, mashed turnips, sweet potatoes, gravy, corn, cranberries, tossed salad, Ambrosia salad, rolls, Apple pie and Pumpkin pie. (Food that could kill if taken in large doses over too long a period. I get it. Nobody cares.)

So this morning, since there was no real call to duty, I woke up thinking not about what I had to do first, but about Detroit, Father Cunningham, Eleanor Josaitis, and Focus:HOPE. In the announcement of her death in August, Eleanor was what the NYT called a "housewife-turned-activist". (I know. Me too) Father Cunningham ("guardian of the poor" in his NYT obit.) was her parish priest and good friend. Together they created a non-profit organization to help the poor and disenfranchised and it has been a beacon of light shining in the gloom of Detroit for 43 years.

Eleanor Josaitis and Focus: HOPE students

From the Times obituary:

After racial hostility exploded into riots across Detroit in 1967, [Josaitis] uprooted her husband and five children from Taylor, Mich., moved to the city and set out to help heal it.
“You have to have the guts to try something, because you won’t change a damn thing by sitting in front of the TV with the clicker in your hand,” Mrs. Josaitis said in a 2004 profile in the magazine Fast Company.

In 1968, she joined with her priest, the Rev. William T. Cunningham, to establish Focus: Hope. The organization called them “an unlikely pair,” describing Father Cunningham as an “outspoken visionary” and Mrs. Josaitis as “the practical operations manager.”

Focus: Hope says it now provides food to 43,000 people a month and operates job training programs that have prepared 11,000 mostly minority and poor residents of metropolitan Detroit for careers in engineering, machinist trades and other fields. With its own 40-acre office campus, it employs 285 people.

Well, that was as near ago as this summer. This is now: Yesterday the headline in the Free Press read, "Funding Cuts hit Focus: HOPE. Layoffs ahead, training programs suspended." The reason? Nearly 6 million needed dollars in jobs program funding are being held up while members of Congress fight over who gets what, if anything. From the Free Press:

The work force development programs affected are the Information Technologies Center, Machinist Training Institute, Fast Track math and reading program and the Center for Advance Technologies, which is a college program.

As many as 1,200 students a year have enrolled in the programs. Since 1981, when Focus: HOPE began its job training programs, 11,000 students have completed programs, according to agency officials.

Jones said that Focus: HOPE had expected to receive $5.86 million in funds under the federal Workforce Investment Act (WIA) of 1998 for its job training programs on Oct. 1 -- the beginning of the fiscal year. It's about one-sixth of Focus: HOPE's estimated $35-million budget.
Jones said the agency's programs are a casualty of the debate over federal spending in Washington.

Every day we're hearing about the Republican's insistence that in this terrible economy the obvious solution is to cut all those bloated social programs. They're digging their heels in, refusing to move on anything until the poorest of the poor, or even the richest of the poor, are reduced to a choice of either begging in the streets or taking the slave-wage jobs now so popular overseas.   It's a cold, miserable world we've allowed to let happen and the people affected so cruelly by the actions of our chosen leaders deserve a whole lot better.

That's where my Thanksgiving guilt comes in. We cook that huge meal for our family, and they're grateful and we enjoy doing it, but always in the back of my mind I'm thinking of the people who have no family, who will have no dinner, who don't even know what tomorrow will bring. I've never been able to sit down to a fully-laden table without thinking those thoughts. But they pass, don't they, and tomorrow is another day.

I've done that whole round-the-table "what are you thankful for this year?" thing and -- I'll put this mildly: I don't get off on it.   "I'm thankful for my dear family and for my good health and all these good eats, and if the Lions win I'll really be thankful...".

And as this is going on, I'm thinking "Oliver Twist".

I give thanks to people like Eleanor Josiatis, housewife-turned-activist, who saw a need and did something about it. She took a step and another step and then went on to devote her whole life working toward bettering the lives of people who needed someone like her to come along and move them toward hope.

To religious activists like the late Father Cunningham and to Rev. Ed Rowe, who I guarantee is in a soup kitchen right now getting ready to feed people a dinner with a few more fixings than yesterday's, offering the kind of reliable sustenance that comes more than just twice a year.

To liberals everywhere who see the need to keep fighting for the kind of justice that will move men, women and children out of poverty and into a life that not only promises hope but delivers it.

Thank you, my beloved heroes. To you I give thanks.

Eyes on the Prize, Occupiers. The 99-Percenters are counting on you.

2011-11-15T19:10:00.000-05:00

For a couple of months now, we on the left have been marking the heady, exhilarating, organic spread of the Occupy Wall Street Movement and getting it that something unstoppable seems to be happening. Think of it: The dedication, the precision, the impossible successes coming from a movement organized by ordinary hoi polloi. No backing by agenda-driven billionaires, no pseudo-intellectual input from think-tanks, no take-over by shady cabals. It's the stuff of miracles.

It's the kind of citizen-driven wildfire effort we haven't seen in this country since the days of the Civil Rights Movement. Just as the march on Selma was the catalyst for a nationwide awakening to the need to end the rampant, blatant, often lethal, civil rights abuses in the South, the occupation of Wall Street woke us up to the possibility that change could come to the poor and middle classes suffering from decades of ruthless economic abuses perpetrated by the power brokers.

As we already know from past history, change of this magnitude takes vast crowds of hopelessly burdened people finally coming to the end of their patience, finally committing to a cause so essential to their well-being the only acceptable outcome is success. It takes crowds so huge they can't be ignored. Crowds, in this case, not just on Wall Street but spread across the country in every city, every town, every public square.

What we couldn't foresee was that the OWS Movement would move as quickly worldwide. With that revelation came a clearer sense of responsibility, of stewardship, even in a movement that strives to remain leaderless. (Remarkable, considering how easy it would have been to give in to egos, to celebrity, to the kind of fame that inevitably drags down instead of lifting up or moving forward.)

When ordinary Wisconsin citizens stormed the State House in Madison in the dead of winter early this year to protest the attempted theft of their bargaining rights, the die was cast. They overtook the castle and they stayed. Their occupation of the Peoples' House opened doors to those in other beleaguered states--Michigan, Indiana, Ohio--and when attention had to be paid, when concessions, however slight, were made; when recalls were threatened and then carried out, it was like manna to a starving nation. It energized us all.

But there comes a point when every such movement goes from simmer to a rolling boil, requiring an ever-watchful eye in order to prevent it from spilling over and ruining the entire project. With the OWS movement, it was only a matter of time before the cops would get pushy, before the city fathers would lose patience, before the opportunists with agendas of their own would infiltrate. Past history dictates that much of the purity of any grand movement will be lost to influences beyond the movement's control. The ones that succeed are ready for whatever comes and take steps to move past it. They succeed because they never take their eyes off the prize.

Huge movements like these -- Civil Rights, anti-Vietnam War, OWS -- begin with and are sustained by a red hot anger. It takes a hefty resolve on the parts of many to keep the anger laser-beamed to the source without allowing it to resort to the kind of rage that turns violent. It's an uphill battle, never made easier by time. As the days and months go by without some kind of resolution, one side or the other is going to blow. It happened in Oakland last week after a month-long confrontation with police. Increasingly, we're seeing police in riot gear, warranted or not. Rubber bullets, tear gas and pepper spray are the weapons du jour.

Different factions are losing patience and are disrupting Occupy meetings, even when the organizers are on their side, as happened in Seattle with the "mic check" shout-out.

Winter is coming and the Movement is in danger of losing momentum.   Freezing temperatures will empty parks and squares within weeks and much of the activity will be moving indoors, out of sight. It can't come soon enough for a host of mayors, including NYC's Mayor Bloomberg, who held a presser this AM announcing the plan to get the protesters out of Zuccotti Park so that crews can give it a good cleaning. He took the opportunity to announce also that, while he's a big supporter of First Amendment rights, he won't be allowing overnighters at Zuccotti anymore. Before the presser, the police were taking box cutters to the tents and arresting protesters who had been lulled into thinking it was okay to just hang around for a while. A court order, issued soon after Bloomberg spoke, rescinded his actions, giving the use of the park back to the OWS bunch. Bloomberg's office says they'll go back to court. For now, Zuccotti Park is empty and any clear vision of the First Amendment is muddied once again.

Update: The park is open but no more camping. No more tents. Sometimes you take your victories in smaller doses than you had hoped. Onward.

So where do the Occupiers go from here? Protesting in parks and on the sidewalks outside buildings, carrying predictable signs, remaining lawful within established confines -- is that all there is? How long before those efforts become ho-hum and easily ignored?

Is it time now? Is this the point where the actual revolution begins? Occupy Wall Street is planning a MASS NON-VIOLENT DIRECT ACTION on Thursday,. November 17. It's the next step for them and, as with any step forward in the revolutionary process, it's not without its risks.

Poster by R Black. Can be used freely, but cannot be sold.

So where will they go from here? Are there real Anarchists out there? Infiltrators? If so, how many? How are they when it comes to stamina? Will violence erupt? Will wiser heads prevail? Will a clear leader emerge?

What will it take for this Movement to succeed? Every report of infighting (and there is and always will be infighting), every report of concerted efforts by detractors (and there are and always will be detractors) needs to be offset by reports of solid consequential successes. Every move needs to be shining a spotlight on the goal.

The goal is to rescue the country from the One Percenters and their enablers so that we can revive it and rebuild it. Anything else is ineffective, unproductive diversion, of no good use to the 99 percent who are finally beginning to see that change they can believe in is not only possible but probable. What cruelty if, after all this, we veer off and let ourselves down.

A Simple Plea: Do Not Lay Hands Upon Our Children

2011-11-10T12:30:00.000-05:00

Every hour of every day, children in our keep are being harmed. Throughout the history of the world, adults have used their size and their physical and psychological power as weapons against our most precious assets--our children.

Hurting them is not accidental, it's the goal, but all it takes to muddy the waters is the argument about degree. Is spanking abuse? Is yelling? Is fondling? If there are no cuts and bruises how bad is it, really?

In the past few weeks the stories have been coming at us, fast and furious.

On November 5, Penn State assistant coach Jerry Sandusky was finally charged with serial sex abuse of minors after years of sexual contact with children as young as nine years old. (complete Grand Jury report is here.) During those years several adults were suspicious of his activities but didn't come forward.

One boy's mother, after finding out Sandusky had shared a shower with her son, told him he must never do it again. She tries to make him promise not to shower with young boys at all. She fails. He tells her, "I understand I was wrong. I wish I could get forgiveness. I know I won't get it from you. I wish I were dead." That was in 1998.

Sandusky was caught in the act at least twice during those years and hauled on the carpet. In 2002 an eyewitness went to Paterno's office and reported an incident involving actual intercourse between Sandusky and a ten-year-old boy. The eyewitness was never questioned, but was told that Sandusky's locker room keys had been taken away from him and the incident had been reported. Nothing else happened.

Now Joe Paterno, a beloved long-time coach, has been fired after evidence surfaced proving he knew of at least one instance of the abuse and did nothing about it. On hearing the news of his firing, crowds of students gathered in protest, not against Paterno but against the board's decision to let him go. (It's been said there was a small contingent protesting at the same time against the sexual abuse, but it apparently wasn't worthy of a news story because it's not out there anywhere.)

A Texas family judge, William Adams, is caught on videotape beating his disabled daughter with a thick belt, striking her hard at least 20 times. The girl's mother is seen hitting her once with another belt, telling her to "take it like a grown woman". The incident was secretly taped by the girl in 2004, when she was 16 years old. The girl recently put the videotape on YouTube (after her father dared her to do it, she says), but no charges will be issued against the judge because the tape is more than five years old, beyond the Statute of Limitations.

The story was detailed last week in the U.K-based Mail Online. The story itself is horrific enough, but buried inside was this bit of nasty business:

Asa result of the furor, the video was being examined by the District Attorney and previous controversial judgements Judge Adams made in casesinvolving children have come to light.
In a court judgement last October, Judge Adams said that a child's statements 'amounted to no evidence' despite the fact the child's words had been confirmed by third party witnesses and recorded on video several times. The young person had also been interviewed by a child psychologist who believed the child.
Judge Adams also agreed with a lawyer who claimed all children are 'fantasizers' and their testimony should just be ignored.

Michael Pearl, a preacher at the Cave Creek church in Tennessee, wrote a book called "To Train up a Child", advocating corporal punishment modeled on “the same principles the Amish use to train their stubborn mules”. This from a November 6 NYT article:

More than 670,000 copies of the Pearls’ self-published book are in circulation, and it is especially popular among Christian home-schoolers, who praise it in their magazines and on their Web sites. The Pearls provide instructions on using a switch from as early as six months to discourage misbehavior and describe how to make use of implements for hitting on the arms, legs or back, including a quarter-inch flexible plumbing line that, Mr. Pearl notes, “can be rolled up and carried in your pocket.”

So far, three child deaths have been attributed to the use of the methods in that book, yet Preacher Pearl and his wife, Debi, have appeared on shows like Anderson Cooper 360 to defend their methods and their book. As a compelling visual, "Pastor Pearl" brings a length of the plumbing line to demonstrate that it might sting but it won't do damage to muscle or bone.

In the NYT account, there is this paragraph, describing the condition of a child who had been murdered by her parents:

Late one night in May this year, the adopted girl, Hana, was found face down, naked and emaciated in the backyard; her death was caused by hypothermia and malnutrition, officials determined. According to the sheriff’s report, the parents had deprived her of food for days at a time and had made her sleep in a cold barn or a closet and shower outside with a hose. And they often whipped her, leaving marks on her legs. The mother had praised the Pearls’ book and given a copy to a friend, the sheriff’s report said. Hana had been beaten the day of her death, the report said, with the 15-inch plastic tube recommended by Mr. Pearl.

This controversy brought Michael Pearl into the spotlight, not as an accomplice or the devil incarnate, but as a minor actor, the requisite media shock blast in a compelling, agonizing tragedy. He and his wife were wined and dined, all expenses paid, to appear on television as a defender of corporal punishment in the wake of a terrible, preventable tragedy. Never mind that the parents, now murderers of an innocent child, saw something in Pearl's book that gave them permission to abuse their children. The mere sight of Pearl handling a 15-inch length of plumbing tube while defending its use is the kind of hold-your-nose moment we've all come to recognize as an odious but reliable tool to increase nightly ratings.

A 7th Grade Special Education student was raped twice in the course of two years by a fellow student. School officials didn't believe her story and after the second accusation, she was expelled and made to apologize to the boy who raped her.

The girl was first raped at Republic Middle School in the spring of 2009, according to the lawsuit. After the mother notified the school, the girl described the rape and "multiple sexual assaults" she'd experienced at school that year to Duncan, Mithelavage and Ragain. They then told the mother that they thought that her daughter made it all up.

During subsequent meetings described in the lawsuit as "intimidating interrogations," the lawsuit says the officials told the girl that they thought she was lying about the rape. The girl's mother was later told that her daughter recanted her story during one of those meetings.

The family's lawyers note in the lawsuit that the girl's school file contains a psychological report describing her as adverse to conflict, passive and "would forego her own needs and wishes to satisfy the request of others around so that she can be accepted."

Following instructions from the school, the girl wrote an apology to the boy she accused of raping her and had to personally give it to him, according to the lawsuit. She was then expelled for the remainder of the 2008-09 school year. The school also told "juvenile authorities" that she filed a false report.

In the moment, as we bring ourselves to watch or read the sad, horrific details in these stories and so many others, we tell ourselves we can't stand it. Enough. We rail, we wail, we pontificate. Something must be done! But it goes on. It ever goes on. Because once a fuss is made, once we as a nation howl at the moon and do the requisite teeth-gnashing, the moment passes and we move on nearly residue-free until it happens again.

We could stop it if we forced the courts and thus the perpetrators to recognize that child abuse in any form is a major crime. When the victims are helpless children, their abuse has to be considered a crime worthy of punishment so severe the offenders assaulting them will be stopped forever. The sentencing guidelines need to be so stringent there won't be a judge in the land who will ever again dismiss abuse as mere necessary punishment or childhood imagination.

But it won't happen until we can get past the widespread approval of spanking as a useful punishment. There is no cause, ever, to lay hands on a child and cause pain in order to get the point across. Radical, I know, but think about it: There are millions of children who grew up to become adults without once being spanked or hit or injured by a parent. I was one of them, and I know for a fact I'm not alone. Each child of mine can make the same claim.

Every child has worth. Every child needs to feel loved, to feel secure, to feel as if their world is a good place to grow up in. The thing is, only those who have already become adults can make that happen.

FRIDAY FOLLIES: On Limousine Meals, the Crush of Wine, Absurdity, and Occupation

2011-11-04T11:43:00.000-04:00

I'm not one to laugh at the plight of others, especially at elderly ladies whose family makes a request for meals on wheels, and I'm certainly not going to do it now, but can I at least laugh at the picture in my mind of people delivering those charity meals to limousines that will then whisk them off to a millionaire's mansion?

The bankrupt Crystal Cathedral, the Rev. Robert Schuller's megachurch in Garden Grove, CA, is about to be sold to pay off its debts, and is facing a court battle over whether many millions of church-donated dollars have been deliberately diverted to keep the family in a lavish lifestyle.

It's a sad and sorry thing, that, but sometimes it's the little things that become the final straw. For the Friends of the Schullers, it may just be something as simple as a request for "Meals on Wheels".

Dr. Schuller's wife, Arvella, in her 80s, is home-bound and in need of daily meals. The family is apparently unable to provide them, considering their current penury, so an email went out to certain of the members asking for some help:

The email states that the Schullers do not want get well cards sent because they would like to "keep her situation under the radar."
"However, they would appreciate meals over the next three to four weeks," the email states. "They are to be sent to the church in order to be transported to Arvella. The limo drivers could pick up the dinners or meet in the Tower Lobby around 4:30 p.m."
The message also requests that the meals be low in sodium and include items such as fruit, meats, soup and egg dishes such as quiches.

Well, imagine their surprise when not everybody jumped at the chance. Member Bob Canfield says he was outraged when he got the message.

"These are millionaires who have limos and chauffeurs," [Canfield] said. "Why in God's name would they want the congregants to deliver meals? It's ludicrous"

. . . Canfield said he and other members of the congregation are upset the request came at a time when their church is in bankruptcy and information coming out through court documents has suggested that the Schullers took nearly $10 million from the church's endowment funds. They've completely depleted the church's funds," he said. "But they have shown that they have absolutely no remorse for what they've done. They're still being chauffeured around in limos. We, the congregants, have nothing."

This is the stuff of movies -- the irony, the spoiled rich kids, the classic fall from grace -- but I'll leave that to others to sort out and make the most of it. I'm still imagining the limos pulling up to the glorious glass edifice, the cathedral of 10,000 windows, the people gently placing their care packages onto the leather seats, waving farewell as the long, shiny gas guzzler winds its way out of the complex and works its way to the portico of the mansion, where members of the domestic staff are waiting to carry the meals inside before they get cold.

So we'll leave the land of 10,000 windows and move to the eerie tale of 7000 self-destructing wine bottles. It happened in Sheboygan, Wisconsin and, again, it's the kind of story some might not find the least bit funny.

The man stocking the shelves at a wine shop said he heard a little sound and felt a little shift and "booked out of there" as dozens of shelves filled with thousands of bottles of wine ranging from $4 to $150 crashed to the floor, creating gushing rivers of wine that flowed out of both the front and back doors.

There were no customers in the store yet and nobody was hurt. "Luckily," Jak Phillips at Time Newsfeed wrote, "insurance covered the losses and the shelf has long since been replaced and restocked, meaning there was no cause for sour grapes."

Okay, then. I'll pretend I didn't read about $150 bottles of wine and the fact that insurance covered it all.

But leave it to the Herman Cain Presidential Campaign folks to bring me back and make me laugh out loud. I'm sorry, I just can't watch that smoking, leering Herman commercial often enough. Here it is again. There's something absurdly Buñuelish about it. It's great theater when we're heading over the cliff into the Sea of Insanity.

I was looking at some pictures I took last year and realized these four were speaking to me about current events:

It takes just one. . .


*to start an Occupy Movement.*

Tell that to the Fence Sitters

Still waiting for a Miracle.

Halloween was last week and as many pumpkins as I have carved, (triangle eyes and nose with a grinning mouthful of broken teeth is my signature) I've never come close to the artistry of Roy Villafane.

Cartoon of the Week

Adam Zyglis - The Buffalo News

Herman Cain is a goofball who thinks he's sexy. Who cares?

2011-10-31T09:03:00.000-04:00

Herman Cain is in the news again, this time for allegedly sexually harassing a couple of his female employees some time in the way back.

From Politico: The sources — which include the recollections of close associates and other documentation — describe episodes [with Cain] that left the women upset and offended. These incidents include conversations allegedly filled with innuendo or personal questions of a sexually suggestive nature, taking place at hotels during conferences, at other officially sanctioned restaurant association events and at the association’s offices. There were also descriptions of physical gestures that were not overtly sexual but that made women who experienced or witnessed them uncomfortable and that they regarded as improper in a professional relationship.

While I've been waiting for the inevitable comparisons to the "high tech lynching" of Clarence Thomas for similar behavior against Anita Hill and other female underlings in Thomas's workplace, I've been trying to think of a way to put this whole thing into some kind of perspective without upsetting and offending my female compatriots.

Here's the best I can do:

Any woman who came of age in the middle of the 20th Century (that would be me) is now scratching her head wondering when the moment of high drama is going to come in this story. It appears this guy Cain is possibly a creep who doesn't have the foggiest about propriety and good manners, let alone common sense. Have you seen him in action as a so-called politician? Have you seen him leering at the end of that goofy ad where his campaign manager slowly releases a mouthful of smoke? Would it really shock you or even surprise you that he may have made suggestive comments to women who work for him?

It doesn't shock me or surprise me or, frankly, even give me a moment's pause. If I had a better memory, I could name you dozens of men I've worked with over the years -- some of them my bosses -- who have done the same things, not just to me but to every person who looked the least bit female. I'll give it to you that there are men who take it as their right to go beyond innuendo and gestures, but that's a whole different ballgame. So far all I've heard about Herman Cain's actions are the typically stupid, creepy, laughable pastimes of someone who deludes himself into thinking his position has the power to somehow make him desirable. (Insert mention of "Mad Men" here.)

Good lord, people of the press, everybody knows Cain is an idiot. Nothing new here. Move along.

So let's get to why I can't get too excited about this new revelation about Herman Cain and his nasty mouth. There are men out there in positions of power who want to take away every right women ever had to be equal citizens under the law. They are working night and day to bust Roe v. Wade wide open. There are already a number of states either in the process of, or actively promoting, bans on abortions. If they're not working on outright bans they're sneaking around looking for ways to stall or discourage a procedure that has been declared legal in this country. (Mississippi is getting ready to decide if eggs are people, for God's sake.)

The House recently passed phony legislation that would stop most private insurance companies from paying for abortions, using the new Health Care law as the phony reason for the need to act. It won't get past the Senate and they know it, but it can't hurt to send the message once again that, while our children are at risk, being pro-fetus is where it's at.

Rick Perry is proud of the fact that he defunded Planned Parenthood in his state, and his isn't the only one.

Mitt Romney wants to pretend he wasn't for legal abortions before he was against legal abortions.

Most if not all of the GOP presidential candidates are prepared to take steps to flat-out outlaw abortions in America. (Including Cain, who, even as I write this, is at the American Enterprise Institute using "genocide" and "Planned Parenthood" in the same sentence.)

If Herman Cain did what they're saying he did, it's a bad thing, sure, but let's get real. While the press insists on resorting to the ridiculous in order to draw in the shallow, real government-sanctioned sexual harassment looms large and threatens never to go away.

That's the big story.

Why Junk Insurance deserves an Occupy Movement

2011-10-27T18:02:00.000-04:00

Things are heating up in Chicago and I don't know a soul who is surprised by that. It's Chicago and it's Emanuel Land. Last week the Occupy Wall Street Windy City branch decided to occupy Grant Park past the posted 11 PM closing time. The police, never ones to miss even vague radical clues, guessed correctly that these folks had other things on their minds and weren't going to be ready to leave just because a simple sign said they should.

When the clock moved past the magic hour, Mayor Rahm barked, the police moved in, and more than a hundred people were arrested in the eviction process. (Contrast that to the Good Mayor of Lansing, my hero and should-be governor, Virg Bernero, who welcomed the OWS protesters to the state capital, encouraged the crowd to keep up the good work, and provided park permits and the services necessary to make the days easier for them. Ahem and aha.)

So the climate in Chicago is apparently not good for protesters, (though I have to say it's much better than that in Oakland) but I'm hoping those same OWS crowds got wind of this week's Junk Insurance Conference, and hot-footed it over there. (It began yesterday and runs through Friday.)

My hero, Wendell Potter, former CIGNA CEO turned whistleblower, wrote about it in HuffPo:

On Wednesday [10/26/11], the third annual Voluntary Benefits and Limited Medical Conference will open at the Marriott Renaissance Schaumburg Convention Center, not far from Chicago's O'Hare airport. In just three years, this conference has grown to be a very big, three-day extravaganza. According to the conference Web site, it will "bring together all the players in the industry, from employers and benefits managers, to insurance agents, consultants, brokers, insurance companies, TPAs (third-party administrators), and enrollment firms."

All you have to do is spend a few minutes on the Web site to get an understanding of just how much money there is to be made selling inadequate coverage to naive consumers. You'll see all the big names in the insurance world among the attendees and exhibitors, including the very biggest -- Aetna, Blue Cross and Blue Shield, CIGNA, Humana and United -- as well as dozens of restaurant and fast food chains and other employers of low-wage workers.

Yes, it's a den of thieves (no surprise -- they're "insurance" biggies), but this is pretty stunning:

One of the big for-profit insurers sponsoring this year's conference markets a limited-benefit plan only to employers with inordinately high employee turnover. Not only are the benefits very limited, the underwriting criteria almost guarantee an impressive profit margin.

Under the plan, the average age of an employer's workers cannot be higher than 40, and no more than 65 percent of employees can be female. (Insurers have long charged women more than men simply because of their internal plumbing.) To meet the insurer's additional demands, employers must have a 70 percent or higher annual employee-turnover rate (that's not a typo), which means that most employees won't even stay on the job long enough to use their benefits. Employees also get no coverage for care related to any preexisting conditions they might need during their first six months of enrollment in the plan. And get this: Employees have to pay the entire premium. The insurer doesn't even allow employers to subsidize their workers' coverage. No wonder the big box retailers and restaurant chains love this junk. They list them among the employee benefits they supposedly offer but don't have to part with a dime when a worker enrolls in one of the plans.

We have come to accept the business of "insurance", not as "assurance", as it was originally defined and administered by quasi-benevolent non-profits, but as just one more scam in the long list of scams we Americans have to watch out for. This is our health we're talking about and we've put it in the hands of merciless privateers.

CIGNA HQ

The insurance companies, begun as non-profits and mainly run that way until the 1970s and 80s, at least pretended to understand the part about shared risks. Sometimes they win, sometimes they lose. Sometimes people die long before they've outspent their premiums, while other people cause their insurance carriers to dig deep, like it or not. That's the crux of the insurance biz. One thing the carriers understand to the core: they'll never go broke selling us insurance policies. They'll always pull in more money than they'll put out. If that weren't so, there wouldn't be an insurance industry.

But now we're at the point where the watchdogs are fed too well, where members of our own government fight hard against an equitable, non-profit health care solution, where the industry is so bloated, enough will never be enough. Even the big guys are not above committing fraud, but what makes the whole scam even more egregious is that they never needed to go to such lengths in order to make their fortunes. The fortunes were theirs to be made. The entire system works to their advantage, even when they're being good guys doing the right thing.

I haven't heard that there are any protesters over at the Marriott convention Center yet, but it's not too late. As I said, the Conference runs through tomorrow (Friday). But if the OWS folks happen to miss the Conference, they can always camp out in front of a few grand and glorious corporate offices.

Blue Cross-Blue Shield, Houston, TX

(Note that the only corporate office list I could find complete with addresses and phone numbers comes from India. Yes, India. I said India)

In 21st Century America: It's still okay to beat up on women.

2011-10-15T14:48:00.000-04:00

TOPEKA | The Topeka City Council on Tuesday [10/11/11] voted to repeal the city’s law against misdemeanor domestic battery, the latest in a budget battle that has freed about 30 abuse suspects from charges.
One of the offenders was even arrested and released twice since the brouhaha broke out Sept. 8.
It started when Shawnee County District Attorney Chad Taylor announced that a 10 percent budget cut would force him to end his office’s prosecution of misdemeanor cases, almost half of which last year were domestic battery cases.
With that, Taylor stopped prosecuting the cases and left them to the city. But city officials balked at the cost.
Tuesday’s 7-3 vote to eliminate the local domestic violence law was designed to force Taylor to prosecute the cases because they would remain a crime under state law.

Hey, all you totally misunderstood guys in Topeka who feel the need to smack around your women, good news! As long as you don't get too heavy-handed -- blackening eyes, loosening teeth, leaving really ugly bruises -- your city officials are on your side.

In a fledgling century of new lows this may not rank up there with the worst of them, but as an indicator of how low our new austerity drives have allowed us to fall, it's right up there. Misdemeanor violence against women has now been approved by a city council for no other reason than to play chicken with a county prosecutor looking for creative ways to get around budget cuts.

Tack on top of that last week's action by the House to bully insurance companies into refusing to cover abortions.

From the Hill:
The House approved a bill that Republicans said would prevent last year's healthcare law from funding abortions, but which Democrats said would go far beyond that and make it much harder for women to exercise their constitutional right to have abortions.
The bill, H.R. 358, was passed in a 251-172 vote that saw more than a dozen Democrats join nearly all voting Republicans in support of the measure.
Republicans said throughout the day that the bill is needed because the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) was approved without any limitation on funding for abortion rights. They also dismissed President Obama's Executive Order that Democrats say reinforces this prohibition.
"Thus ObamaCare, when phased in fully in November 2014, will open up the floodgates of public funding for abortion in a myriad of programs, including and especially in exchanges, resulting in more dead babies and wounded mothers than would otherwise have been the case," Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) said.

I expect that sort of thing from the Republicans, but 15 Democrats bought into it, too. It would still have passed without them, but that doesn't make me any less ashamed of them. (Here is the list.) Don't tell me they're only doing what their constituents expect of them. Either they're Democrats or they're not. A real Democrat wouldn't be caught dead voting for something like that.

"This bill is a radical departure from existing law," House Minority Whip Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said. "This legislation is bad public policy, it is the wrong priority for Congress, it is an assault on women's health, and women should know that it prevents them from using their own dollars to buy their own private insurance should they be part of an exchange."

Never mind that this action by the House is as phony as the bill's moniker, the "Protect Life Act". Where are the bills to protect jobs, to protect children already living, to protect the health and welfare of the citizens of this country? Nowhere to be seen. There are some battles we shouldn't still be fighting. A woman's right to choose is sacrosanct. A woman's right to protect her own body is not now and never should have been up for debate.

You protect life by respecting the living, by nurturing the living, by honoring the living. You accept the job as representative of the people by promising to preserve and protect. This bill and the actions in Topeka turn those notions upside down, and do it in mean-spirited, draconian ways too many people are finding acceptable. But change is in the air. If we can keep it going, a great awakening is about to begin. If we can keep it going, we'll be looking back on the last few decades of wicked wrongheadedness, wondering how we ever let it happen in our lifetime.

It can't come soon enough for me.

FRIDAY FOLLIES: Wagons and Trailers and Planes! Oh My!

2011-10-14T07:05:00.000-04:00

Bob Dalrymple and his girlfriend, Kathy Neal, are leaving Michigan and heading for Colorado, because, Bob says, the economy's suffering, the winters in Michigan are too cold and it's time for adventure. He wants to go someplace warm. That's what he says. His two kids live in Colorado, but apparently they've neglected to tell him there's a reason crowds of retired Snowbirds aren't descending on the Centennial State. It's snowy and blustery and cold there in the winter!

Bob, disabled after a truck-driving accident, takes it slower these days but isn't about to take it easy. “I figure you can sit there and exist or you can go on an adventure,” Dalrymple told a Muskegon News reporter. “We decided an adventure didn’t sound so bad....I sold my stuff and I’m going, and I’m not coming back.”

He and Kathy are going to take a couple of months to get there and I'm just hoping they really understand about winter. They'll be traveling in a mini-caravan of two wagons pulled by five horses, accompanied by three dogs. One "wagon" is really a kind of camper, but the smaller one, the supply wagon, looks like a true covered wagon (See gallery here and near-enough picture below). Their friends have autographed it with well wishes and Bon Voyages and desperate pleas to reconsider.

This from the Muskegon News:

He had the horses. Building the wagons is what would take the most work. He turned to a scrapyard, where he found the materials that would do the trick: A 60-year-old hay wagon, an old pontoon boat and a Winnebago camper.
Eighteen feet in length, the camper includes a refrigerator, a stove, a queen-size bed and a sink. Pulled by three horses, the driver and passenger sit in two bucket seats taken from a 1970s Chevy Malibu.

As near as I can tell the two of them will be exposed to the elements whenever they're sitting in their Chevy Malibu seats. They'll be going across the plains, the dusty, windy, frigid plains, and I'm not seeing a windshield. I thought this story was going to be a lark. It was supposed to be fun, but now I'm alarmed. Bob says they have gloves and boots and they'll be all right, but I don't know. I've read those stories about hapless, ill-prepared pioneers falling for that word "adventure". The outcome can often be grim. So if you happen to see these two wagons going down the road, give them a big Howdy and maybe check to see that they're doing okay. They seem like nice people.

Not Bob and Kathy, but a close-enough wagon. (With apologies -- the Muskegon News wants me to pay for pictures.)

The story goes that this guy was out walking and he "stumbled" upon an unattended refrigerated beer trailer equipped with outside spigots and -- Good Lord Amighty! -- empty beer pitchers sitting on a nearby table. When they nabbed him, many pitchers later, his perfectly reasonable, though somewhat wobbly explanation was that he thought he had died and gone to heaven. Everybody sees Heaven in a different way. I might see my sainted grandmother but this guy saw free beer trucks. But here's the part that must have really convinced him: He wasn't charged with anything! Not with public intoxication, not with Grand Theft Beer Trailer. Nothing.

A feel-good story if ever I saw one.

Not the real trailer, but I'm guessing pretty close

Or maybe like this

But get caught trying to bring a Snow Globe on a plane and see what happens to you. Or big hair.

CNN contributor LZ Granderson wrote and talked about it this week, and yes, it's to laugh, but no, it's not, considering what kind of nuts are out there. Even less funny was the search through LZ's dreadlocks. At least to LZ. I snickered a little over that one, I admit. How does one search through dreadlocks? Not with a fine-toothed comb, I'll tell you that.

LZ himself

But enough about all that. Do you know how hard it is to be a Liberal? Well, do ya? Roy Zimmerman thinks he knows, and, okay, I had to laugh. (Not that I saw myself in any of it):

I don't know where I've been but I've just discovered Roy Zimmerman. My near-loss, because he has some really funny songs to sing, at least from where I'm sitting. But it appears there are plenty of people who already know about him, so I doubt he even missed me. You can find more of Roy's songs on YouTube, or, better yet, on his website, where his songs are for sale.

Those Magic Moments -- Fall in Michigan, My Michigan (All pictures mine):


Every Color under the Sun

Autumn Morning Mist

Maples in all their Chlorophyll-free splendor

Birches and Cedar

Cartoon of the Week

Mike Luckovich

It all comes down to this, America: Don't be Cruel

2011-10-10T14:03:00.001-04:00

Another 2.6 million people slipped into poverty in the United States last year, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday, and the number of Americans living below the official poverty line, 46.2 million people, was the highest number in the 52 years the bureau has been publishing figures on it.
And in new signs of distress among the middle class, median household incomes fell last year to levels last seen in 1997.
Economists pointed to a telling statistic: It was the first time since the Great Depression that median household income, adjusted for inflation, had not risen over such a long period, said Lawrence Katz, an economics professor at Harvard.
''This is truly a lost decade,'' Mr. Katz said. ''We think of America as a place where every generation is doing better, but we're looking at a period when the median family is in worse shape than it was in the late 1990s.''
The bureau's findings were worse than many economists expected, and brought into sharp relief the toll the past decade -- including the painful declines of the financial crisis and recession --had taken on Americans at the middle and lower parts of the income ladder. It is also fresh evidence that the disappointing economic recovery has done nothing for the country's poorest citizens.
The report said the percentage of Americans living below the poverty line last year, 15.1 percent, was the highest level since 1993. (The poverty line in 2010 for a family of four was $22,314.)

Sabrina Tavernise, New York Times, September 14, 2011

When all is said and done, if we can ever get beyond the grand-standing, the bloviating, the harumphing and the chest-pumping, the awful truth is that millions and millions of American citizens are now among the chronically hurt because of the current no-fault-of-their-own economic crisis, exacerbated by the current we'll blame them anyway political climate.

Families are hurting. Our elders are hurting. Children are hurting. Future generations will be hurting. We've let yesterday slip by and tomorrow shows no great promise. The time to do something is now.

Everybody knows that something must be done, but what keeps the wheels from turning, from moving us forward, is an ongoing, time-wasting argument about how best to appear to be saving the country while saving face, saving precious personal skins, saving the privileged elite.

There is no point wasting time talking about past history -- a couple of centuries worth of the same mistakes, the same indulgences at the top, the same misery at the bottom -- when nobody is in the mood to learn from it.

We have now become one of those countries known throughout the world for deliberate cruelty to its own citizens -- the kind of despised country whose citizens we ourselves would have taken pity on not so long ago.

While it may be true that unprecedented numbers of America's children have experienced hunger or homelessness (or a desperate, unrequited need for health care) it's cruel to pretend that no single sweet child of ours is affected. We're masters at shutting our eyes to real, live, scared and suffering kids.

It's cruel to play games with needed unemployment benefits by pretending they're one more example of undeserved governmental handouts to the lazy or misbehaving.

It's cruel to humiliate the jobless even more by pretending that anyone without a job isn't looking hard enough.

It's cruel to pretend that outsourcing and off-shoring have nothing to do with the loss of millions of life-sustaining jobs.

It's cruel to pretend that workers don't need or deserve representation when the need is so much greater now.

It's cruel for the richest country in the world to give private insurance companies the power to deny anyone health care and pretend that people aren't dying because of it.

It's cruel to allow profiteers to attempt to kill off one major historic source of national pride -- public education for every child without regard to race, creed, or income level -- and pretend that a) the public schools did it to themselves and b) no child is being left behind because of our negligence.

It's cruel to divert our national treasure, including and especially our young men and women, to foreign wars that don't concern us or affect us nearly as much as our own at-home social and economic wars.

But the cruelest reminder is that we almost had it in our grasp -- a fair and prosperous country we could be proud of -- and we let it slip away.

There's no pretending it didn't happen. There are enough of us still around who remember a different country, where it looked as if the American Dream would actually become a major possibility. It was taken away from us, not by happenstance but by the mean and deliberate actions of politicians and power brokers.

You can say it a million different ways, but what it comes down to is cruelty by a thousand cuts. There was a time when we all would have fought against that sort of thing. I'll say it again: This is some strange new century...

No Surprise: Erin Burnett doesn't get the Wall Street Protesters.

2011-10-05T10:01:00.000-04:00

For her CNN "Out Front" debut on Monday, Erin Burnett went to the Occupy Wall Street protesters to see for her corporate-shilling self what the heck all the fuss was about. She couldn't find a single person who knew why they were protesting. Imagine that.

"I saw dancing, bongo drums, even a clown.... I asked several protesters what it was that they wanted. Now, they did not know.... They did know what they don't want."

This is not new. I've heard many pundits question whether the people holding the signs have a real agenda or just want to be out there in front of the cameras holding silly signs, dressed in goofy garb, doing the Kumbaya thing. (Yes. Wherever there's a protest, they'll be there, too. Bless their hearts.)

But the claim is that nobody in that crowd really knows the reasons for the protests. I guess if you were one who isn't listening, or more likely, refuses to listen, you might not get the message.

This is it in a nutshell, from the Occupy Wall Street website:

Occupy Wall Street is [a] leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions. The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%. We are using the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic to achieve our ends and encourage the use of nonviolence to maximize the safety of all participants.

I probably won't spend a lot of time watching Erin Burnett's new show, but I've had her number for a while. If you just look at that angelic face, those deep, darling dimples, you might miss who Erin really is.

She is a Wall Street groupie who searches, but can only find eensy-teensy, little bitty problems with her chosen pals.

She is about to marry a CitiGroup exec, thereby solidifying her affection for the Street.

She is a supposed reporter who once told the folks on AM Joe to take a larger look at China, who might be as successful as they are because they don't coddle people by paying them when they're unemployed. (Not in itself true, but she said it ever-so-sweetly, even apologetically, as if she really hated to spoil a perfectly good discussion, but it needed to be said kind of thing, so nobody jumped on it.)

And Rush Limbaugh loves her.

If you watch Erin Burnett's "Out Front", you're going to hear what sounds perfectly reasonable, because the person saying it is about as far from a Maria Bartiromo as one can get. But I'm seeing nothing but love songs to Wall Street already, which is okay as long as CNN isn't promoting it as a family show.

FRIDAY FOLLIES: On Jesus toasters, Gray Panthers, Raging Grannies, and Fun with Medicare

2011-09-30T12:39:00.000-04:00

WARNING: Hot graven images ahead. Turn back if you believe Jesus' image on toast should remain a miracle and not be used as a promotion by clever, sacrilegious Vermonters for a Made in China toaster. (It's International Blasphemy Rights Day today, but I swear I didn't know that when I chose this segment. Not that I'm not okay with it. I am.)

As serendipity would have it, I was thinking about making myself a piece of toast in my conventional Fire Engine Red toaster last week when I happened to glance at my newest Twitter followers and saw that "Virgin Mary Toasters" was following me. I was about to write them off because, really, @VirginMaryToast? Why me, faGodsake?

But I bit. I clicked. And now I'm crazy about Vermonters Galen and Owen (AKA Virgin Mary Toasters) and their website, Burnt Impressions, Inc. They have a growing line of actual toasters that entertain with pictures, but the Rapture Toaster is my so-far all-time favorite. (Not yet for sale. Must be a prototype):

In Honor of Older Persons Day, October 1 (and because I'm one of them, now entering my fourth year of septuagenarian bliss) I would like to take this time to remind the (relatively) young that we're not all out there playing Bingo or whining about gas or sitting on icebergs waiting to die.

Remember the inimitable Maggie Kuhn and The Gray Panthers? She and a small group of retired friends organized the tiny grass-roots organization, using word-play on "The Black Panthers" to suggest an aggressiveness that probably wasn't really there, first to protest the Viet Nam war, and later to protest social and economic inequities. They're still out there doing their thing, making my heart glad, but now they've got more friends and allies.

"Speak your mind - even if your voice shakes. Well aimed slingshots can topple giants."

Now we have The Raging Grannies, with chapters all over the country and all over the world. They joined the Wall Street protesters last week when members of the Canadian-based Grannies for Peace (Not be be confused with the Granny Peace Brigade) were pepper-sprayed and arrested.

Amongst those detained were two members of New York's Grannies for Peace. Both ladies are in their 70s and they were amongst the younger people, handcuffed and corralled, into orange mesh pens, in the street. The Raging Grannies saw their friends and decided it was time to show their support too.

"We have helluva job on our hands," said 96 year old Lillian Pollak, [Raging Grannies member] as she arrived in Zuccotti Park to join the Occupy Wall Street protesters camped out there. "We thank you. This is wonderful. I was getting down in the dumps about what was going on, but you have raised my spirits."

Note: We Senior Citizens also have another day, called "Senior Citizens Day", that falls on August 21. That one was signed into remembrance by Ronald Reagan, the guy who started that whole Kill Social Security thing, from the party that hates Medicare, so I'm still a little wary about that one. Plus, I hate that phrase, "Senior Citizen" and besides that, all Reagan expected on that day was for people to be nice to their elders. I would say it's a start, but it wasn't. His party is still trying to kill us off early.(Reminds me of deer hunters who rave over the beauty of the animal but lust after its blood. Very odd.)

Cartoon of the Week:

Nick Anderson - Houston Chronicle

The Religious Test is Alive and Kicking in American Politics. Again.

2011-09-27T09:30:00.000-04:00

As a non-religious person I have faith that religion will always be with us. It's the way of the world, and if I'm baffled by its constancy, by its influence, by the sheer numbers of people involved, I'm even more befuddled watching the successful move away from any pretense at goodness and mercy by the Religious Right in favor of a peculiar form of public, political bullying.

There are many churches that do good works and act as sanctuaries in a cold, cruel world. Their congregations are loving and generous and, by the way, have no problem accepting non-believers like me. We work well together. There is that understanding that our goals are the same; it's only the paths we take to get there that are different.

I've hesitated to get into this, mainly because I have family and friends who are religious and I love those people. Most of them have enough respect for me to lay off any proselytizing, but I know that a number of them can't help but pray for my damaged soul. I'm good at pretending that's okay. They mean well.

But what's not okay is what brings me to this: Rick Perry. His phony piety, his bad acting, his destructive actions as governor of Texas showing him for the hypocrite he is. It should have been Michele Bachmann's lame and lazy preaching that capped it, but Rick Perry has finally done it for me. His performance at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University was as loathsome as Jimmy Swaggart sobbing open-mouthed on close-up for forgiveness or Jim Bakker weeping at the loss of his empire. Rank insincerity is what bonds them all. The significant difference is that, so far, Jimmy and Jim haven't aspired to be president of these United States.

Billboard in South Carolina

I listen to the calls to Jesus by Presidential candidates like Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, Mitt Romney, Jon Huntsman, and even Ron Paul. I see our presidents and members of congress fighting to one-up their Jesus-is-my-lord-and-savior status, and it's clear that scrupulous avoidance of religious tests for political candidates is a thing of the past.

An avowed Atheist has never had a chance -- a fact that makes no sense in a democracy -- but even a quiet Christian wouldn't have a chance today. If you're thinking of running for anything, you had better be out there professing your undying love of an accepted and specific God as defined by the one and only Holy Bible or forget about any future in 21st Century American politics.

This new century of ours is a puzzler. It's suffering the worst kind of growing pains, but it's not as if it came from nowhere. It's roots are in several centuries of ups and downs and lessons ripe for learning, yet it's as if American history is some quaint, nostalgic throwback having almost nothing to do with this modern world.

There are reasons for the need to see ourselves as a nation and not just as a country. We're peopled with citizens as diverse as the world. The fervent bleating of the more vocal Christian politicos cannot change the fact that not all Americans are Christians. We are not a Christian nation. We never set out to be a Christian nation. By clear Constitutional design, there is no religious test for any candidate in this country.

If they can't get that one simple fact straight, one wonders what hope there is for understanding issues even more complicated. Like the meaning of "Of the people, by the people, for the people", for starters.

FRIDAY FOLLIES: On Butter, Blankets, and Beauty. Then There's That Cartoon.

2011-09-23T11:00:00.000-04:00

I can't believe it's not butter! In Wisconsin there is a law on the books that forbids restaurants, schools, hospitals and prisons from serving margarine instead of butter. This weaker version of a 1897 law has been on the dairy state's books for 44 years but most restaurants can get around it, since the interpretation of the law these days is that if a customer asks for margarine it's okay to give it to them. No mention of how the margarine is delivered to table -- in plain sight or disguised as something else. (The bovine version of for "Don't ask, don't tell".)

Butter Cow

But now that we're 11 years into the 21st Century, a few lawmakers have finally decided that that other butter is going to be around for a while. Might as well learn to live with it.

This is pretty delicious, too:

The margarine-butter debate has a long political history in Wisconsin, where Sen. Gordon Roseleip, R-Darlington, a strong advocate for the state's dairy industry, fervently campaigned against the butter substitute in the 1960s, saying it tasted different than butter and arguing that it wasn't healthy--until another state senator challenged him to a blind taste test and he showed a preference for margarine, uncovering the secret that his family had been sneaking the hefty congressman the low-fat substitute, according to the Daily Reporter.

This "OMG! Someone's going to be manufacturing in America!" feel-good story last week really hit home for me. (I'll explain in a minute.) Minnesota's Fairibault Woolen Mill is planning to re-open after a shut-down so sudden two years ago there are still unfinished blankets on the looms.

Closed since 2009, Faribault Woolen Mill Co. is beginning a new life under new owners. Gov. Mark Dayton and other officials are scheduled to attend ceremonies Thursday marking the re-opening at the historic mill purchased in June by Edina businessmen Chuck and Paul Mooty.
The plant, which dates back to the 1890s, at one time had a workforce of about 80 and produced half the woolen blankets made in the United States. The mill is resuming production with 31 workers, including some former employees, said Paul Mooty. "Our goal is to build that back to one full shift with about 50 to 60 people," he said. Extra shifts could be added, depending on demand, he said.
At a time when most textile production has moved overseas, the Faribault mill is thought to be North America's only fully-integrated facility with equipment that washes, cards, spins and weaves wool into Faribo brand blankets and throws.

(More here.)

Fairibault Woolen Mill offices - 1897

I saw the story first on a TV news program and thought it would make a good FF story. It wasn't until I saw that "Fairibault" was actually "Faribo" that I made the connection and realized I have one of those blankets. It was here in our cabin when we moved in 17 years ago so I don't know for sure how old it is, but it really is something special. It's lightweight and soft and seems impervious to both dirt and moths. It's been laundered several times and still looks like new.

And it was made right here in the U.S. Who knew even 30 years ago we would be this nostalgic for "Made in America"? Just so sad.

But back to feel-good. This video came from the Washington Post via Twitter: A little Brazilian girl has surgery on her cleft lip and sees her new self for the first time. (Be prepared...)

Those Magic Moments: Circling the earth with the space station:

Cartoon of the Week

FRIDAY FOLLIES: Tea Party Games, Rabid dogs, Sweet Old Fools, and Stories that Soothe.

2011-09-16T10:21:00.001-04:00

I swear, the weirdest thing going last week was the Tea Party debate hosted by Ted Turner's brainchild gone wild. (When I heard that the once-venerable CNN was going to give free air-time and thus a large dose of credibility to yet another crazy bunch hell-bent on taking back every single right and privilege afforded us by hundreds of years worth of struggle by our more forward-thinking ancestors, this is what I said out loud: "Waaaaaahhhhhtt??" (Most people I know uttered a variation of WTF??? but it was all I could muster. Trying to save an ungrateful country is exhausting.)

I admit I went into a deep funk over it for a while. I did. I sent out dozens of 140-character Tweets that were nothing more than pathetic variations of "Waaaaahhhhhtt??" (or WTF, if you lean that way.)

But then I read Bob Cesca's HuffPo piece on it and I had to laugh a little. I especially liked this part:

I'm not sure if CNN knows it, but nearly everyone across the political spectrum thought the CNN presentation of the debate was ridiculously self-satirical -- a laughing stock only rivaled by the Fox News debate several weeks ago. It's almost as if the producers and planners were deliberately attempting to air something that Jon Stewart would definitely mutilate the following night (he did).

(Worth the read, too, for what he says after this: "Whether it's print or broadcast news, the press is the only industry specifically named in the Bill of Rights, preserving for history the founding mandate that the press remain independent and unconstrained as a means of checking government power. Consequently, an unrivaled degree of integrity is required to fulfill that mandate.")

Then, only yesterday, I came across this post by Andy Borowitz, called "Rabid Dog Briefly Mistaken for Tea Party Candidate". I laughed until the tears came, and it was just the lift I needed until I crashed again, remembering how hysterical I got at the crazy notion of someone like George W. Bush becoming president of anything.

Beware of Granddaughters with access to YouTube: OMG, Bruce and Esther, I HAVE to do this!
(Warning: Do not watch this while eating or drinking. Cover your keyboard and any other sensitive electronic components within spitting distance. Okay. NOW.)

(Note: If you read this you'll find they're okay with it. They were shocked at first, but you just know they're having fun with it now.)

I love this story. When Hurricane Irene washed out mountain roads in rural Vermont, teachers were shocked when kids from the far side of the mountain got off the bus as if it were just another day. It happened like this:

When Vermont roads were washed out by Hurricane Irene,33 schoolkids made it to school from the other side of the mountain. Their families had discovered a half-mile-long forest path that they could walk, from Route 4 across the mountain to their school bus. At first, the woods were still and unsettling. “My hands shaked a little bit,” said Jillian Bradley, a second grader.
But as Sophia Hussack, another second grader said, “Since Vermont got hit by the storm, people think we couldn’t, but we do.” And what townspeople do and have done is a thing to behold: they have taken that quiet trail and in two weeks’ time turned it into the I-95 of wooded paths. More than a 1,000 people a day now walk it to get to their jobs and go food shopping on the other side. So many cars line Helvi Hill, the dirt road leading to the path on this side, that handwritten no parking signs have been posted to make sure the road stays passable.

I love to get a glimpse of the places where writers write. I never get tired of picturing them sitting in their spaces doing what they do. Plush or sparse? Window or no window? Hard or soft chair? Tablet, typewriter or new-fangled electronics? Chatchkes or no? Over in Buckinghamshire, they're trying to preserve Roald Dahl's hut. It's a good, good thing.

Those Magic Moments: Mysterious paper sculptures are appearing in libraries in Edinburgh, Scotland. The gorgeous works of paper art were produced by cutting up old books (which, okay, gives me the shivers) and were then placed on library desks without anyone being the wiser. Notes of thanks accompany them, giving the libraries credit for creating an environment where books are treasures and reading is a gift. What a loving thought.

(Thanks to my daughter, Sue, for sending this to me. I surely would have missed it.)

Cartoon of the week:

Mike Luckovich - Atlanta Journal Constitution

Ten Years After

2011-09-11T09:05:00.000-04:00

Today marks the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. Ten years have passed -- an entire decade -- but for those closest to the terror, for those whose loved ones were caught in that unimaginable rage storm, for those who trained for this, who mobilized and fought so hard to try and save the lives already lost to them, we pay tribute by refusing to forget.

The pictures are all that is left. They stay with us and resonate as terrible, beautiful works of art.

The agony of the men and women who could do nothing but stand by and watch the towers fall reflected and drove home our own agony -- even those of us in the hinterlands who watched the horrific events unfold on our TV screens, helpless to do anything but gasp and moan and rock with a kind of psychic pain most of us had never felt in our entire lifetimes.

As painful as the dredging up of the images of that terrible day is to us, there is no sense of dread as the annual anniversaries approach. Every year, on September 11, we want to remember. 9/11 has become a watchword. Nobody in America has to be told what those numbers represent.

As I write this, they're reciting the names of the men and women lost to us on September 11, 2001 in a ceremony to honor the dead. The names are being read alphabetically. For one brief moment the people live again. We do this for their families and for us. They're not just numbers or actors in an unimaginable event that became the catalyst for an entire decade that changed all of our lives forever. We need to keep their memories alive in order to recognize their humanity, and possibly our own.

We remember. We remember. We'll always remember.

Toxic Politics will be the Death of Us Yet

2011-09-06T17:31:00.001-04:00

While Democrats temporized, or even dismissed the fears of the white working class as racist or nativist, Republicans went to work. To be sure, the business wing of the Republican Party consists of the most energetic outsourcers, wage cutters and hirers of sub-minimum wage immigrant labor to be found anywhere on the globe. But the faux-populist wing of the party, knowing the mental compartmentalization that occurs in most low-information voters, played on the fears of that same white working class to focus their anger on scapegoats that do no damage to corporations' bottom lines: instead of raising the minimum wage, let's build a wall on the Southern border (then hire a defense contractor to incompetently manage it). Instead of predatory bankers, it's evil Muslims. Or evil gays. Or evil abortionists.

How do they manage to do this? Because Democrats ceded the field. Above all, they do not understand language. Their initiatives are posed in impenetrable policy-speak: the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The what? - can anyone even remember it? No wonder the pejorative "Obamacare" won out. Contrast that with the Republicans' Patriot Act. You're a patriot, aren't you? Does anyone at the GED level have a clue what a Stimulus Bill is supposed to be? Why didn't the White House call it the Jobs Bill and keep pounding on that theme?

You know that Social Security and Medicare are in jeopardy when even Democrats refer to them as entitlements. "Entitlement" has a negative sound in colloquial English: somebody who is "entitled" selfishly claims something he doesn't really deserve. Why not call them "earned benefits," which is what they are because we all contribute payroll taxes to fund them? That would never occur to the Democrats. Republicans don't make that mistake; they are relentlessly on message: it is never the "estate tax," it is the "death tax." Heaven forbid that the Walton family should give up one penny of its $86-billion fortune. All of that lucre is necessary to ensure that unions be kept out of Wal-Mart, that women employees not be promoted and that politicians be kept on a short leash.

The above is from a piece called, "Goodbye to all that: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult". It was written for Truth-Out by Mike Lofgren, a former professional staffer who worked on Capitol Hill for more than 28 years, a good portion of which were spent aggressively pushing the Republican line. No more. He's had enough. But it's not as if he's seen the light and gone over to the Dem side. He's giving them hell, too, the lousy self-serving cowards.

I think what's giving this essay legs -- it's all over the place; Google Mike Lofgren and you'll see -- is the recognition that we're slowly destroying our ancestor's dreams and our grand-children's futures by allowing our elected politicians to lead us down a path we know will come to no good end.

There are hundreds of partisan essays out there blasting both parties up one side and down the other, often with chilling accuracy, but what makes Lofgren's piece compelling is that the insider/author's indictment doesn't spare anyone. Yes, he thinks the Republicans are worse than the Democrats (which, I admit, opened the door for him here), but his goal, as I read it, is to get us to open our eyes to the dangers we're facing right now, right this minute, that are, incredibly, being fueled by the very people who took an oath to uphold our constitution and work toward the common good.

I spent a good part of this Labor Day weekend looking for programs honoring our unions and our work force. Precious little could be found, even though that's what Labor Day is all about. Instead, Sarah Palin's rally was thoroughly covered, as was the Republican candidates' debate in South Carolina. There was plenty of talk about President Obama's failing numbers and his capitulation to John Boehner over when he could come to Congress to give a speech on jobs. (It'll be on Thursday, September 8, if you're interested.)

Obama himself gave the traditional Labor Day speech in Detroit, promising to defend the unions and hinting that his upcoming speech will be substantively about jobs. I'm glad he was in Detroit on Labor Day, and I'm glad he's talking about jobs, but we all know it's going to take more than that. He's also still talking about trying to work with the Republicans on a bipartisan plan to save the country. If he can't get past trying to be friends with an enemy who keeps hitting him over the head with evidence of their intent, it's a safe bet things can only go downhill from here.

What Mike Lofgren is trying to tell us is right there in front of our noses: The Republicans are not our friends. The Democrats are afraid of them and are trying to save their own skins. The country is being held hostage by Fat Cats, religious zealots, a media culture bored with real journalism and thirsty for entertainment, and by people who think holding Tea Parties while starving the government is the only way to go.

The politicians the electorate have put in office are either usurping or avoiding their constitutionally endowed obligations. We're dyin' here and the only jobs crisis they see is their own re-election.

And here's the crazy part: We're paying them for this.

FRIDAY FOLLIES: Labor Day Edition

2011-09-02T12:27:00.000-04:00

This is the start of the Labor Day weekend. We've been celebrating Labor Day since 1882, an amazing feat considering all those bastards throughout these long years who would like to strike from our memories the fact that it was labor unions who started the whole thing.

Lately it has become not much more than the last weekend of the summer to go out and get recreational, and on the face of it, that's a good thing. All work and no play and all that. But can we just take a moment this weekend to celebrate the movement that is Labor in our country?

First Labor Day Parade - New York City, 1882

The history of Labor Day (A 3 1/2 minute video. Won't take long.)

Striker's children picketing - Flint Sit Down Strike

Marisa Tomei reads the words of a female factory worker involved in the GM sit-down strike, 1936-37, Flint Michigan.

Mother Jones, 1913 Copper Mine Strike, Calumet, Michigan

The only known film clip of Mother Jones - interviewed on her 100th birthday in 1930.


From left: Mary Heaton Vorse, Upton Sinclair, Eleanor Roosevelt, Walter Reuther. Photo: Walter P. Reuther Library

In 1940, Walter Reuther wrote a letter to FDR proposing to turn half-empty auto plants into airplane factories. His claim, that they could turn out 500 planes a day, might have been a bit of an overreach, but the plan made perfect sense. Europe was already struggling with Hitler's onslaught, and it was clear it would take years to prepare for it. But guess who were vehemently against losing even an ounce of profit to help out? The heads of the companies whose plants Reuther was proposing to use. It never got done (not until after That Day that will live in Infamy, when the nation turned to its factories to build up a massive war machine in a hurry), but the letter brought Reuther to Roosevelt's attention and they became friends and allies. He and his wife were invited to the White House on several occasions. Roosevelt, it's been reported, actually listened to what Reuther had to say.

So yes, it can be done. It has been done. The American Labor Movement has been long recognized as a force for good, except by those who see no profit in admitting it.

And for your reading pleasure, labor quotes from the American Labor Studies Center. (A subversive organization if ever I saw one.) Their admitted goal is to provide labor history materials to Kindergarten through 12th Grade teachers in order to "provide students with an opportunity to explore the many facets of a very complex and important part of out nation’s history and contemporary life. Teachers are encouraged to use a variety of research and inquiry approaches as they select their pedagogical strategies."

Oh, my...

Cartoon of the Week:

Mark Hurwitt is an Illustrator, Cartoonist, Designer, Writer and Teacher residing in Brooklyn New York

His website is HurwittGraphics.com

Have a grand and glorious weekend, everybody. Have fun, stay safe, but come Tuesday let's get back to it -- it's jobs, jobs, jobs.

On having to defend Michele Bachmann. Don't Make Me Do This Again.

2011-08-29T17:14:00.000-04:00

The latest Michele Bachmann controversy revolves around the first words of a speech she made inside a tent at an outdoor Christian meeting in Iowa. It had been raining and the first words out of her mouth were, "Who likes wet people?" Someone leaning to the left either misheard or deliberately chose to present it in a doctored YouTube video as "Who likes white people?" Guess what happened then? Yesiree, it went viral.

The clip making its rounds on Wonkette and other sites left out her next sentence, which was, "Yeah, that's right. Because we have the God of the winds and the rain, don't we?" On the un-doctored video I watched she clearly says "wet people". Clear as a bell.

I hate that I have to defend someone who is so clearly against all that I stand for, but I'm going to do it because, as a long time liberal, I know what comes of any attempt at hanky-panky at our end. We get trounced for it and it never goes away. But beyond that, phony attacks are their game, not ours. Or I should say, mine. I'll never be a part of that idiocy. There is enough honest ammunition against Michele Bachmann without resorting to lies.

This is the true version of her remarks.

And this is the doctored version. (I'm still hearing "wet" instead of "white" but many people swear she's saying "white people". Judge for yourself.)

If you want to see Michele Bachmann at her dangerous worst, watch her here as she defends South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley for making sure her state remains a Right-to-Work state. Bachmann couches it in terms of "Pro-growth" but what she's saying here is that she wants to see every state become an anti-union, low wage state. She says, "A right-to-work state is a good thing", and she's saying it clear enough for everyone to get the message.

In that same speech there's no doubt about her words as she threatens to take out both the National Labor Relations Board and the Environmental Protection Agency if she becomes president. This from Politico:

“Our president decided to allow the National Labor Relations Board to try to stop what Boeing is doing in South Carolina,” said Haley, referring to the NLRB’s complaint that Boeing moved the plant from Washington state to South Carolina to punish union workers, in violation of law. “It’s the most un-American thing I’ve ever seen. If you were president — knowing he is saying he can’t do anything because it’s an independent agency, what would you do?”
“Why thank you for asking that question,” Bachmann said, inviting the crowd to applaud Haley and promising she would take her calls if elected president. “If the NLRB would also be continuing their current stance, they may not last very long. Once they see what I do to the EPA, they may shape up.”

(For the record, I'm not at all convinced the NLRB made the right decision about Boeing's move after the fact -- the plant has already been built; Americans are already working in those jobs -- but I am convinced that Boeing decided on South Carolina because of it's lax labor laws.)

If the polls weren't showing this ridiculous excuse for a candidate as a Republican front runner it would be easy to dismiss all that she says. Nearly every day it's something new and attention-getting. (This weekend it was God trying to get our attention about the deficit by sending us earthquakes and hurricanes.) The times are such that we surely need to pay attention to what this woman who would be president has to say, but we don't need to make it up as we go along.

I mean, literally, we don't need to.

Friday Follies: On Kardashian, Condi, Lust, Larceny and Love in the Air

2011-08-26T07:43:00.000-04:00

How jealous are we of that lavish, over-the-top Royal Wedding the Brits got to celebrate this year? So pathetically jealous we had to pretend we're capable of having one of our own by latching onto the lavish, over-the-top Kim Kardashian-Kris Humphries wedding. (Whoever the hell they are.) The Big Event took place last weekend and every station in the nation went all barmy over it. The name "Kardashian" was out there so often, I figure it's just a matter of time before it appears in dictionaries all over the world as another striking example of "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing"

[Celebrity] is but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing." — With apologies to Macbeth

But my favorite part was a moment just before the nuptials when a CNN reporter was outside the compound talking about things most shallow and decidedly icky, like the fact that People Magazine paid more than a million dollars for the exclusive rights to the wedding photos, and a kid (looking and behaving like a certain grandson) gives the performance of his life on national TV.

Love Story #2: Moammar loves Condi. Who knew? The Libyan Rebels have taken over Gadhafi's (Kaddafi. Khadafy. Qaddafi. etc.) .compound and of course the first thing they did was to dig through the junk to find the juicy stuff. Imagine their joy when they found a photo album entirely devoted to portraits of Condoleeza Rice.

One might guess from the evidence that Moammar had a certain obsession with Condi, but all guessing ends with the heretofore ignored interview the smitten one gave to al Jazeera way back in 2007, in which he gushed:

"I support my darling black African woman [...] I admire and am very proud of the way she leans back and gives orders to the Arab leaders. ... Leezza, Leezza, Leezza. ... I love her very much. I admire her, and I'm proud of her, because she's a black woman of African origin."

Well, yes, it's very bizarre, very creepy, but what I can't figure out is 2007? How did we miss this for so long??

Love Story #3:

Newlyweds Arthur Phillips and Brittany Lurch wanted very much to have a nice reception where their many friends could join them in celebrating their nuptials. Money was apparently tight (neither of them were Kardashians, you see) so it took the Centre Hall, PA couple a few days to figure out how they were going to do it, but when the plan finally took shape it was a doozy.

They headed to the local Wegmans and loaded up a cart with over $1,000 worth of reception-type food and then walked out the door without paying. Brilliant. It worked! The problem was, they had invited so many people to their special soiree one cart-load of hors d'oeuvres just wasn't going to do it. They had to go back and load up again. They were so tickled over the success of their first heist, they ordered a huge batch of seafood from the deli. But something felt amiss, apparently, because they left the deli counter without the goods and tried to get outside, landing smack into the arms of the police.

They will be spending their honeymoon in jail. No immediate plans for an actual marriage.

(That's Bonnie and Clyde. Click here for Arthur and Brittany's wedding portrait. The Centre Daily wants me to pay for the photo but I don't want to.)

That moment sublime: The flying scene from "Out of Africa". Pure romance:

Cartoon of the Week

Joe Heller - Green Bay Press Gazette

Our Employees are Revolting, In More Ways Than One

2011-08-24T16:55:00.000-04:00

Here's the thing about those occupants of the White House, the Capitol complex, and all other elected tax-payer-paid tenants of tax-payer-built edifices all across the country. Once they're in office they tend to forget their place on the organizational chart, so here's a reminder: We, the people, are on top. We are the employers and they are the employees. We pay their wages and their benefits, give them cushy offices and take care of their every need. We pay it all, knowing that to do so is, ipso facto, giving them serious control over our lives.


Freshman members of the 112th Congress pose for a class photo on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. (Photo by: Jeff Malet. Photography/Newscom)

In Congress, if the electeds are still employed by us after five years in office, we are required to pay every solitary cent that goes into their retirements. Consider that: They only have to work for us for five years to get a guaranteed lifetime retirement based on an average of the best three years of employment. That means a House member would have to be re-elected twice to qualify, but a first-timer serving a full six-year term in the Senate will thereafter be eligible for retirement at our expense until death or until the coffers run bone-dry, whichever comes first.

There's no chance that their employers -- that's us -- can arbitrarily decide that we don't feel like paying it anymore. We can't say we want more of our money to go to us and not to them. When it comes to shared sacrifice, we seem to have exempted them. We're locked in. We will pay their retirements, no matter what we might have to let slide in order to do it.

This one crucial fact sometimes gets forgotten in the day to day back-and-forth about whether or not our elected officials are doing their jobs in a way that the majority of the employers -- that's us -- will find acceptable: They don't have to do their jobs well. Once they're in, they're in. We can't fire them for laziness, carelessness or insubordination. There's no such thing as chronic tardiness or too many sick days. They can even vote to strip jobs and take away retirements from the very people who have put them in office, all the while knowing they're safe from the same kind of unfair action. Once they're there, sitting comfortably in their catbird seats, they can, in fact, make and/or enforce laws that will actually damage and/or destroy a good segment of the very people who pay their way

It's as if they have the best damned labor union in the country (that's us) looking out for them. Ironic, isn't it, considering how little use most of them have for labor representation?

Under both CSRS [Civil Service Retirement System] and FERS [Federal Employees Retirement System], Members of Congress are eligible for a pensionat age 62 if they have completed at least five years of service. Members are eligiblefor a pension at age 50 if they have completed 20 years of service, or at any age aftercompleting 25 years of service. The amount of the pension depends on years ofservice and the average of the highest three years of salary. By law, the startingamount of a Member’s retirement annuity may not exceed 80% of his or her finalsalary.
As of October 1, 2006, 413 retired Members of Congress were receiving federalpensions based fully or in part on their congressional service. Of this number, 290had retired under CSRS and were receiving an average annual pension of $60,972.A total of 123 Members had retired with service under both CSRS and FERS or withservice under FERS only. Their average annual pension was $35,952 in 2006.

Like most of us, they now pay into Social Security and will be eligible to collect on it after age 62 -- unless that changes, too. (The young'uns might want to remember that before they get too hasty about killing it.)

Today regular members of the House and Senate each make $174,000 per year, with additional funding going toward staff and office wages, travel and other incidentals. (The leaders, of course, make more.) Their staffers can make almost as much as they do, and they're entitled to anywhere from 20 to 60 support staffers. We pay to keep all of them working.

Representatives' staff allowances can be used to hire up to 18 permanent and four non-permanent aides divided between the members' Washington and district offices. Up to $75,000 of a representative's staff funds can be transferred to his or her official expense account for use in other categories, such as computer and related services. The maximum salary allowed House personal staffers in 2005 was $156,848 (2001: $140,451)..

Senators' personal staff allowances vary with the size of the members' states. Senators may hire as many aides as they wish within their allowance; typically this ranges between 26 and 60, depending on the size of the state and the salary levels offered to the staffers.
- The maximum salary allowed to Senate personal staffers in 2003 was $150,159 (1999: $132,159); for Senate legislative staffers the maximum salary in 2005 was $153,599.

Capitol.net, has a full compilation and history of wages and perks going back to 1789, when Congressional salaries were six dollars a day, with no limit on honoraria. They could accept all the booty and swag they wanted in those days. Now they have to choose between booty or swag. (No, I'm kidding. Actually, it says they cannot accept honoraria these days. Absolutely verboten. No can do, people. Forget about it. Got it? But corn dogs are okay.)

As employers go, we're really lousy atthis. Knowing how committed we're going to have to be toward ensuring alifetime of benefits to our electeds, we really ought to do a better job ofhiring them in the first place. It's not like we haven't studied theirresumes. It's not like we’ve neglected the interview process. Itcosts us millions of dollars and requires a multitude of days bringing usinterminable boot-licking, back-slapping, chest-thumping speeches to get us tothe point of hiring these people.

Could we just try and remember these four magic words before we give any of them the honor of a job with lifetime benefits?

For the common good.

FRIDAY FOLLIES: The Worst Writer Ever, Abercrombie's scam, and the Eagle Has Landed

2011-08-19T12:27:00.000-04:00

A few weeks ago, when I wrote about the Bulwer-Lytton contest for the worst first sentence of a novel, I had no idea there was actually a worst novel in the world, too. The consensus, from what little research I've done on the subject, is that Amanda McKittrick Ros is the author who wins, hands down. (A literary group that included Tolkien and C.S. Lewis would read her works aloud to see who could do it longest with a straight face. None of that bothered Amanda in the least. She scoffed at critics, claiming at least one of them was being mean because he was madly in love with her.)

There does seem to be some conflicting views on which of her novels would actually win the title of Worst, but Irene Iddesleigh, published in 1897, clearly ranks right up there in glorious hideousness. It's out of print, but is available through the Gutenberg Project. It was really hard to choose the lines most representing how awful that book really is, but here goes nothing:

I should begin with the beginning. It goes like this:

Sympathise with me, indeed! Ah, no! Cast your sympathy on the chill waves of troubled waters; fling it on the oases of futurity; dash it against the rock of gossip; or, better still, allow it to remain within the false and faithless bosom of buried scorn.

Such were the few remarks of Irene as she paced the beach of limited freedom, alone and unprotected. Sympathy can wound the breast of trodden patience, --it hath no rival to insure the feelings we possess, save that of sorrow.

Irene, you see, is the protagonist who meets the wealthy Sir John, who courts her and proposes marriage, both of them knowing all along that her heart belongs to Oscar, the poor tutor. She marries Sir John, of course, but it's doomed from the start. It'll come as no surprise to you that it ends badly for poor Irene. But what sets this novel apart from other bad novels (and has made Amanda famous as the worst of the worst) is the author's avid, awful alliteration.

"Leave me now, deceptive demon of deluded mockery; lurk no more aroundthe vale of vanity, like a vindictive viper; strike the lyre of lying deceptionto the strains of dull deadness, despair and doubt/ and bury on the brink ofbenevolence every false vow, every unkind thought, every trifle of selfishnessand scathing dislike, occasioned by treachery in its mildest form!”

(I think what’s happening here is Irene is thinking she should be sorry forsomething, but I could be wrong.)

I use this picture as my avatar sometimes, but I’ve come to believe it’sAmanda McKittrick Ros writing her putrid purple prose.

And speaking of words, these two, Abercrombie and Fitch, have always made me snicker. They're so damned prissy-sounding. Like two accountants straight out of Dickens. But somehow the clothing company, around since the 19th century, has latched onto the young, ages 18-22, causing them to overlook how old-fashioned that name is and take to wearing the name on tees, pants, caps, and underwear. Product placement is everything, I get it. Really. Now, stop SHOUTING.

But last week A&F turned the tables on that whole concept. The company is actually willing to pay someone big bucks to stop wearing their merchandise! I don't watch "Jersey Shore", so I don't know this guy Michael "The Situation" Sorrentino, but apparently he doesn't fit A&F's image as an approved wearer of their clothing brand. Also, he's way past 22 years old. (He's 29.) Also, A&F loves controversy. I mean loves it. Really, really loves it.

So, okay, it's a publicity stunt, but a pretty clever one. They're now offering the entire cast of "Jersey Shore" a "substantial amount" of money not to wear their clothes. No word yet on whether any of the cast members have taken them up on it. (This could start a whole new trend. Paying people not to wear a clothing line might someday even have an effect on the jobless numbers. And the world would be a better place.)

In my travels on the WWW, I found this great new website (New to me, I mean) called "The Awl". I don't know what it is. It's a whole bunch of fun and interesting things. (Their motto is, "Be less stupid". Check it out.) But today I was wandering around there and found a quote by Maud Newton from her NYT Magazine article called "Another thing to sort of pin on David Foster Wallace".

I suppose it made sense, when blogging was new, that there was some confusion about voice. Was a blog more like writing or more like speech? Soon it became a contrived and shambling hybrid of the two. The “sort ofs” and “reallys” and “ums” and “you knows” that we use in conversation were codified as the central connectors in the blogger lexicon. We weren’t just mad, we were sort of enraged; no one was merely confused, but kind of totally mystified. That music blog we liked was really pretty much the only one that, um, you know, got it. Never before had “folks” been used so relentlessly and enthusiastically as a term of general address outside church suppers, chain restaurants and family reunions. It’s fascinating and dreadful in hindsight to realize how quickly these conventions took hold and how widely they spread. And! They have sort of mutated since to liberal and often sarcastic use of question marks? And exclamation points! “Oh, hi,” people say at the start of sentences on blogs, Twitter and Tumblr these days, both acknowledging and jokily feigning surprise at the presence of the readers who have turned up there.

Oh, Jeez! What can I say? Ya got me...

That moment sublime: A story in the Minneapolis Star Tribune tells about an amateur photographer, Frank Glick, who happened to spot an eagle sitting on a headstone one misty day at the Fort Snelling Cemetery. He took the picture and then gave it to the widow of the soldier whose headstone the eagle chose to grace. A friend of his sent it to the paper and Jon Tevlin wrote about it. The story and the picture went viral. So viral that it brought out the inevitable doubters, who insisted the eagle was too large on that headstone. It had to be photo-shopped. The experts came out and said it most certainly wasn't enhanced. A cemetery spokeswoman said there are eagles around there all the time.

But who really cares? This particular photo is wonderful on so many levels. The mist, the bare trees, the sheen on the tops of the asymmetrical rows of headstones, the bit of red in the foreground, the first headstone leading to the focal point, and the eagle posed just right. It's breathtaking.

Tevlin said it generated more emails than any other story he'd ever done. There were 11,000 hits on Facebook when the picture appeared. The military has ordered copies and it has made its way to Afghanistan where it sounds like they may use it as a basis for a monument to the fallen there. Bravo, Frank Glick. This is for you.

Cartoon of the Week:

Clay Bennett, Chattanooga Times Free Press

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Political Tiddly-Winks in Iowa. The Corn Dog Won

2011-08-14T10:07:00.003-04:00

Good God and Lordy, people, is there anything more ludicrous on the political scene than what happens in Iowa whenever the Republicans don't have a Grand Poobah candidate for President? This year it was a big barbecue in Ames where just under 17,000 people 16 1/2 years old and over got to pay their $30 to "vote" for a candidate and then party afterward. Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul were the "winners". And, not surprisingly, the emperor wore no clothes.

The main function of the Iowa Straw Poll is to draw in money for the Republican Party and for the towns in Iowa that hold the straw polls. That should be enough for those folks, but even given proof of the historical insignificance of the poll and it's non-role in the winning of presidencies, the press falls all over itself to turn it into something it's not now and never will be. As a political forecaster, it's record is pitiful. Rarely if ever does the Straw Poll winner win the Iowa Caucus, much less the presidency. So let's just get over the "importance" of yesterday's vote in Ames, Iowa and have a little fun with it, okay?

Andy Borowitz: SandP Downgrades Iowa IQ:

Calling the results of today’s Iowa straw poll “alarming,” Standard and Poor’s took the unprecedented action of downgrading Iowa’s IQ.

While the effects of such an extraordinary measure are hard to predict, experts say the IQ downgrade could result in Iowans having difficulty completing sentences or operating a television remote.
“This downgrade would be very upsetting to Republicans in Iowa,” said an S & P spokesman. “Fortunately, there’s no way they’ll understand it.”

At the Fairgrounds, where the Big Barbecue was going on, Ron Paul had something called the "Prosperity Playground", where you could slide down the "Sliding Dollar" slide and just be a kid again.

Ujala Sehgal writes about it and more in this piece in the Atlantic. Man, those kids had fun!

The Ames Patch took to judging the candidates' tent sizes. Thaddeus McCotter's may have been the smallest, at an embarrassing 30x30 feet, but Tim Pawlenty's took the prize as the largest, at 200 sq. ft. over Michele Bachmann's 10,000 foot air-conditioned whopper.

I'm hearing rumors this morning that Pawlenty is already thinking of dropping out of the race, so I hope he had a great time there in Ames. Something should come out of all that effort, at least. (News flash: It's true. Pawlenty has dropped out. All because of that first Iowa Straw Poll. Am I going to have to rethink this whole thing? Am I just not getting it??)

Okay, I started this out absolutely refusing to even consider including that truly awful, truly obscene un-Photo-Shopped photo of Michele Bachmann deliriously munching a very long corn dog, but I changed my mind. Here it is:

(Note: Changed my mind again. I couldn't stand the picture any longer so I took it down. It's here if you really want to see it.)

And here's a bonus. Marcus Bachmann with that same corn dog. I WILL NOT comment. No. I mustn't.

(Note: Ditto the shot of her husband. It's here. Go for it.)

But I will say this: What happens in Iowa should have the decency to stay in Iowa. Really.

FRIDAY FOLLIES: Bachmann's look, Mitt's People, and the Artistry of the All-seeing Blind.

2011-08-12T13:50:00.001-04:00

Michele Bachmann was on Newsweek's cover this week and editor Tina Brown swears to all who will listen that Bachmann's bizarre cross-eyed skyward gaze was meant only to "capture her intensity". About the crossed-eyes, Tina says she doesn't see it. She honestly doesn't know what all the fuss is about. (Cough, choke, gasp, gag.)

She was on "Morning Joe" last week defending her choice, and what an entertaining few minutes that was!

Now there are cries of foul and/or sexism and/or foul sexism. Even Miss America got into the fray on Fox and Friends. Did she think the cover was racist? Well, yes she did.

But as someone who has never had the good sense to put on a photo face when a camera is pointed toward me, I might actually have some sympathy for the expressive Rep. Bachmann. I blame it on my Italian heritage. While I'm talking with my hands I can make some pretty awful faces, especially if I'm in a rage about the Tea Party and people like Michele Bachmann. Or being put on hold having to listen to Jazz when I'm trying to get something done that requires telephone support. Things like that. (No, I'm not going to show classic examples here, though there are plenty of them out there.)

I know what it is to get caught with the goofy face. It's embarrassing. And I thought that's what happened with Bachmann until Tina Brown talked about the photo shoot. The cover photo wasn't a candid, it was a studio portrait set up with a photographer who had all the time in the world to get a good one. OMG. Tina. You scamp.

Mitt Romney got caught admitting that corporations are people, thus ensuring some big bucks in the campaign coffers from the corporate persons. That would be a good thing if Republicans actually wanted him as their candidate, but they don't seem to be leaning that way. Still, he's out there giving it all he's got, and all he's got is the best entertainment at the Iowa State Fair.

ROMNEY: Corporations are people, my friend. We could raise taxes and --
[unintelligible crosstalk]
ROMNEY: Of course they are. Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to people. So -- [audience laughter] where do you think it goes?
[shouts]
Whose pockets? Whose pockets? People's pockets.
Okay -- human beings, my friend.
Number one, so number one: you can raise taxes. That's not the approach that I would take.
Number two, you can make sure that the promises we make are promises that we can keep. And in my view, the areas that you have to consider are, for higher-income people ...

Well, that was kind of nutty... I went looking for someone coming to Mitt's defense but so far all I've found is a quote from a Romney spokesman on an update to a piece on Talking Points Memo:

Update: Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom took to Twitter to defend Romney's quote: "Do folks think corporations are buildings? They're people who incorporate to conduct business. They create jobs and hire more people."

Okay, that's better. I get it now. Meanwhile, the DCCC has already come out with a video using Streisand's "People" as background music. It's here.

I was all over the tube looking at comments. Someone wanted to know if corporate takeovers could now be considered kidnapping. Someone else wanted to know if two male corporations could get married or would they have to settle for a merger. So I added a few myself: When does the awkward teenage phase end? Is there a diet for obese corporations? Can they bake a cherry pie? Who does their nails? Can one of them become President of the United States? Can we punch them in the face? How do we tell their faces from their asses?

It's a zoo out there, my friends. Nuts is the new normal.

Moments of Sublime: On one of my quests for interesting distractions, I found a link to a blind painter. How does one paint if one can't see? Well, seeing is in the eye of the beholder, it seems. These artists would be remarkable if they were simply artists who could paint. The fact that they paint while blind makes them awesome in my eyes.

John Bramblitt became blind at age 30. He has never seen his wife or child, nor any of his subjects, yet he paints them beautifully and accurately. He explains his technique here.

This is Maria Santos. She was blinded in a car accident when she was just 22 years old and already an accomplished artist. Watch the video about her experiences here.

What inspirations they are. They've developed whole new ways of seeing in order to accomplish their dreams. There are lessons to be learned from them, but for now...just enjoy.

Cartoon of the Week

Clay Bennett, Chattanooga Times Free Press

Poor Old Detroit: Who is going to save it from itself?

2011-08-09T15:15:00.015-04:00

Detroit is my unofficial hometown. I spent more years in and around Detroit than anywhere else in the country. I loved growing up there, so it would be hard not to have feelings for the city now, even after all of the scandals, the neglect, the excesses, the tearing-down of beautiful landmarks, and the destruction of entire formerly lovely neighborhoods for no earthly good reason other than that nobody cared.

Even though I don't live there any longer, and haven't for years, I keep Detroit in my sights. It's like an old friend gone weary and self-destructive. All the hand-wringing in the world isn't going to save it from itself, but a friend is a friend forever, and often we delude ourselves by living on memories alone. We just can't let go.

My adopted city has long been at the mercy of elected officials gone greedy and potentatish. Once in office, the lot of them come to see the city coffers -- taxpayer money -- as their own personal gold-stores ripe for the taking.

Detroit Public Schools, the sole resource for educating the city's poor youth, has a dismal history of allowing the school board to spend much needed funds on fancy office furniture and through-the-roof expense accounts for exotic trips and chauffeur-driven limos. (Dan Rather ran a two-hour special on the DPS in May. They called it "A National Disgrace". That's putting it mildly.)

I was a student in Detroit Public Schools in the 1940s. Our buildings were beautiful, and so were the grounds. We had gorgeous conservatories and libraries filled with stacks of leather-bound books, made cozy and welcoming with huge stone fireplaces, polished oak walls and sparkling leaded-glass windows. I can still conjure up feeling pretty special while wandering around inside one of those schools.

I don't know what happened -- the blame is often put on White Flight, on racism, on the movement of factories outside the city -- but whatever it was, all that was golden and promising in Detroit is no more.

I blame some of it on the dissection of the neighborhoods by ill-placed freeways, and on the serious lack of any kind of useful public transportation. There simply is no way to use public buses to get around the city. Huge sections are left to fend for themselves if cars are not available.

I blame some of it on the wholesale destruction of historic buildings and neighborhoods where, along with the demolition of thousands of tons of brick and mortar, a sense of belonging, of history, of continuity, was crushed beyond repair.

But I blame most of it on a lack of caring. Jobs have left the city, leaving poverty behind. Any attempt at gentrifying the city is met with suspicion and a lack of support from city services, including police and fire departments. It's big news if a major chain looks to build a store in Detroit proper. The bigger news is how many choose not to build in Detroit.

I know for a fact that there are people in Detroit who hate what has happened to their city and are working to make it better. (Eleanor Josaitis was one of them. She passed last week and will be forever missed.) Former basketball star Dave Bing is the current mayor, having taken over after Kwame Kilpatrick's reign as head poobah of one of the most corrupt regimes in Detroit's history. I want to believe Bing when he says he's working hard to make life better in Detroit. I want to believe him when he says he's investigating this latest mess concerning the outright theft of monies meant to go to the poorest of the poor. (See below) I want to take him at his word, but when I see that he has warned his staff not to talk to the media about this, I would be a fool not to wonder why.

In a revelation that's almost hard to comprehend in a city as poor as Detroit, it's the city's Human Services Department that is currently under fire for personal and possibly illegal spending sprees. The Human Services Department is the place where the poor are supposed to be able to get the help they need. Funding comes in the form of Federal Community Services anti-poverty Block Grants, which are meant to be used for employment, education, income management, housing, nutrition, emergency services and health, according to federal guidelines.

Instead, they've been used to buy top-of-the-line washers and dryers, refrigerators and freezers, a laptop computer, a Wii Fit game, and assorted gift cards, none of which ever benefited the poor. This is the same department that was under fire earlier this year for spending $210,000 of the block grant money to buy expensive office furniture.

Here is the Detroit Free Press lede:

Three employees of the Detroit Human Services Department, including the director, have been fired after a Free Press investigation revealed mismanagement and misspending.

Mayor Dave Bing announced the firings after the city investigated the newspaper's report that $210,000 in federal funds intended for poor people were spent instead on office furniture.
Bing said the investigation found nothing "fraudulent or criminal in nature" and then revealed that "most of the furniture purchases have been accounted for, however, two televisions and 10 computers have been determined missing."

Bing said the investigation found "a lack of oversight and poor inventory management."

Good Lord. That's how Mayor Bing sees it. It'll be interesting to see how the Feds see it. An investigation follows some time this week.

Meanwhile, if that's not depressing enough, there's this story by former Free Press columnist Desiree Cooper in her "Detroit Diary". She writes that, in modern Detroit, people are going to jail for stealing things like diapers, formula, and vitamins, and not being able to pay fines for taking a fish out of season.

"Long thought to be a relic of the 19th Century, debtors’ prisons are still alive and well in Michigan,” my good friend, Kary Moss, ACLU of Michigan’s executive director, said in a press release. “Jailing our clients because they are poor is not only unconstitutional, it’s unconscionable and a shameful waste of resources. Our justice system should be a place where freedom has no price and equality prevails regardless of a defendant’s economic status.”

But a 2010 multi-state study by the ACLU entitled, "In for a Penny," showed that Michigan is one of the biggest offenders when it comes to jailing people who are too poor to pay fines.

"Michigan, a state hit harder than most by the recession, is trying to find operating funds in the most unlikely of places: the pockets of poor people who have been convicted of crimes," concluded the report. "Though the Michigan Constitution forbids debtors’ prisons and state laws explicitly prohibit the jailing of individuals who cannot pay court fines and fees because they are too poor, judges routinely threaten to jail and frequently do jail poor people who cannot pay."

So stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from a poor folks fund is simply "a lack of oversight and poor inventory management" but stealing a few dollars' worth of necessary food and goods, or not being able to pay a fine, is reason enough for a jail sentence?

Detroit in the 21st century. "Les Miserables" all over again, as Cooper says. What makes it even more disheartening is that these stories and others like them are all the ammunition Gov. Snyder and his Koch-addicted bunch need to get away with appointing "emergency financial managers" to take over school districts and municipalities and give them to private interests to do with them as they will. The question, as always, is will Detroit survive? The answer, as always, eludes us. It's up to the people now. We'll see if they think Detroit is still worth it.

One evening, little Gavroche had had no dinner; he remembered that he had had no dinner the day before either; this was becoming tiresome. Victor Hugo, Les Miserables.

FRIDAY FOLLIES: on Purple Prose, Mangy Mutts, Smokey Sunsets and R-E-S-P-E-C-T

2011-07-29T08:47:00.001-04:00

Every year I think about entering a sentence in the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, but it always happens after I've seen the announcement of that year's winner. This particular contest is like a "Worst Fiction in the World" contest, where contestants have to come up with an opening sentence for an imaginary novel that is worse than, or at least comparable to, Edward George Bulwer-Lytton's first sentence of his 1830 novel, Paul Clifford (and the first line of many of Snoopy's unfinished novels).

(Here's the entire sentence. You be the judge):

"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."

I love the idea of coming up with a sentence so godawful bad it could actually win an award. I think I could do that. Write badly, I mean. A sentence that would drop them to their knees, where, when the dust settled, they would find an entirely new perspective; or better yet, fly them to the moon, where green cheese is a mere but pleasant myth, but the ethereal man who smiles down on Mother Earth is as real as their hearts will allow, thus opening a path to thinking kind thoughts of me.

Anyway. The 2011 over-all winner was a professor from Oshkosh, WI, who sent in this sentence:

"Cheryl's mind turned like the vanes of a wind-powered turbine, chopping her sparrow-like thoughts into bloody pieces that fell onto a growing pile of forgotten memories."

I personally thought this one, from the "Purple Prose" category, should have won, but click on the link above and see what you think:

"As his small boat scudded before a brisk breeze under a sapphire sky dappled with cerulean clouds with indigo bases, through cobalt seas that deepened to navy nearer the boat and faded to azure at the horizon, Ian was at a loss as to why he felt blue."

More odd news from Wisconsin: A highway worker found a dead animal by the side of the road that was like no other he had ever seen. "It's completely hairless [he said], almost like leather. It has a canine-like head and a fox- or dog-type head. The rear legs are coon-like. The tail is almost like an opossum."

Some people think it's a chupacabra, while others think it's just an animal with a severe case of mange. But it turns out there have been sightings of similar animals all over the place. And unlike Bigfoot, there's actually a carcass. (Either the genus Bigfoot never dies or they disintegrate and turn into dust, giving them an entirely new perspective, leaving nothing to us except our own imaginings.)

And speaking of oddities, how about Arizona and those dust storms? Where the heck did they come from? And why are they all of a sudden called "haboobs"? Such a ruckus in that touchy state over an Arabic word for "Holy shit! Look at that thing!" Articleman wrote about it on dagblog last week. (He lives in Arizona but he's okay. He's not one of them. Lordy, if the dust ever settles in that nutty state, everyone could breathe easy again.)

A Flash mob comes to a DC Walmart: I love flash mob videos, but this is a new one on me. All they want is a little R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Just as much fun for the rest of us but it doesn't look like the Walmart manager is enjoying himself. Still, he let it happen. Good for him. (Thanks to GottaLaff at Political Carnival for this.)

A moment sublime: There was a forest fire to the west of us last week. Not close enough to cause any concern for us, but it produced a spectacular sunset. It went on and on. I ran out of purple prose long before it finally subsided.

Cartoon of the Week:

Bob Englehart - Hartford Courant

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Rosa Parks: No Way to Treat a Lady

2011-07-27T21:41:00.001-04:00

People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.

Rosa Parks, My Story.

In December, 1955, after a long day at work as a seamstress at a Montgomery, Alabama department store, Rosa Parks got on her bus and plunked down in a first-row seat of the section clearly defined as Blacks Only. "The back of the bus". The unwritten, unofficial public transportation rule in Montgomery said no white person should be standing in the aisle if a black person has a seat to give up to them. Four white men got on the bus but the white section was full. The four blacks in the first row of the black section were told to get up and give up their seats. Three of the four moved. Parks sat and waited. She was arrested and fingerprinted on the day which would mark the end of what might have been for her a quiet, uneventful life. It was the impetus for the Montgomery bus boycott, an effort that would last just over a year before the U. S Supreme Court struck down the laws on transportation segregation.

She wasn't the first one to have refused to give up a seat on a Montgomery bus (the civil rights movement was already well under way) but black leaders, including a young, untested Martin Luther King, wanted an issue in Montgomery and Rosa Parks was perfect in the role of innocent provocateur. She was far from being apolitical, however. At the time of her arrest, she was the secretary of the Montgomery NAACP and was working with other groups to engage in passive resistance to the Jim Crow laws of her state.

Her actions brought unwelcome public attention to Montgomery in the form of that year-long bus boycott. The days of segregated buses, schools, lunch counters, restrooms, and drinking fountains were numbered, though it would take a few more ugly years before certain thick-headed whites got the message.

It was one of those iconic events that registers and resonates until both the event and the person triggering it become larger than life. She became Rosa Parks, the embodiment of passive civil disobedience, and continued as an activist throughout her life, until a series of illnesses brought her work to a halt.

Before she died at age 92, she co-founded The Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development in Detroit, the city where she was living when she died, "to motivate and direct youth not targeted by other programs to achieve their highest potential". Her will specifically left the bulk of her estate to the institute -- some $372,000 plus what had once been described as over 10 million dollars worth of memorabilia. Last week the Detroit Free Press front page headline read: "Rosa Parks' estate was drained. Cash Gone, memorabilia is in limbo."

Parks died in October, 2005. By November her relatives were petitioning the court to overturn the will that left them with just dregs and neglected to give them control over the estate. By the time it was over, lawyers' fees had eaten up most of the cash, and the Institute she so loved was no longer in control of the funds or the memorabilia.

This is one complicated story, but this is what David Ashenfelter at the Freep says, in part, is at the heart of it:

In exchange for confirming the validity of Parks' will and trust, [Steven Cohen, lawyer for co-founder Elaine Steele and the institute] said, the institute agreed to give the relatives a part of the royalties it received from licensing Parks' likeness and image. Parks had assigned those rights to the institute in a 2000 agreement that wasn't part of her estate.

Cohen said the institute reluctantly agreed to sell or license its memorabilia collection to a museum or historical institute and give some of the proceeds to the relatives.

Though the settlement agreement called for [court-appointed family attorneys, John Chase Jr. and Melvin Jefferson Jr.] to bow out of the proceedings, Cohen said the pair refused to leave and kept billing the estate for fees.

Worse, Cohen said, the pair falsely accused him of divulging details of the confidential settlement agreement during a 2009 Michigan Court of Appeals hearing where the institute unsuccessfully challenged Chase and Jefferson's request for $105,000 in fees.

Even though they weren't parties to the settlement agreement and had no legal standing to do so, Cohen said Chase and Jefferson asked [Wayne County Probate Judge Freddie Burton Jr.] to order the institute and Steele to forfeit Parks' estate assets, including the memorabilia collection.

He said Burton agreed, even though confidentiality disputes were to be submitted to binding arbitration, not Burton, per the settlement agreement. Moreover, Cohen said Burton never allowed the institute to present witnesses, documents or defend itself at a trial before taking the institute's property.
Cohen said Chase and Jefferson never specifically identified what Cohen supposedly disclosed or who heard it.

In early 2010, Cohen said, Burton approved a verbal request that the institute and Steele pay Chase and Jefferson $120,075 for an unexplained claim for fees. Cohen said no trial was ever held.

If I'm reading this right, not a single request by Rosa Parks was honored by her family. A couple of judges and a couple of lawyers appear to have colluded to give the family what Rosa Parks herself didn't want them to have. There's a reason she wanted her estate to go to an institute helping young people realize their potential. It should be clear to anyone who has ever heard of her. It's because she was Rosa Parks and it was her legacy.

The "back seat" bus before

And after (Henry Ford Museum, Dearborn, MI)

Now the funds are gone and her huge, important memorabilia collection is up for auction at Guernsey's Auctioneers in NY. If it goes well, the entire collection will stay together and intact at a museum somewhere. But if Ms. Parks wanted it to stay in Detroit at the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development, her own baby, that's where it should be.

Seems pretty straightforward to me. I could have solved this problem pro bono by simply saying, "Here's the will, there's the door". But of course nobody asked me.
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FRIDAY FOLLIES: On the Palin Docudramody, the Cantor uninvite, and Will Rogers' finest moments

2011-07-22T15:25:00.004-04:00

All alone, I'm so all alone... When the Sarah Palin docudromedy "The Undefeated" debuted last week, Conor Friedersdorf happened to be visiting his parents in All Red All the Time Orange County. He went to see the Sarah movie hoping to interview Sarah fans to find out what the hell they're thinking. Except he didn't find any. In fact, he didn't find anyone at all--hardly. He wrote about it in the Atlantic and -- I don't know -- I just wanted to cry. I mean, an entire movie about Sarah Palin and even the Orange County gushers can't bear to watch it? That's just sad.

But wait. That can't be right. It's La Belle Palin we're talking about here. So, okay! The Washington Times says the lamestream press got it allllll wrong. As usual. On purpose. It may not have been boffo, but it did pretty good compared to that movie about Eliot Spitzer or that movie about Jack Abramoff. But the last Harry Potter movie debuted on the same weekend. Harry Potter! So what would you expect? Jeez.

And here's the other thing (sniffle): If hundreds of thousands of people had only read Ben Howe's pre-review on Andrew Breitbart's Big Hollywood, Harry Potter would be eating dust! The movie is brilliant! Dammit!

Eric Cantor, in true democratic spirit (how'd he let that get by?), invited everyone (not just his nearest, dearest, most oblivious fans) to his Facebook page for a confab on whether he and his buddies should destroy the country swiftly or take the chance that the voters might not notice the country's going down the tubes and and let it dangle in the wind a while before tightening the noose.

Well, those damned liberals got wind of it and got a flash mob going, trying to disrupt the whole exciting exercise. Honestly, there's only so much tolerance for that sort of thing when you're a Republican, so Eric's peeps got busy deleting all the leftist comments, ruing the day they ever got the silly idea of opening it up to anyone, just anyone, in the first place.

So if you look today you'll see it's still open, but they've figured out that allowing one or two Commie comments (out of thousands submitted, I'm guessing, if our guys are doing their jobs) will draw 10 or 20 delightfully defensive comments from their nearest and dearest. Works like a charm! Woo hoo! (I would try out the commenting but I would have to "like" Eric Cantor and I'm not ready to go there yet.)

"Will Rogers and American Politics" was on our local PBS station last night. (Another fine program from the folks having to spend way too much time fighting the privateers in order to bring us public television.) Will started out as a soft-spoken, lasso-twirling Vaudeville comedian and became America's foremost political humorist. (He was the Jon Stewart of the 1930s, come to think of it.) There was plenty to make fun of when it came to politicians and politics, but he was a gentle man, a compassionate man, and the Great Depression tore at him until he could no longer take what was happening in his beloved country. He took to the airwaves and talked about it seriously. Listening to the audio of his speech about unemployment, I'm hearing a man who is almost done in by the enormity of the suffering caused by that era's masters of greed and avarice. (The radio broadcast was filmed and is shown on the PBS documentary. It's almost unbearable to watch, Will's pain is so palpable.)

I didn't hear that same hopelessness when he spoke before a group of bankers (who must have decided to invite him after a late night of illegal hard stuff), calling them "loan sharks" and "interest hounds".

You are without a doubt the most disgustingly rich audience I ever talked to, with the possible exception of the Bootleggers Local Union #1 along with the enforcement officers.

Now I understand you hold this convention every year to announce what the annual gyp will be. I often wondered where the depositors hold their conventions.

I see where your convention was opened by prayer. You send outside the ranks to find somebody that knows how to pray. You should have had one creditor there to show you how to pray.

I see by your speeches that you're very optimistic of the business conditions of the coming year, Boy, I don't blame you. If I had your money I'd be optimistic, too.

You have a wonderful organization. I understand you have 10,000 here and with what you have in various federal prisons brings your membership up to around 30,000.

Well, goodbye, paupers. You're the finest bunch of shylocks that ever foreclosed upon a widder's home.

Will Rogers on an early laptop. (I own that exact make and model. It's almost as if Will himself is here with me.)

Moment of Sublime: A freed humpback whale thanks the crew who saved her. This is a feel-good story that may or may not be what it seems. The crew of a fishing boat found the whale so entangled in fishing line it was probably hours away from sure death. It took them about an hour to free the whale, and when they finally did, it swam a short distance and then put on an enthralling performance, convincing the crew that it was for their benefit.

Far be it for me to be cynical (and I can't believe this is me writing this) but it could be that that was as far as the whale could swim right then, and the glorious leaps could have meant it was gasping for air, trying to get its lungs and other internal parts working again. But the visuals are stunning and I hate myself for thinking such doltish thoughts.

Cartoon of the week:

1922 cartoon. Some things never change

*(Cross-posted at Dagblog here)

In Our Own Voices: Getting it Right While Blogging

2011-07-18T10:13:00.002-04:00

Once there was a post by Simon Dumenco called, "Poor Steve Jobs Had to Go Head to Head With Weinergate in the Twitter Buzzstakes. And the Weiner Is ...." It appeared online on June 8. The next day The Huffington Post published a piece by Amy Lee called, "Anthony Weiner vs. Steve Jobs: Who Won On Twitter?". The thrust of the Lee article was the same as that of Dumenco's. In fact, nearly the entire article consisted of quotes from Dumenco's piece. There was a link at the end, but, as Simon Dumenco saw it, why bother? Everything that needed to be said was already in Amy Lee's piece. No need to go off-site to read the rest. There was no "rest". (The clicked links from the HuffPo piece to his own numbered a mere 57 -- a pitiful number, considering the source.)

That was bad, and HuffPo's Executive Business Editor Peter Goodman promptly apologized, but there are stirrings out there that this isn't the odd blog out over at Arianna's place. HuffPo has done this many times before. Former NYT editor Bill Keller wrote about it in the NYT magazine last March:

“Aggregation” can mean smart people sharing their reading lists, plugging one another into the bounty of the information universe. It kind of describes what I do as an editor. But too often it amounts to taking words written by other people, packaging them on your own Web site and harvesting revenue that might otherwise be directed to the originators of the material. In Somalia this would be called piracy. In the mediasphere, it is a respected business model.

The queen of aggregation is, of course, Arianna Huffington, who has discovered that if you take celebrity gossip, adorable kitten videos, posts from unpaid bloggers and news reports from other publications, array them on your Web site and add a left-wing soundtrack, millions of people will come. How great is Huffington’s instinctive genius for aggregation? I once sat beside her on a panel in Los Angeles (on — what else? — The Future of Journalism). I had come prepared with a couple of memorized riffs on media topics, which I duly presented. Afterward we sat down for a joint interview with a local reporter. A moment later I heard one of my riffs issuing verbatim from the mouth of Ms. Huffington. I felt so . . . aggregated.

Oooo. Ouch! I confess I've heard the word "aggregate" bandied about before but didn't really understand how it might actually apply to a lowly blogger like me. Now, with the brouhaha over HuffPo's publication of a post composed almost entirely of paragraphs from someone else's article, I've been thinking about what blogs like mine -- where other voices are prominent, where links are leading everywhere, where not all of the content is original to me -- might actually fit in with journalistic ethics and rules, even though, in the end, as chief writer/editor/publisher, I'm pretty much free to do almost anything I want on my own pages.

What is my obligation as a blogger? Mine is a political blog, not a personal one, and I've known from the start that if I want my blog to be taken seriously (even though I'm fishing for smiles now and then) I have to be mindful of what I'm putting out there. I know when I link to and/or quote someone else's work, it's not mine to mess with. I can't change the words, change the meaning, put it on my page without attribution, or -- perish the thought -- print the entire piece. It doesn't belong to me. (I suspect in some cases I should get permission to use them, but I rarely do. I figure as long as I'm using a paragraph or two and as long as I tell where it came from, preferably with a link, I should be okay. I could be horribly wrong about that, too.)

So, okay. That's bad enough. But what about when we grab something from another site or via the social networks that looks legitimate, seems plausible, but turns out to be all wrong, and we've passed it on? We part-time, unpaid opinion bloggers already have to work hard at overcoming our dillettante reputation. It doesn't help when the facts go by the wayside in order to get to the clever, hopefully brilliant observations we all want to be singled out and known for.

On Poynter I found an article that answers some of the questions about what to look for in order to verify a piece you want to share or quote. (It's written for journalists, but I personally think political bloggers have the same obligations to their readers.) It specifically zeroes in on social networks like Twitter or Facebook, where I admit I spend a good amount of time scouring the snippets for leads to stories that might interest me enough to write about. I also admit I'm astounded by how much misinformation there is in just those two places.

From Jeff Sonderman's Poynter piece (relevant to what I'm talking about here) :

Evaluating credibility
Consider the social history of the source. Has this person been on the network for years, or is this a brand-new account with no profile photo, friends or history? Has the person regularly posted information that was credible? In the rare case that someone deliberately tries to spread false information, it will probably be from a newly created or fictitious account, not from a social profile someone spent years building up.

Seek social corroboration. Are other social network users posting similar, independent reports from the same location? If a tornado really touched down in a city of 8 million people, for example, there ought to be more than one photo of it. Be sure to look for other primary-source reports, not just retweets or messages based on the account you already have.

Without naming names or even going into the entire story, I read on FB the other day that a famous news person I really admire had been canned. I was pretty sure it didn't actually happen, and when I looked at the provided link, it clearly showed that the startling new information was in a piece written over a year ago in a piece published by The Onion!

That's why I wrote this, in fact. That sort of thing doesn't go unnoticed. Sometimes it grows wings and flies. I love blogging and I'm all for encouraging more of it. I just want us to get it right.
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