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Bush’s Wars:
The true cost of war



 

ESL

English as a Slippery Language

Sen. John Kyl of Arizona, blathering to the C-SPAN camera on the floor of the U.S. Senate in yet another Republican class warfare assault: “If you want an abortion, you go to Planned Parenthood, and that’s well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does.”

The truth, reported by scores of fact checkers: Less than three percent of Planned Parenthood’s budget is used for abortion services.

The next day, after Kyl’s televised lie had spread all over the 24-hour news cycle, his office issued this explanation: “The senator’s remarks were not intended to be factual statements.”

Kyl then had his remarks stricken from the Congressional Record.

Three slippery snakes for John.

snakey snakey snakey

Sarah Palin went to Wisconsin to curry favor with the billionaire Koch Brothers by supporting the Republican union-busting rampage . . .

 

Intelligence 2, Intolerance 0

Sometimes common sense prevails in the eternal struggle against repressive ideology. It happened here in Arkansas twice last week with judgments in different state courts.

First, the Arkansas Supreme Court smacked down an absurd law that had prohibited child adoption or foster care by persons unmarried and cohabiting.

The law, clearly aimed at gays and lesbians, had been dumped onto the statute books by a 2008 voter initiative pushed by the familiar horde of Bible-thumping busybodies whose mission is to make life miserable for the rest of us. Karl Rove’s cultural-hot-button brigade XMart brought right-wing extremists to the polls for this one in a presidential election year.

Second, a trial jury in Clarksville deliberated only briefly before throwing out a local prosecutor’s attempt to criminalize an adult entertainment store. The sex shop has operated for five years in the same location in a commercial area just off Interstate 40, about six miles from where we live in a neighboring county. It has caused no problems for anyone but stiff-necks.

The case was an example of a prosecutor abusing common sense in search of notoriety . . .

 

A national public emergency

I would like my children and grandchildren to be able to think for themselves. I hope they can be equipped to challenge ignorance when they find it, and to subdue it with truth.

Today I fear for those aspirations.

The Vandals have come again. They have been here before, I know, because I learned of their previous visits from my teachers in school. I learned from the books I have read, alarm bellfrom the newspapers and magazines and broadcasts I have consumed through the years. I know the damage the Vandals have wrought in previous assaults.

And the Vandals are among us again. They are closing libraries. They are deprecating the teaching of history. They are rewriting textbooks. These philistines are eviscerating school programs in the arts.

Beyond their attack on education and knowledge, they memorialize and celebrate sedition as if it were patriotism. They try to institutionalize racism and xenophobia by cloaking them in the guise of public hearings, or investigations, or security strategies. These gangsters would have us treat assassination, kidnapping, bondage, torture and other depredations as mere necessities of geopolitical intercourse.

Not many weeks ago they even bowdlerized a public reading of the U.S. Constitution to shield themselves from the passages they find offensive . . .

 

Perspective in 24 minutes

Take a break and watch this. It will hold your attention, guaranteed.

It might make you weep. It might make you angry. It might make you want to shake Sgt. Tyrone Jordan’s hand, even give him a hug. It might make you want to go sign up to do something worthwhile.


As of this writing, the video had 34,719 views on YouTube in three weeks.

What does it say that a clip titled “Charlie Sheen ‘Explaining His Actions’ interview” had 6,893,575 viewers in two weeks? Consider that a hysterical cheerleader in something called a “national hip hop championship” had 422,122 views in its first week online.

That is our society’s 2011 version of perspective, I suppose.

Remarkable, is it not, that this “Blood and Dust" video — which could stand alone as a U.S. Army recruitment tool — was produced and broadcast by al Jazeera? That network, whose English-language channel produces some seriously good journalism, has been de facto blacklisted by the corporate cable and satellite TV moguls in the United States.

Pieces of al Jazeera’s work are on LinkTV, the non-commercial network carried by satellite providers and local access cable channels.

A broadband Internet connection will bring in al Jazeera online.

Al Jazeera is carried on Canadian cable systems and wants to compete in the U.S. But it is available on just three local cable systems in this country. No Dish. No DirecTV. No Cox, no Comcast, no Time Warner, no Cablevision.

Another triumph of the free market, oligarchy style.

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Earthquake

Susan had just finished watching the Academy Awards broadcast last night. I had gone to bed long before, and was sound asleep. A few seconds after 2300 CST, the earth shifted under central Arkansas. The epicenter of a 4.7 magnitude earthquake was 70 miles east of our abode.

This morning, when I read the news and asked her about it, Susan admitted she did not notice the quake. But people across Arkansas and as far away as Tulsa, Oklahoma, more than 200 miles west of the epicenter, called police when they felt the shake. Tall buildings swayed in quake 2-27-11Little Rock, 40 miles south of the epicenter. Books fell from shelves and pictures from walls 60 miles away.

Earthquakes are usually blamed on the forces of nature. But the circumstances are different in our part of the country. Commercial exploiters are hard at work here, altering the geologic structure beneath our feet.

What they do is called “fracking” in the vernacular of the petroleum extraction industry. It is hydraulic fracturing of underground rock formations, a technique . . .

 

The other shoe is dropping (on our necks)

A couple of months ago the Social Security Administration sent me (and 30 million other retirees) a notice that the U.S. cost of living had not increased in 2010, thus there would be no adjustment in our monthly stipend for 2011.

"No change in the cost of living?" I thought. "Where are these guys, on Big Rock Candy Mountain?"

The government numbers, massaged as they are by statisticians and politicians, inflationand blown to and fro by extraordinary winds of change in the world economy, have not reflected the realities consumers encounter in the marketplace.

Like anyone who rides behind an internal combustion engine, I am accustomed to paying a few cents more per gallon each time I visit the corner gas station. At the time I received my SSA letter, fuel prices were jumping six to 10 cents each week.

At the grocery, prices on breadstuffs and crackers had been rising like a pan of grandmother’s biscuits for more than a year. We eat no beef in our household, but I could not fail to notice the insulting prices on the meat case displays. The same for vegetables . . .

 

The foes of truth, revealed again

A heaping, steaming platter of secret institutional dealings and dialogue summons a dessert almost as tasty as the entrée itself.

Our delectable bonus is the revelation — or confirmation — of which of our contemporaries will support the freedoms our civil society professes. Who truly believes in democracy and an informed populace? The ongoing WikiLeaks dump of diplomatic correspondence gives us another opportunity to grade the players.

Slavishly following the script, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama deplored the publication . . .

 

The summer it all broke down

No writings appeared in this space during the Summer of Twenty-Ten. The months of June, July. August and September loomed up and rumbled past like a convoy of black SUVs. The menacing procession, clearly bound for perdition, was visible to me only intermittently through a thickening fog.

I turned away from the disturbing parade, but I heard October go clanking down that same road to hell, sounding like a Nazi Panzer division with all 88s a'blazing. By that time I had embraced a sufficient number of personal projects and chores to engage body and mind and keep myself mostly oblivious to the distressing sights and sounds blasting from radios, TVs, billboards and web pages.

My written words refused to come, even on those few occasions when I was moved to half-heartedly beckon them. This summer presented no proper environment for reason. The language was owned by the Becks, the Palins, DeMints and Bartons, ordered up and paid for . . .

 

A friend of Blanche no more

The sun is up, the cats are fed, and I am enjoying my third cup of coffee this morning. In a few minutes I will drive up the road to my polling place and I will vote to fire a United States senator who has betrayed the people who elected her.

Blanche Lincoln had my support in 2004 when she last faced the electorate. Our car bore a bumper sticker with her name, and our checkbook was lightened by donations to her campaign.

But within a few months, Sen. Lincoln had us looking for alternatives. She had come out of the closet to reveal herself as one of the DINOs (Democrats In Name Only) unwilling to stand up against the pro-business, pro-war, anti-labor, anti-consumer, police-state policies and legislation of the Bush Administration and the Republican-controlled Congress.

Lincoln infuriated me when she voted with the Republicans for the disgusting “bankruptcy abuse” act of 2005, which was nothing but corporate welfare . . .

 

Mr. President, can we rethink this?

News Item, March 31, 2010: The Obama Administration mapannounced plans to open large areas off the U.S. Atlantic Coast for offshore oil drilling.


News Item, April 25, 2010: An offshore Louisiana drilling platform which exploded and sank last week, killing 11 of BP’s crew members, is leaking large amounts of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico. It is not known whether or when the leak can be capped. The U.S. Coast Guard is assisting with containment efforts.

Update (4-27-2010) The driller's emergency plan fails. Remotely controlled submersibles cannot reach the optimistically named non-functioning "blowout preventer" valves amid a tangle of structural steel and drilling pipe on the Gulf floor. Unless the valves function, the leak cannot be shut off any time soon.

Update (4-28-2010) Officials want to try burning the oil on the surface. The leak is five times as bad as BP first claimed. It is belching more than 200,000 gallons of heavy crude oil every day. The twisted pipes are leaking in more than one place, 6,000 feet below the surface of the Gulf.

Update (4-29-2010) BP asks for help from other agencies, a legal prerequisite for federal intervention, and the Obama Administration scrambles the squadron. The spill looms over the ecologically priceless marshes of Louisiana. The plan to burn the surface oil is scrubbed because of adverse wind and waves. Chemical dispersants are used, but the scale of the spill is too massive for this method to have a significant effect.

Update (4-30-2010) Voices acquire a tone of resignation as efforts to contain the spreading crude prove inadequate. Both the oil slick and the wellhead feeding it are out of human control for now. The slick will reach the Louisiana coastal marshes within hours. Spillage to date is estimated at 1.5 million gallons, growing daily. Realists admit this could become the biggest oil spill in history — greater than the Exxon Valdez wreck — and the worst single ecological trauma ever inflicted by the hand of man.

Update (5-9-2010) BP’s “containment dome” scheme fails as the outlet pipe clogs with icy slush. Many scientists and academics insist that the flow from the broken well is far greater than BP is admitting. Video images of the spurting gusher show at least 10,000 barrels of oil — and perhaps as much as 40,000 barrels (nearly 1.7 million gallons) — is pouring into the Gulf every 24 hours. BP admits to Congress the flow theoretically could be as high as 60,000 barrels a day. Massive streams of oil have been discovered beneath the surface, flowing with the current many miles from the leak.

Update (5-29-2010) Louisiana’s seafood industry is crushed; the runaway gusher has ruined the coastal ecology and poisoned the spawning grounds for fish, shrimp and oysters for miles along the Gulf coast. President Obama has canceled further deepwater drilling and leasing off the U.S. Gulf, Atlantic and Arctic coasts. BP fails again with its latest schemes to stop the toxic flow. First, the oil and gas pressure overwhelms a “top kill” (pumping heavy mud down the proken pipe against the flow), then a “junk shot” (cramming golf balls and pieces of rubber into the breach) also flops.

Final Comment (5-30-2010) Again, an unrestrained free-market attitude has put America and the world at the mercy of greedy capitalists who cannot fix their own high-risk blunders. Remember the Republican chants of ”Drill, Baby, Drill!”? Remember the teabaggers’ cries to step aside and let private-sector entrepreneurs do their thing, create jobs for all and carry our economy to glory? Now, once again, these free-market evangelists come pleading for government help. But this time, there will be no bailout.

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Ironic and shameless

How much bitter irony can Americans endure? The masters of the universe on Wall Street party on as if it were still 2007, while we poor sods on Main Street suffer through disappearing jobs, falling wages and higher prices for everything from ice cream to insurance.

The multi-million-dollar bonuses are back in the executive suites, profits are bigger than ever, the shady casino games go on unchanged and unregulated in the canyons of the bulls and bears. There has been no Great Recession on Wall Street.

Now comes Moody’s Investor Services, part of the capitalist mob Moody's logoresponsible for the Great Meltdown of 2008, proposing to lecture us on the importance of prudent financial practices. Moody's is actually jawboning the federal government (that’s us), the very folks who rescued them and their entire Wall Street thiefdom with newly printed money — cash we might have used for constructive social purposes. For example, funding health care for all our citizens.

A securities rating service which stamped a Triple-A seal on billions of dollars of worthless sub-prime mortgage bonds . . .

 

Freedom, doled out by the dollar

Back in the summer of 1988 as Ronald Reagan's reign was winding down, I sat in the office of the company garage at the big-city newspaper where I worked, chatting with Charlie, the crusty supervisor who ran the motor pool of delivery trucks and company cars.

It was a presidential election year, and the subject of politics came up. I don’t recall the context, but at one point Charlie exclaimed, “It’ll take this country 25 years to recover from that sonofabitch!”

The S.O.B. he meant was Mr. Reagan.

I don't know if Charlie is still among us (I hope so, because he was one of the good guys), but if he is still sentient somewhere he will recognize that he seriously underestimated the timeline for the nation's recovery from Reagan’s wrecking ball. That sad legacy will remain long past 2013.

The harshest reminder of Reaganism this year was last month’s 5-4 Supreme Court decision (Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission) which magically turned corporations into people. So, while we struggle through a severe economic recession caused in large part by the pro-business, anti-tax, anti-government, anti-regulation bias fertilized by Reagan and his acolytes 30 years ago, now we must share our constitutional liberties with artificial creations called corporations.

The Supreme Court has opened the gates to a flood . . .

 

Privatizing privacy

Painless, isn’t it, when corporate tentacles reach out gently and silently to suck up little pieces of our life for company use? It’s data death by a thousand cuts. We don’t even know we’re being bled.

As if data mining for profit weren’t bad enough, last week we learned with certainty that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is putting on a Google searchfull-court press to track our every online move. They admitted it in public, and they have state police agencies joining the assault.

Alas, we have known for at least five years that corporations won’t stand up for individual citizens when government spooks demand to spy on us without a warrant, or even a valid cause.

So this well-done, three-minute movie offers some big, honkin’ elbow nudges about what we might be giving up . . .

 

Roping the Sacred Cow Elephant

Have we Americans ever been plagued by so many sacred cow elephants at one time?

The elephant in the room, you know, is the hulking topic which no one wants to mention. The sacred cow roams free, because it would be blasphemy to corral her. And a sacred cow elephant is that which neither can be discussed nor brought to heel.

One American sacred cow elephant is the endemic waste and corruption in the so-called “war on drugs”. Another American sacred cow elephant is the rampant collusion among top management and brass in the Pentagon and its corporate vendors. Another American sacred cow elephant is the cruelty and denial of humanity so integral to free-market capitalism.

On Friday evening’s PBS Newshour, something very gratifying occurred: Light was shined on an American sacred cow elephant, and a lasso was tossed at her neck.

This particular sacred cow elephant was tax increases. and the mentioner with a rope in his hand was a Reagan Republican . . .

 

That face on the screen, again

Even when he is not running for president, one of the most dangerous spots in Washington is anyplace between John McCain and a TV camera. That has not changed since his drubbing in the 2008 presidential campaign.

Since inauguration day a year ago, the Arizona Republican’s face has been on the tube almost as much as President Obama’s. McCain pops up on the card again this weekend, appearing on Sunday morning’s Face the Nation for the fifth time in 12 months.

Here is the scorecard, compiled by Washington Monthly:

Since the president's inauguration, McCain has been on Meet the Press three times (December 6, July 12, and March 29), This Week three times (September 27, August 23, and May 10), Fox News Sunday four times (December 20, July 2, March 8, and January 25), and CNN's State of the Union four times (January 10, October 11, August 2, and February 15). His appearance on Face the Nation will be his fifth in the last year (January 24, October 25, August 30, April 26, and February 8).

Pretty remarkable, considering that he is not in the Republican Party leadership, has no key legislation before the Senate and is not involved in any important legislative negotiations.

Ignoring the hand of collegiality extended by President Obama, McCain has voted the straight Party-of-No obstructionist line in the Senate and has opposed all of the administration’s initiatives. He has buried forever the “maverick” label and wasted an opportunity to become one of his country's respected senior statesmen. John McCain now is just another right-wing troll.

His frequent TV invitations are the more puzzling because some of the senator’s public utterances have cast doubt on his mental acuity.

This week, Sen. McCain’s confusion and misunderstanding of facts in the Underpants Bomb investigation was only the latest example of his decline.

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Our dying democracy

For a few days, while obsessing over the warped and unseemly process by which the United States Senate arrived at its version of health-insurance reform legislation, I have been glancing frequently at an unused bumper sticker lying atop a chest of drawers in our living room. The sticker, which you see here, is stacked with some others I stockpiled a couple of years ago in a fit of frustration.

bumper sticker

Now, one day after the Supreme Court ruled that free speech shall be apportioned according to the heft of a corporate bank account, I cannot stop thinking about the message on that bumper sticker.

Last night, still feeling queasy from the brutal beating . . .

 

Secure in mind

Bruce Schneier is a security expert whose reasoned approach to the subject of terrorism is refreshing. I am a regular reader of his blog and a regular listener to the podcasts of his monthly newsletter. If you are weary of the Chicken Little din from the fear lobby, give Mr. Schneier a try.

After the underwear bomb attempt on Northwest 253 burst into the headlines December 25, Schneier was in demand as an analyst for both print and broadcast media.

For a long time, he has been strongly critical of what he calls "security theater" — particularly the knee-jerk expenditure of huge sums of our money on high-profile busy work in response to the last attack. These theatrics, he says, are a form of "magical thinking."

"It relies on the idea that we can somehow make ourselves safer by protecting against what the terrorists happened to do last time," Schneier wrote in an opinion column for CNN.

 

The forty thousand

If Stan McChrystal wants the president to ship 40,000 more Americans to Afghanistan, I have a suggestion for Mr. Obama: Send the general the 40,000 U.S. schoolteachers who lost their jobs this past summer because our state and local school districts couldn’t pay them.

Under my plan, let’s pay the teachers $100,000 bonuses to sign up for two one-year tours teaching Afghan school children. Pay the teachers $100,000 a year. That would be a stimulus plan guaranteed to take people off the U.S. unemployment lines and put them directly to work at a decent wage.

By my calculations, this would cost America a measly $12 billion spread across two years. That investment would be only about 5% of what it will cost taxpayers if Gen. McChrystal gets 40,000 people in military uniforms, with tanks and planes and guns and ammunition pouring through a 10,000-mile-long supply line.

Conservatives who obsess about budget deficits should love the idea of a 95% cut in expenditures.

Time and time again, we are told that the way to win in Afghanistan . . .

 

Consolation, anyone?

My natural tendency, and my emotional preference, has been to perceive homo sapiens as a rational species — or at least a species evolving toward rationality by applying our special abilities of reasoning and abstract thought. But Halloween seems an appropriate time to admit that we are still a long, long way from rationality.

As individuals, so many of us still cling passionately to the supernatural. We embrace phantasmic tales and illusions, apparently to shield ourselves from the harsh evidence of reality. We might smile knowingly at the ghosts and goblins of Halloween, yet the next day embrace a far-fetched fantasy peddled by charlatans playing to our insecurities, our passions, our prejudices.

To realize the breadth of irrationality among us, we need only spend an hour browsing the Internet . . .

 

It’s the hope, dummies

The Nobel Committee's selection of Barack Obama for the 2009 Peace Prize has flummoxed the wiseguys who think the core energy of the Cosmos flows exclusively in a circuit between Manhattan and a few prestige addresses in Washington, DC.

These oracles read tea leaves, test the wind, study their navels and report their analyses to powerful insiders hopeand to the public. They need to look smart and aware. They don't like surprises. When the Nobel selection of President Obama was announced, their knee-jerk reaction was to gasp indignantly and ask, "What has he done to deserve it?"

Republican hypocrites whined about his winning the prize despite a shortage of accomplishments. These are the same saboteurs who in the nine months of the Obama Administration have done everything in their power to derail the president’s initiatives while openly praying for his failure.

Even liberal columnists and commentators questioned the Nobel decision. Pundits out on the right wing gagged and spluttered, nearly incoherent in their ideological rage.

 

Silly Democrats

Somewhere in the DNA of many politicians, particularly Democratic politicians who sit in Congress, is something we might call the Silly Gene. Every so often, it causes them to act like a flock of panicked chickens in a windstorm.

The latest evidence of the Silly Gene was last week’s wing-flapping squawkfest over AIG’s bonuses. The House of Representatives flew into a tizzy, eventually voting 328-93 to confiscate most of the executive bonuses paid to AIG employes within reach of the IRS.

The loudest cacklers cried for a list of names of bonus recipients. They were no better than rabble-rousers working up the passions of a street mob.

Just six Democrats kept their sanity and voted against this clearly unconstitutional bill. (I am pleased that Vic Snyder of Little Rock, the best legislator in my state's delegation, was one of the six.)

The whole thing reeked of the brain-dead kerfuffle (pun intended) to overturn Terri Schiavo’s right to die . . .

 

Lies from the echo chamber

Two of the planet’s inveterate twisters of fact — the Wall Street Journal editorial page and broadcast blowhard Rush Limbaugh — continue to spread the lie that American corporations bear unfair tax burdens.

These extremist voices, as usual, are repeating misinformation from the anti-government core of the Republican Party, to whom the only good tax is a repealed tax.

All we have to do, these pundits trumpet, is cut corporate taxes and just stand back and watch the private sector carry the American economy to paradise.

Like most right-wing theories, this canard rests on simplistic arguments. The theory fails to graphacknowledge that when we reduce corporate taxes, typically only a portion of the company’s extra profit is reinvested for domestic growth. The rest goes into the owners’ pockets or is moved offshore. Meanwhile, 100% of the lost tax revenues must be absorbed by individual taxpayers like you and me. (That is, unless we follow the Ronald Reagan-George W. Bush model and just add the cost of tax cuts to the federal deficit for our grandkids to deal with).

U.S. corporate income taxes are well below average among the biggest industrialized nations. Yet Republican politicians and their echo chamber — the WSJ editorial page, Limbaugh, American Enterprise Institute . . .

 

Time to evolve

What a remarkable anniversary this is. Two hundred years ago today Abraham Lincoln was born dirt poor in a cabin in Kentucky. On the same day, in a mansion in Shropshire, England, Charles Darwin was born to a wealthy doctor and financier.

Lincoln’s most notable lifetime achievements were preserving the United States and ending slavery. Darwin’s greatest accomplishment was working out the natural selection of species, and thus an explanation of evolution, through his prodigious and painstaking studies of the plant and animal worlds.

Lincoln’s work seems to have stuck, for the most part, maybe because the benefits of his projects are easier to understand. We cannot say racial equality has been reached in America 144 years after Lincoln’s death, but the realization surely has moved closer with the Obama family in the White House.

Meanwhile, Darwin’s explanations of natural selection, divergence of species and adaptation are apparently disquieting and unacceptable . . .

 

We want more profit, so give us your money

Get this: Dipstick Motors in Troy, Michigan, where I bought my last new pickup truck several years ago, sends me a letter claiming the dealership didn’t make enough profit from my purchase, therefore it will invoice me for an additional amount above what I paid for the truck.

How about this?: The accountant for El Zocalo, my favorite Mexican restaurant, calls to say he has decided what the restaurant billed me for dinner two weeks ago did not generate enough profit, therefore he will send through an additional debit against my charge card.

What is wrong with this picture? Even in the cutthroat world of capitalism, “a deal is a deal” is supposed to have some meaning, is it not? These guys can’t do this, can they?

Okay, I confess, these two examples are fictional. They did not happen. Retail merchants don’t get away with this kind of extortion and double-dipping.

But banks do. The U.S. Congress has given them permission to behave as loan sharks.

The rest of this story is true.

 

Colin Powell Legacy Day

Did you think about Colin Powell today? I did, just as I have every February 5 for the last five years. My thoughts, as usual, were not pleasant.

Six years ago today Powell, the U.S. secretary of state, went before the United Nations Security Council and laid out a package of distortions, exaggerations and outright lies in support of action against Saddam Hussein's government in Iraq.

Whether or not the general knew how false his words were, the net result powellwas a wave of media activism (hysteria, actually) and public opinion which all but assured the unilateral attack on Iraq six weeks later.

To date, more than 4,220 American military personnel have been killed in the disastrous war that Powell helped promote. Permanent disabling injuries number more than 10,000. Other serious wounds exceed 20,000. Total Iraqi deaths are believed to exceed 200,000. More than four million Iraqi citizens have been driven from their homes as refugees, half of them to foreign lands.

The Bush Administration lied, and Colin Powell went to the United Nations to transmit those lies around the globe . . .

 

Away sails the bubble

The harmonized whining came from the passenger cabin, not the engines, of the B-747. The whine began somewhere in the sky above Elkins, West Virginia, and continued westward in the key of B-flat all the way to Midland, Texas.

George W. Bush, who has lived his entire life inside a bubble of wealth, privilege and fawning sycophants, was winging home to Texas, to party with his oil-country pals and toast the end of his presidency. On the airplane with him, safely surrounding him still as he sailed away home, was The Bubble.

Inside The Bubble there was no sober reflection on what opportunities were wasted in the last eight years, B747what jobs were botched, what legal and ethical transgressions were committed. Nothing of what resources were squandered, how many Americans were left measurably poorer, what indelible stains were left on American ideals, how many Americans died because of the administration’s errors or neglect. There was no talk of such things on that airplane, because inside The Bubble such things do not exist.

The presidency of George W. Bush had been a success. Period. Just ask any of the more than 100 relatives, employes, admirers, contributors and hangers-on aboard that airplane.

The whiners were wondering why President Barack Obama . . .

 

Unjust Deserts

I just ordered a book, Unjust Deserts. Published a couple of months ago, it is said to take a fresh look at the creation of wealth in our modern economy.

When Barack Obama suggested in a campaign appearance to “spread the wealth around” would be book covera good thing, the din from free-market maniacs and other capitalist hard-liners was deafening. They cried that Obama was advocating the “redistribution of wealth.”

My response was: It’s about damn time someone did. Obama was merely verbalizing what many had been thinking long before we heard Gordon Gekko's “greed is good” credo.

Massive redistribution of wealth has been occurring in our society for the last 25 years, ever since Reaganomics legitimized selfishness. For more than a generation, America’s wealth has been relentlessly redistributed upward through the warped economic policies and governing practices of the right. Net worth and purchasing power has leached from the working classes . . .

 

Vacant seat, vacant heads

Democrats in the U.S. Senate have shot themselves. It remains to be seen how much blood will be lost.

In the last two years under Harry Reid's erratic leadership, the Democratic majority frequently has been outmaneuvered and frustrated by the Republican minority. Now the Dems are about to sabotage their own interests in the flap over Barack Obama's vacant seat.

Just when we thought racial politics was behind us for this season, Reid has opened the door and invited the monster inside once more.

Three weeks ago, Reid convinced all the rest of the Democratic caucus to publicly declare their resistance to seating anyone appointed to the vacancy by Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich. At the time, it appeared Blago — newly out on bail from an arrest on corruption charges — might be on the verge of resigning his office or being removed by the Illinois supreme court or state legislature.

Never mind that refusing to seat a legally appointed and qualified . . .

 

Arkansas Traveler

Sometimes I feel as if I seldom leave home — meaning I sleep in my own bed almost every night. That would not necessarily be an oddity, except that during the last half of my life in most years I have logged frequent long trips, both air and ground, and spent many nights as a guest of relatives, friends or hoteliers.

Last year was different. In 2008, for the first time in at least 15 years I did not pass through a Canadian border checkpoint. Susan and I made only one trip to the Midwest to visit the sons and daughters and grandkids, and we combined that round-robin journey with our annual trip to the Thompson family reunion in Indiana.

Even so, I can count 14 different away-from-home locations . . .

 

A much-too-long goodbye

Among the lessons 2008 has offered us, one of the most apparent on this final day of the year is that a newly elected U.S. president should take office as soon as the ballot result is confirmed. The ceremony and the parties can come later (like maybe, say, January 20 of the new year). The president should own the keys to the Oval Office within a few hours after the election.

In the 21st Century, our chosen leader needs to be on the job as soon as the airplane can get to Washington.

cartoon

This is not 1820, so we do not wait weeks for the ballot count from the frontier states to arrive by courier on horseback. This is not 1876, so we do not depend on broken telegraph lines to tell us of a possible uprising in the Dakota Territory — or maybe it was just a windstorm. This is not 1938, and we do not wait for the deciphering of tomorrow's cable from the embassy to let us know when the bad guys are marching across frontiers.

In our time, we know instantly. The communications revolution began decades ago; in the last 10 years the Internet has enabled a stupendous global transfer of instant information . . .

 

How audacious of us to hope

Robert Reich is one of the smartest people still walking upright. I need regularly to partake of his writings and his podcasts. His thoughts help me maintain perspective lest I be swept along in the constant flood of irrational ideas and analyses that pours from the mouths and keyboards of nitwits, both elected and otherwise.

Like most Americans approaching this new year, I feel the exhilarating tug of January 20, 2009, when we will be unshackled from an astonishingly bad presidency and will welcome to our White House an inspiring leader who has promised us — given us — much hope.

One problem with advancing age, though, is that an ever-burgeoning inventory of disappointments presses on the heart, occasionally squeezing out a trickle of skepticism.

Have we not been this way before? Hope? Ah, yes, the man from Hope, Arkansas . . .

 

A slight design flaw

The creative process is a solo endeavor. In spite of all the excitement over cloud computing, Web 2.0 and collaborative development projects in the business world, creative thinking is achieved only by individuals.

When something is pieced together by group effort, it often emerges looking like it was designed by a committee — because it was. Not always, but often, it is a bloated parody of the original idea.

On the other hand, solo creation has its pitfalls, too. Sometimes the lone practitioner will be captivated by an idea and will follow it with such narrow focus that obvious flaws become invisible. In the field of visual design, I think, the tunnel-vision trap is particularly insidious. Before going public, the designer is advised to enlist a second pair of eyes, and a third, and more, to avoid embarrassment.

Not enough eyes had access to the logo of a new iPhone app, Wine Enthusiast Guide, before it was listed on Apple's iTunes app store. The program itself, which taps a huge online database of facts, prices and reviews of wine labels and vintages, appears to be a quality item. But the logo has techie bloggers snickering.

Maybe the software company, mobileAge, does not mind the laughter. Pre-Christmas buzz helped push Wine Enthusiast Guide to near the top of the iPhone app sales charts in the “lifestyle” category.

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Sweet Caroline

By the time New York Gov. David Paterson announces his choice to replace Hillary Clinton as the state’s junior senator, the selection will be almost automatic. And that will be a good thing.

The longer the process is drawn out — accompanied by constant chatter on the blogs, deafening blather on cable, exhaustive analyses in the op-eds caroline kennedyand breathless play-by-play on the front pages — the more apparent it will become that Caroline Kennedy is a cinch for the job.

And she will be brilliant as a United States Senator.

Gov. Paterson, an intelligent and experienced politician, probably knows already what he will say when he steps to the microphone next month. In the meantime, he is seeing to it that all the ducks are lined up nicely before he pulls the trigger.

Update — On January 21, less than 24 hours before the announcement was to have been made, Caroline Kennedy stunned Paterson and the world by declining the appointment for “personal reasons.” What followed was a slapstick circus of political and personal blunders that damaged Paterson's credibility and assured Democratic Party primary election challenges in 2010 for both Paterson and his last-minute substitute choice for the Senate seat, congresswoman Kirsten Gillibrand, a conservative Blue Dog.

 

Thank you, Mr. President

At last, after seven years and 11 months, we have a domestic action by the Bush White House for which to say, “Thank you, Mr. President.” This administration temporarily put aside its party doctrine and did something of enormous benefit to the American people.

By funding a four-month bridge loan to keep the U.S. auto industry alive, George W. Bush averted what I believe would have been the worst economic catastrophe ever to hit this nation. He does not Hooverwant to supplant Herbert Hoover as the man who twiddled the country into its Greatest Depression.

We can understand why the White House announcement was delayed so many days: The administration stretched out the suspense while it placated the bloodthirsty Republicans in Congress who wanted to let the auto industry crash and burn for the sake of party ideology.

These congressional brutes — intent on smashing the United Auto Workers union — were willing to watch from the sidelines as two million, maybe three million Americans lost their jobs. The costs of unemployment and health care . . .

 

Not quite a bellwether state

The six presidential electors of my state have made their 2008 choice official, I am sorry to report. Was it too much to hope that these half-dozen men and women of Arkansas would be overtaken, in their 15 minutes of fame, by the spirit of change?

Was it unrealistic to think that perhaps, as they gathered in Little Rock on Monday, the weight of dark history might press upon them and steer them toward a brighter legacy?

Of course; that was a silly fantasy. There is a name for an Electoral College member who resists the will of the majority. That elector is not called a “maverick” (which surely would appeal to some). No, that person is officially branded a “faithless elector”, and there are laws . . .

 

Republican sabotage

The bankruptcy of a U.S. automaker would bring the worst economic calamity any of us has ever known. Yet, the leaders of the Republican Party would like nothing better.

Regardless of the prospect of unprecedented pain, destruction and even death raining down on America from the collapse of a Big Three automaker, Republicans in Congress are doing their utmost to bring it about by denying emergency loans.

Why do they stoop so low? Why do they play a saboteur's game?

Here is the answer: Because an automaker's failure, with America's economy already in freefall, would play right into their dirty hands. It would accomplish three Republican Party objectives:

 

Yes, we can . . . some day . . . maybe

Two days before the big election early this month, we were rolling down Highway 170 in Beaufort County, South Carolina, a few miles west of Bluffton, when I saw the sign — a billboard, actually. Brightly painted and neatly lettered, it glared at us from the corner of a piney woods next to a dirt road.

As the 2008 presidential campaign dragged on, I had been thinking for many weeks about the very message this billboard conveyed, so my eye locked on, hard. The rebel flagsign, about 10 feet high by 15 wide, was a riveting sight.

It was selling nothing but an idea.

The panel was filled with a representation of the Confederate battle flag — the familiar Stars and Bars. Across its middle, in large black letters, were two words: Never Forget.

I often thought of that billboard in the days immediately after the election, especially when the national county-by-county vote . . .

 

Where is George?

Pirates have hit more than 90 merchant vessels in the Indian Ocean this year, including eight in the last week. They suddenly have become the highest-profile terrorists in the world, pushing aside bombings in Iraq and Pakistan and Afghanistan on the TV newscasts.

Now, wouldn't one expect George W. Bush to jump on this with both feet? Wouldn't one expect our dress-up Flyboy in Chief to eagerly seize the opportunity to play with his fleets of ships and planes in a high-profile, seagoing showdown with the Evil Doers? It would be another chance to use that tough-guy twang announcing military action . . .

 

Red, and White

I filled out my general election ballot the other day and slipped it through the slot in the blue metal box in the county clerk's office. Early voting in my state began two weeks ahead of Election Day. I usually like to vote at my own precinct on the actual day, just to say howdy to the neighbors and sip the elixir of democracy. But I will be 800 miles away on Election Day, so I voted early.

No one challenged me at the polling place (no intimidating Republican Jugend in sight). Four of us occupied the small courthouse office: the clerk and her assistant and one fellow voter, who also requested a paper ballot.

There is an odd — and somewhat sad — tone to this election campaign in Arkansas. It hardly deserves to be called a campaign. Few give a damn how I voted.

 

No Commander in Chief for me

When I vote for President of the United States, probably tomorrow at the county clerk's office, I will not be voting for a commander in chief. I do not want a commander in chief. It is much too late for that. I want and need a president.

At one time, I desired to place myself under the orders of a commander in chief. I tried to make myself a servant in his armed forces. But Dwight D. Eisenhower wouldn't have me. Well, actually, one of his minions gave me the virtual rejection slip.

I wanted to enlist in the U.S. Air Force, to go to Officer Candidate School and become a pilot. I wanted to fly . . .

 

Unthawing the Thaw

This, I expect, is the last quote from George W. Bush you will ever read here. This one, from last weekend, was too apropos of the man to be ignored:

“This thaw took a long time to thaw, and it will take a long time to unthaw.”

In one brief sentence, again he demonstrated (1) his unfamiliarity with the English language and (2) his undisguised yearning for the day he can flee back to his Texas chain saw and not have to explain to us ignorant citizens why another Bushite scheme is putrefying.

At a Camp David photo-op with Europeans Nicolas Sarkozy and Jose Manuel Barroso, our unlettered oaf of a president was attempting (laughable though this might seem) to explain the global economic crackup and credit market constipation. His technical lexicon surely impressed his visitors with the Bush mastery of complex problems.

As a world leader, our president makes one hell of a brush cutter.

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Look in the mirror

Have you noticed that U.S. State Department press officer Sean McCormack and White House spokeswoman Dana Perino sound like clones of each other? They have the same way of delivering excuses and spinning their bosses’ failures into tangled webs of obfuscation — the same phrasing, the same alternately smarmy-snarky air about them, the same tone of condescension when questioned.

Both have hopeless jobs, of course. Working to cover up the felonies of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice cannot be fun.

McCormack’s statement the other day about the diplomatic squabble with Venezuela and Bolivia . . .

 

Gates and walls

Gated communities rank high on the poison chart of U.S. society. The very term “gated community” is an oxymoron. Gates and walls do not create a community, they divide one.

Gates create subsets of people who are tricked, bribed or frightened into believing they differ from the rest of humanity. Gates and walls block out the light and create illusions. They prevent us from seeing that we are all in this thing together.

Which is why Microsoft turns my stomach.

While you puzzle over that abrupt segue (no, “gates” does not refer to Bill), let me clap one hand for Google, which has released a new browser . . .

 

Clogged

A few weeks ago, Susan put a cartoon from The New Yorker magazine on my desk. Without comment or note, she placed it where I would find it amid the piles of books, scraps of notepaper and outrageous fuel bills that litter the horizontal surfaces around my keyboard.

At the time, I had not written any new blog entries for about a month. Several beginnings had languished on the storage drive, uncompleted and awaiting further input. Something was wrong, but I was unable to diagnose the problem until I saw the Frank Cotham drawing . . .

 

Burning the future

Last night I watched Burning The Future, a documentary film about the ongoing desecration of West Virginia by coal companies, and the uphill battle by some of Appalachia’s people to change the way these corporations do their dirty work.

Pictures of the destruction are gut-wrenching. The coal companies are allowed to convert some of America’s most natural and lovely lands into scabrous mesas and lifeless slurry pits. In the name of profit, they deface irreplacable beauty. As a by-product, they poison the people’s water supply and inflict havoc on the streams and habitat in this garden of natural delights.

Mountaintop removal, it is called. The phrase reeks of utilitarian efficiency. Like a doctor performing debridement. Like a Warthog . . .

 

This day we hold dear

The calendar shows us a date held dear.

Yes, it is Caitlin's 14th birthday, which certainly is something to warm the cockles of a grandfather's heart. It is also the anniversary of the first day of the greatest presidential tenure in American history.

Seventy-five years ago today, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated as the 32nd U.S. president, on which occasion he uttered one of the most famous and inspiring sentences in our nation's lexicon of leadership.

Less than a minute into his inaugural speech on the east portico of the Capitol Building, speaking to a nation cowering helpless in the face of unprecedented economic disaster, the new president laid it on the line:

 

The telling screenshot

A few hours after the polls closed on yesterday's so-called Potomac presidential primary elections, I called up the online Washington Post for progress of the vote counts in Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia. By that time, the vote tally was well advanced and the winners were settled.

On my screen were two photographs so strikingly expressive that their elegant narrative needed no words.

our future
look at our future

The two photos evoked the essence of what this massive national political exercise is all about. I had no need to read the headlines: The faces in the photos defined the core of this 2008 U.S. presidential election campaign. The two choices spotlighted in these photos were so starkly different that no captions, no text, no headlines were necessary.

Click on this thumbnail, study the two photos and meditate for a moment on the backstory. Look at them, and dwell on what they represent.

There you have it, America's future in a screenshot. Your choice.

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Am I empowered . . . or disfranchised?

Yesterday morning I drove to the local American Legion hall, my precinct voting venue in the Arkansas presidential preference primary. During the three-mile trip, I contemplated whether my vote represented empowerment or just another personal disfranchisement.

It was a historic day, of course, with a woman and a man of color contending atop the field on the Democratic Party primary ballot. As I drove down Highway 109, I reflected on my first-ever vote for President of the United States (which happened to be my first-ever vote for any political candidate after reaching legal voting age). I expect I will always recall the warm feeling when I placed my “X” in the box at the top of the ballot headed by John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

Unfortunately, that was one of the few times the presidential candidate of my heart’s desire . . .

 

The Old Grey Lady has Alzheimer's

If you were, let us say, a player of the ponies, would you buy your tout sheet from a fellow with a lousy track record, a guy whose selections consistently finish out of the money?

If you were a stock trader, would you rely on the analysis of an advisor whose investment recommendations generally rank somewhere between mediocre and bankrupt?

And if you were a newspaper publisher, would you hire a writer with a resumé built around solemn pronouncements such as the following?:

18 Sep 2002 — A U.S. invasion of Iraq “could have terrifically good effects throughout the Middle East.”
 

Take an iPod . . . where!!?

Like about 110 million other people around the planet, I enjoy my iPod.

Some iPod owners never leave home without it. Conversely, many people would have no use for an iPod even if Apple were handing out these brilliant little devices for free. Some folks cannot tolerate background music or chatter when they are engaged in mental tasks, and others simply do not like the intrusion at any time. A former boss was like this; silence was king in our office. He didn’t even play his car radio.

The iTunes music list on my Mac reports 2,642 songs in its database, more than 2,500 of them imported from dusty stacks of CDs and almost 100 purchased from the iTunes store. But I have transferred only a couple hundred songs to my iPod.

My addiction is podcasts. I currently have over 700 . . .

 

Looking good for the Goose

In the Baseball Hall of Fame balloting, 2008 seems a good year for some overlooked candidates to gain support. The freshman class of candidates is unspectacular, and they number only 11.

I think Goose Gossage is almost a certainty to finally gain election to the hall this year, his ninth on the ballot. Just maybe — in this year of political change — we voters might overcome the bias that has long denied Jim Rice baseball’s highest honor. Rice has been eligible 14 years, and I have named him on my ballot every time.

Those are probably the only two candidates with a good chance to go in this year, but this weak crop of first-time nominees might make room . . .

 

Always the losses . . .

The losses, always the losses . . .

Another year ends, and what comes unbidden to mind but the losses? Never the gains, not without some serious concentration. Sometimes not even then. Maybe this is why New Year’s Eve is no longer fun.

Gone in 2007, nevermore to grace us with their wit, their creativity, their unique charm, their strength:

 

Huckabee in a nutshell

You could say I feel smug right now as Iowa voters and candidates grind toward the conclusion of their quadrennial presidential scrum. Because Susan and I were Arkansas residents through most of Mike Huckabee’s terms as governor, he was not the stranger to us that he was until recently to the rest of the country.

I think I know Huckabee’s style and his skills. Family and work connections through the years taught me much about small-town Iowa and its people and its culture, so I felt I had a good handle on how Mike Huckabee’s show would play there. Last summer — even as he was polling 3% — I told Susan I believed Huckabee would come in no worse than third in the Republican caucus voting.

I sit at the keyboard this morning saying, "I told you so."

It took the mainstream media a long time to catch on and catch up to Rev. Mike and his appeal to a certain segment of the Midwest populace. And it is no surprise that once the MSM caught on, it stampeded over the top as it does with most personal stories in our celebrity-sodden society. This, right now, is The Huckster’s 15 minutes.

Friends and family lately have asked about the former governor of our state, and this is what I have been telling them:

 

History turns on brief moments

What and where would the human race be without acts of personal will, acts of courage, both great and small? What would our world be if all of us always obeyed instincts for self-preservation and comfort? What if we never exercised our freedom to think and act contrary to the herd?

Today is the 52nd anniversary of one of those individual acts that propelled a great change in American society. It was the day Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Alabama bus. She broke the law that day in December, 1955. She did so knowingly and resolutely.

Rosa Louise McCauley Parks threw off the yoke of custom, of disapproval, of subjugation, stared into the ugly face of intimidation and even physical terror and climbed over the wall to enjoy the liberty to which she was entitled as a human being.

Two things about the Rosa Parks story always nag at me:

 

Sir, Senator Clinton is 60

My friend and I had just met the businessman in the lobby of his workplace in southeast Michigan. As we followed him upstairs to his shop/office, my friend made an innocuous remark — something about the weather, maybe. The businessman came back with a wisecrack about “what Hillary would do.” It was such a non-sequitur, no meaningful retort came to mind. I just grunted and kept climbing.

We were there to pick up an expensive piece of aircraft avionics, which the shop owner’s technician had repaired for me. In business, my father always recommended the middle ground in transacting with strangers, leaving religion and politics to other venues. But this businessman apparently was having a political spasm.

We reached his office and took places at his desk. Then he brought up “Hillary” again for no apparent reason  . . .

 

Betray us? Gasp!

How bad was the U.S. Senate’s performance this week? Did these wise solons move us toward an end to the disastrous involvement in Iraq? Did they throttle down the open-ended war policy of our delusional lame duck? Did they give our troops a break by legislating more free time at home?

No. Republicans voted down all those efforts. Instead, they mired in a childish propaganda scuffle over a newspaper ad which tastelessly used “betray us” to rhyme with an Army general’s name.

Thus, the only measure the U.S. Senate managed to pass this week was a resolution condemning our freedom to express negative opinions about members of the military.