Nigger!

Queer!

Quiz time: What do André Carson of Indiana, Emanuel Cleaver II of Missouri and John Lewis of Georgia, all Democrats, have in common?

Other than being member of the United States House Of Representatives, you mean?

Oh, right: They’re all black.

And of course, they all shared the pleasure of being called “Nigger!” by “health care protesters” at their place of employment, the U.S. Capitol Building.

The NY Times with the lovely details.

Oh, yes: They were also spat upon.

And when the mob saw Barney Frank, they couldn’t call him “Nigger!” because, well, he’s white.

But he is, you know, homosexual, so they found some words for him, too.

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I just had a gut feeling that they would get away with it.

Nevermind DNA on the baton.

Nevermind an actual fellow officer coming forward to “rat” on one of his own.

Nevermind behavior from the victim completely consistent with the wounds he suffered.

Nevermind a hospital report which found a significant wound in the victim’s anus.

Nevermind the blood on his hands.

Don’t ask me how I knew that the perverted sicko New York cop, Richard Kern, would get away with sexually assaulting Michael Mineo in a Brooklyn subway station in October, 2008.

And don’t think I jumped to any conclusions based on press accounts. I followed up with the actual trial testimony as well as the physical evidence. Testimony from friends and complete strangers who happened upon the scene. The hospital report. There was not one piece of evidence or testimony, other than from the accused, which was in any way inconsistent.

In other words, there was no other story for the evidence to add up to.

Not to a New York City jury, not when it comes to cops versus a Hispanic, pot-smoking tattoo artist.

The jury’s one sentence statement:

“We found reasonable doubt.”

There is a man in New Hampshire, name of David Ridley, who makes videos which I find on YouTube. He’s one of the bravest people I’ve seen in a while.

What Ridley does is this: He defends his rights. He defends his right to videotape police activity, he defends his right not to cooperate more than required by law, he defends his right to open carry a firearm.

What he’s really defending is his franchise. His free agency.

We concede all sorts of power to the government, which is only too happy to take things from us. Most of us pay grudging respect to this reality. People like Ridley look for the line and make sure they stand right up against it, to defend it from further encroachment and to make the point that we’d like some of our freedoms back.

Some of Ridley’s videos demonstrate impressive courage. It can’t be easy to refuse to produce identification or to give your date of birth. It can’t be easy to answer questions with questions. It can’t be easy knowing that at any moment the police could simply take you into custody and destroy the evidence.

Ridley doesn’t come across as a glory hound nor as a loonie; he’s not exactly mainstream, and that’s a good thing. Different is good. It reminds us, or attempts to, that we don’t have to settle for assigned roles. It’s good to be reminded of that from time to time.

Believe it or not, there exists a place called Kermit, Texas, hard by the corner of New Mexico out in west Texas. It’s a small city, the county seat, surrounded by prairie and long roads. It’s hard to get doctors and surgeons to come out to Kermit. They like to keep the ones they get.

But what to do when the doctor is incompetent? That’s what two nurses had to decide. They’d seen the doctor use questionable methods and perform unapproved procedures.

The doctor is Dr. Rolando G. Arafiles Jr., the nurses are Vickilyn Galle and Anne Mitchell and the hospital is Winkler County Memorial Hospital. The nurses had a combined 47 years of service at the hospital when they were terminated without explanation, after a police investigation revealed that they had reported to the Texas Department of State Health Services some of the problems they had observed with Dr. Arafiles. The nurses had previously reported the doctor to the hospital administration, which had not yet taken action on those reports. The nurses decided to take the next step because, they pointed out, the doctor was still practicing and thus patients were still at risk.

Dr. Arafiles countered by denying the charges and instead accusing the nurses of a personal vendetta. This led to a raid on their computers and then to a charge against Nurse Mitchell for misuse of public indormation. A felony.

Nurse Galle was not charged.

The Winkler county sheriff is a close personal friend of the doctor.

The prosecutor insists he can make the charge stick. The case is headed to court, and there are other actions pending as well. The lawyer for the nurses has taken an aggressive posture toward the county, suing them for vindictive prosecution.

Nurse Mitchell faces ten years in prison if she’s found guilty. Neither nurse has been able to find work. They were, by all accounts, fine nurses. They acted in, they assert, the manner their professional ethics and state law require.

The prosecution says it can prove a vendetta. I say that the case had better be slam dunk. They need to explain why the nurses went to the hospital first if their intent was to make things up. Wouldn’t the hospital know if these charges had any basis in fact? The prosecution will have to demonstrate that the information provided by the nurses was erroneous, and then they have to prove that the errors were intentional. If the nurses’ allegations are substantially true and corroborated, how can the doctor be defamed with facts?

Only if the nurses broke procedure would that be possible. They did not. They reported him privately to the state board. That it has come into the open is not their doing nor their fault.

What this case is sure to do is chill any thoughts any other medical service provider may have about reporting something which they think may be a problem. When the incentive is to keep your mouth shut or face a felony charge, a lengthy, expensive trial, loss of your job and ability to obtain another one, and ten years in state prison if convicted…

Would you stand up to that much authority?

Did you know that the Democratic health care overhaul could become law?

Did you know that the replacement of Senator Kennedy with a Republican, which destroyed the Demcratic super-majority, did not kill health care?

No? Then what, you ask, did?

A President who is running from his mandate.

President Obama was elected as an agent of change, “Change we can believe in,” if I remember the catch-phrase correctly. Obama swore to change the culture of Washington, swore to uphold the peoples’ will, swore to get down to business, swore he would get things done.

And for most of that time he has shrewdly played Mr. Inside within the body politic, expertly working Congressional committees to propel the legislation forward. At the same time he has kept up the appearance of Mr. Outside with the populace, venting his anger, presumably shared with The People, over bank bonuses and other examples of “unfairness.”

And he has bailed out the auto companies, saving thousands of jobs, and he has implemented a stimulus plan, saving more jobs while investing in forward reaching policies.

All good stuff.

But we all sense that Health Care is the Great White of this administration. Bag it and you are a hero; fail and you are an empty suit. It’s that stark and that simple.

Obama himself has implored us to understand that the budget cannot be balanced in future years without health care reform, without “bending the cost curve.” He has warned us that we could be the next who cannot afford premiums; who can be denied care because of a loophole in our policy; who can be bankrupted by catastrophic illness. He has laid out the reasons that health insurance should - must - be available to all, regardless of ability to pay. He has made it clear that these changes are absolutely necessary.

There is little dispute.

There is only an opposition party which intends to live up to its name: They intend to oppose anything that can be seen as a victory for this President. It will be interesting to see how willing they are, in an election year, to assist him in his current efforts at bipartisanship. To the extent that they believe they are better served in the coming election by continuing to weaken the President, they will refuse this offer. I expect that they by and large will do just that.

So where does that leave Mr. Change? Pleading for little boys to act like grownups?

This just in: He still has secure majorities in both houses.

No, an omnibus health care bill cannot pass without 60 votes. But budget reconciliations pass with a simple majority, and those bills can and always do contain amendments, which also require only a simple majority.

So, any Democratic Senator can propose an amendment to any budget bill and can get it approved by a majority vote. Now that it’s a part of the bill, it can be passed into law with only a simple majority.

Some call this an “end-around”, and this is presumably why Obama has as yet not thrown his weight behind it. On the other hand, when the minority party has chosen a path of pure obstruction, who is committing the end-around?

At this moment, the country has expressed its determination that both houses of congress as well as the Presidency are to be controlled by Democrats. This means that the country, at this moment, prefers Democratic policies to Republican policies. This means that the country, at this moment, wants Democratic bills to become law.

Once this majority has done what it can, the voters will render approval or disapproval.

So, what is this President so afraid of? Is he afraid that Republicans will say even worse things about him? Psst: They’re going to attack him no matter what he does, and why should he be in any way scared off by the prospect that his political enemies will treat him with hostility?

Is he afraid that voters will see this as a power play and reject Democrats at the polls come November? Then he is selling short his own persuasive powers, because how difficult can it be to explain to the people that:

(a) You put me in charge to make decisions, not to be constantly thrown off course;
(b) You put Democrats in charge of both houses;
(c) Majorities in both houses passed these bills;
(d) These bills are good for the country, and here’s why.

If he can’t do that, then not only is he unqualified to be President, he doesn’t even measure up to the potential he showed on the campaign trail to inspire with his words.

Unless Obama is trying to win a “Least Effective President” lifetime achievement award, and unless he wants to codify the Republican playbook by handing them the win without even putting up a fight, and unless he wants to see the causes in which he believes so deeply, and the people these policies are supposed to help, wither away from lack of support…

Then here is the message:

LEAD, Mr. President.

Just lead.

So these ten missionaries from Idaho, apparently led by a woman named Laura Silsby, show up in Haiti last week, in the devastating aftermath of the massive earthquake which leveled most of the capital city.

Their mission: To stock the orphanage they are developing in neighboring Dominican Republic with children who were left orphans by the quake. Silsby quickly makes contact with a local religious leader who just as quickly sends out the message that there is a humanitarian group preparing to take children to safety and better living conditions. The families are told that this is a camp, not an orphanage, that their children are not to be given away and that the families will be permitted to visit them.

Thirty three children, from several months to teenagers, are rounded up and placed on a bus, along with the missionaries. Silsby is apparently warned by a Dominican representative that she doesn’t have the required Haitian paperwork. She does have Dominican paperwork.

When the bus reaches the border, guards search and soon discover that the bus is loaded with undocumented children, who Silsby declares to be orphans headed to their new home. Interviews with some of the children reveal a different story, and the entire group is detained.

A few days later the entire group of ten are charged with attempted kidnaping. They remain in Haitian custody.

The pastor of Silsby’s church said this:

“We believe that the very best thing that could happen - not only for our loved ones who we miss dearly, but also for the people of Haiti - is for their government to release them as quickly as possible, allowing the world’s attention to be focused where it should be, on helping a nation that experienced a devastating earthquake.”

Former President Clinton said this:

“I think what’s important now is that the government of Haiti and the government of the United States to get together and go through this because the government of Haiti, as I understand it, is not looking for a fight. They just want to protect children.”

First, the government of Haiti is getting exactly what they want and need from all of this publicity: Awareness of the awesome and awful problem of child trafficking. Nefarious agents swoop into situations just like this one and steal children away to lives of labor or much worse.

Silsby and her cohorts had no such motives, of course. No, their motive was much more pure: To take as many children away from the world of Voodoo religion and bring them over to the world of Christianity. They weren’t “technically” orphans, but wouldn’t they be so much better off in a different place, learning proper religion? Weren’t Silsby and her cohorts on the side of Right, on the side of God?

Laura Silsby, where is your God now?

What sort of sick, psychotic God would let you get all the way to the border, inches from Dominican soil, where you would be free to enact your plan - only to have you instead detained in primitive and hostile conditions, indefinitely, charged with serious crimes?

Oh, what a sick God He is. What a terrifying prankster.

Or perhaps he’s locked in an existential battle with Satan, represented in this case by the Haitian government, protectors of the Voodoo religion. Poor Silsby and cohorts, stuck in-between God and Voodoo, left to fend for themselves, seen by both sides as important chips in a game which is so much larger than these mere humans.

Who were, after all, only trying to do Good.

So the children get brought back, re-united with their families. Silsby and her cohorts find themselves locked in one of the few buildings still standing, the local jail. Oh, the irony. And murmurs start to gain strength: These are people of God. They meant no harm. Their intent was to save children. Who can fault that? They should be freed.

There’s been talk of failed bribe attempts. A lawyer has been fired. This mess seems to get deeper by the day.

On the other hand, there is some sort of fairness in Silsby and cohorts being stuck in a Haitian jail. After all, ALL Haitians are stuck in the quake’s aftermath; ALL Haitians have instantly been transformed into the most primitive of humans, lacking access to even the most basic elements of civilized life: food, shelter, waste disposal, electric power.

It is somewhat fitting that Missionaries who considered Haitian law to be non-existent are now caught up in the reality that they were wrong about that. Haiti gets to demonstrate their sovereignty, their ability to protect their citizens and defend their borders. They get to demonstrate national pride. They get to kick somebody in the ass.

Silsby and cohorts should go through the proper Haitian legal process, however long it takes. And the government of Haiti should enjoy the immense publicity this case has brought them, to allow them to remind the world that this is still a viable, functioning society that, much like New Orleans a few years ago, just needs some time to get back on its feet.

Who is Scott Brown?

Why, he is The Terminator, of course.

He just terminated the Obama Presidency and with it any hope of an ambitious liberal agenda.

The people of Massachusetts have spoken: That wasn’t Ted Kennedy’s seat, and they couldn’t wait for him to finally die so they could put a Republican in his place and kill the Senate super-majority that was needed to pass health care reform.

Quite a mouthful, sorry.

But here it is: Kennedy is dead, Brown is in, and it looks to these eyes a whole lot like the honeymoon is over.

Or is this merely backlash for Obama calling the Cambridge Police “stupid”?

Well, maybe. An Obama backlash for sure, though. A heavily Democratic state just handed a historically liberal seat to a man who vows to oppose any such legislation, starting with health care reform.

Obama has spent almost all of his political capital and was greatly counting on a bump in the polls once this thing got passed. Now it will not get passed, not in anything like its current form, and all the Democratic options are bad.

This is 1994 come early. You remember 1994, Contract With America and the obliviation of the Clinton agenda. It seems to me that health care reform was on the table then, too.

If 2010 turns into a year where Republicans make major gains in Congress, here’s the result: We will never, ever again have a meaningful push by the federal government to reform health care.

That would be two out of the last two Democratic Presidents having their hat handed to them for even trying.

America doesn’t want health care reform? It hurts too much to laugh at that one. Of course America wants and needs health care reform, they just can’t agree on HOW. The best chance we had was for one party to get SOMETHING passed, and then hammer away at the thing for the next generation until people stopped complaining about it.

Ugly, I know, pathetic for sure, but the only way to get meaningful reform done. One party passes something and then we keep working on it.

The Republicans had six years of a stranglehold on power and didn’t even attempt such reform. Now they’ve succeeded, spectacularly, in blowing up the Democratic plan.

And the lesson which will certainly be learned is, Never again…

The New York Times is, by the spring 2011, going to be charging for content. We don’t know yet if that means all content or some content, or all content some of the time, or some content all of the time.

I only know it’s a very bad thing.

You see, they really don’t need all those printing presses anymore. They really don’t need all those machinists and drivers and all those other dirty little jobs that used to be necessary when the method of presenting their product began with the killing of a tree.

It’s the economics, stupid.

Many newspapers failed to downshift into the new mode. Do you remember what happened to vinyl albums when CDs became popular? Vinyl was still available, but it was scarcer and more costly than before. In other words, if you had to have your vinyl you had to pay a premium. In the CD world, there were bargains galore as companies sought to ramp up their production to cost-effective levels, which they did in about 3 or 4 years. From 1982 to 1986 the world of recorded music changed absolutely and with hardly a murmur.

The Times, like other spectacular failures before them (including themselves: Remember TimesSelect?) have got the model backward. They are losing money hand over fist on the dead tree side of the business, and they believe that the way forward is to subsidize that by making us pay for the new, much cheaper method of delivery.

(a) Do they think we just fell off the turnip truck? We will still have access to news, even without the Times.

(b) What makes them think they can, now, get us to pay for something they’ve been providing, free, since 1996?

This is sheer desperation on the part of a dinosaur which is failing to adapt to its new environment. Surely the online side of the business is not the cause of the revenue drain. Surely the offenders in that regard are (a) decline in circulation, raising the cost of producing each copy; and (b) loss in advertiser dollars due to item (a) as well as more competition from the online world and a general slump in the consumer sector.

And their solution is to shoot themselves in the online heart?

Evidently, because talks are pretty far along. But does it make the slightest sense? No. Can it possibly succeed? No. Does it run the risk of destroying their online brand? Absolutely.

And yet, it still seems sure to happen.

And that’s why dinosaurs die.

I engage in occasional SHOUTING matches with my cousin, a die-hard conservative, over many things, among them health care reform. In all fairness to her, she does agree with me that there are inequities in the system. She is opposed to giving people quality health care even if they are able bodied and refuse to work, and she is vociferously opposed to any health care for illegal aliens. I don’t disagree with her feelings on this, but I point out that who we are as a people is defined by how well we are willing to treat others, no matter who they are or where they come from. I also point out that the most responsible people she knows are one medical disaster away from financial ruin.

There are severe inequities in American health care, and anybody who denies that has an interest in the status quo. One thing I am sick of, pardon the pun, is people who call themselves “conservatives” who are clearly nothing more than mouthpieces for big business. In case you have not noticed, big business is well into its second decade of attempting to buy the political dialog and sell it back to us as pure propaganda. And they do their best to put as many of their kind as possible on the bench, to protect them down the road.

I like to point out to my cousin that these are the people she implicitly defends.

However, we are both also afraid of big government, because that is a step toward state control. It is a step toward communism in its worst forms. It makes sense to acknowledge that governing a diverse collection of humans is unavoidably messy, and to simply embrace the mess. We get some things right, we get some things wrong, we go back and try again. That’s my “politics” in a nutshell.

So what she and I have been SHOUTING about is the “public option.” We both oppose it, so where we disagree is: Was it ever a serious proposal or was it always a bargaining chip? She says the “Liberals” were serious about it. I say she doesn’t understand politics. And she really doesn’t. She’s far too literal to understand politics.

Yes, “Liberals” wanted a public option. They truthfully want state-run health care. They want socialized medicine all the way. However, “Liberals” and “Democrats” are not the same thing. Yes all Liberals are Democrats, but not all Democrats are Liberals, most especially not the man in the White House. The main reason Obama beat Hillary Clinton and John Edwards in the Democratic primary was that he was, by far, the most centrist of them.

Yes, Obama pitched for it. Back in January. In the next breath he said it wasn’t etched in stone. From that moment I knew it would never be in the bill, but it would hang around as long as it was useful as a counterweight.

We are down to the final moments. The public option has been replaced with a government agency which will oversee “collective” plans using the same rules which govern congressional plans. This excites congressmen. They can sell this. Liberals insisted on a provision to allow 55 year olds to buy into Medicare. It made it into the latest Senate proposal.

Senator Lieberman said the bill is big enough without it. Tonight the Senate is preparing to drop it.

And so we will head into next week with 60 votes in the Senate, a government-regulated private collective and no public option, no expansion of government-run health care.

In other words, a CONSERVATIVE health care overhaul. Just like I told my cousin it would be.

I’ve been incredibly harsh in my assessment of the first year of the Obama presidency, but I now see the wisdom in his approach. He knows that the opposition is going to have its say, and in this era that means 24 hour cycles of pointed attack. He realizes that he must allow enough air into the process for there to be enough left after the fusillade to keep the bill from dying. He took his time with health care and he will end the year with majorities in both houses approving major reform. Reconciliation is yet to come and will certainly be a struggle, but to have come this far, ultimately this soon, is worthy of recognition and worthy of praise.

There just might be a method to this man’s madness after all.

At the risk of coming across as Neanderthal Man:

Tiger Woods needs to go back to work.

Drop Elin and the kids off in Sweden, stay through Christmas, then get back on his plane and come home. Get out to the course with his coach and start working on his game, start preparing to take the PGA apart the way we all expect him to, now that he has his rehab year under his belt.

Yes, he “cheated.” It may be true that his marriage is over. That may actually be for the best, since Tiger clearly enjoys playing the field, so to speak. Perhaps his mistake was to get married in the first place. Perhaps he was just the latest man who believed that marriage would “cure” his “appetite”, so to speak.

None of that is a crime. I find it somewhat natural. Evidently it was unnatural for Tiger to “behave.’

So, let Tiger be Tiger. Elin, you get the chalet, the yacht, and a lifetime of financial riches. You’ll be OK. The humiliation is his, not yours. You don’t really want him to be destroyed, do you?

On the other hand, he can’t really be trusted either. So call it what it is, a marriage gone bad, and let everybody move on with their lives.

If I’m not seeing Tiger back on the links by March at the latest, I’m going to get very angry. 2010 is a no-excuses year for the man who is unafraid of predicting his own calender-year Grand Slam, a feat which has never been accomplished in the modern era. He says he’s already done it - not all in the same calendar year, but in a row - so why can’t he do it again?

That’s my Tiger, smiling for the camera and telling us in his calm way that he has every intention of doing things that nobody else has any hope of doing.

I’m not even mad at him for his dalliances - they didn’t affect me, did they? No, this is between him, Elin and the kids, and they will find a way to figure it out. Maybe a John and Yoko sabbatical, who knows? Sure, it’s tabloid fodder, but then so is Britney Spears’ ass, so what does that tell you?

Tiger, come up with a plan to go forward with your private life - don’t worry about “saving” anything, just do what makes sense - and then, as soon as possible, please:

Go back to work.

There is a new opinion piece making the rounds. I have a cousin who shoots these things to me now and then. I’m not sure to what extent she is caught up in any of what follows, but on a quiet Wednesday I took a turn at scoring it. My comments are in blue.

The Vilification of Rush

Liberals would prefer no opposition. Behind the force field of political correctness, there should never be any disagreement once the liberal mind has decided that something is good for society. There can be no opposition to the “correct” way of thinking, and if you don’t think “correctly,” you are attacked.

NASA GISS keeps a table of monthly average global temperatures at this address:

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/GLB.Ts.txt

The way to read a particular monthly number is to interpret the value as hundredths of a degree above or below the absolute global mean for 1951-1980. The unit of measure is degrees celcius.

So when we look at the table and see that the anomaly for September 2009 was 86, that is 86/100 of a degree. What it means is that this past September was nearly a degree warmer, world-wide, than the 1951-1980 average temperature for September.

What I find useful about this table is that I can look at long term trends. Each row has a column with the heading J-D. This column represents the average annual anomaly for all months of that year. You have to go back to 1976 to see a negative number. Every year since then has been above the mean. That’s a trend.

The 2009 anomaly is currently 70. With September being even warmer than that, there is at least the possibility that the average will go higher than 70. If it stays at 70, 2009 will be tied with 1998 as the second warmest year on record. When the average anomaly of 70 happened in 1998, it was an immense leap from the previous record of 48 in 1987.

Since then it has been eclipsed by the 2005 anomaly of 76, and approached by every other year since 2002. In other words, that shocking new record anomaly has quietly become the norm.

We are now headed into an El Nino, but we are also in a prolonged solar minimum. Thus, another 1998-like leap is unlikely any time soon, but certainly it will happen when the elements of these events line up again as they did in 1998.

And there is no denying that this solar minimum is significantly warmer than the Daulton Minimum and the Maunder Minimum. 2008 was a cool year, with an anomaly of “only” 54, low by recent standards.

It was the 9th warmest year on record.

Oh, the poor left.

Here they though they had found the perfect issue: Climate Change (formerly known as Global Warming).

Oh, don’t get me wrong, the planet is definitely warming, and man is the cause. The planet should be cooling right now, on the downslope of the most recent peak, heading toward another “ice age” (not really, but a much colder period lasting thousands of years and extending glaciers deep into North America).

In 2006 we had Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” which crystallized the problem, complete with all sorts of disturbing images. Then the Democrats won control of the Congress, then the presidency itself.

The stage was set. The leftist takeover of government was as close to a sure thing as one could imagine. Soon there would be all sorts of costs assigned to the “old” ways of generating power, and incentives to move toward “new” ways of generating power - a fine idea, by the way. But this was all being sold as NECESSARY! due to global warming. In other words, act now in order to save the planet.

Well, the British Antarctic Survey had to spoil all the fun.

This past week they announced that Antarctica is losing pack ice at the rate of 30 feet per year. Now true, there is a lot of ice in Antarctica, as Gore showed us in AIT. And until now there was no way to know if that ice was at risk. Well, it is. And there was no way to know how long it would take to melt. Well, now we know. At the pace since 2003, the ice will be gone in 150 to 200 years. And since warming is a self-escalating event, the momentum will only increase, meaning that in about 3 or 4 generations, we’ll be living on a planet with sea level perhaps 80 feet higher than they are today, and basically no permanent ice.

And there’s nothing we can do about it.

See, even if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases today, the planet would not cool. Why? Because the current CO2 levels would continue to rise. Why? Because two thirds of all CO2 ever released by man has been stored in the world ocean, and as soon as we stop throwing more of it into the sky, the ocean will keep giving up what it has stored. And CO2 is persistent; it lasts hundreds of years in the atmosphere.

So, the planet cannot begin to cool - barring something unforeseen, such as a meteor strike or a bunch of volcanoes going off at once - for hundreds of years, and we now know that most of the world ice will be gone by then. And by the way, anything that would force sudden cooling would also wipe out most of life as we know it.

So, the major world leaders are in Copenhagen, hoping to hammer out a deal which will complete the transfer of political power to the “greens”, the leftest of the left. Greens are the ones who want to exert maximum control over human behavior. Greens are, basically, communists, and I don’t say that lightly. The believe in the common good at the expense of all else. “Common” is a root of “communism” when you break down the parts.

Now, it may prove to be quite sensible to live communally. After all, man is in the midst of wrecking the planet, which could have been avoided by making better choices along the way, which would have meant telling big business what it could and could not do, and which would have meant slower economic growth.

But let’s face it, economic growth is not something that everybody enjoys. Many nations contribute cheap labor so that other economies can grow, while they are stuck in perpetual second or third class status. In other words, be grateful that you live where you live, or your opinion of the world economy and economic growth would be quite different.

The left told us to follow the science, because in 2006 the science was firmly in their favor. There was still time, we were told, to avoid the worst of global warming. All we had to do was slash emissions by 80 percent in 20 years.

Well, that was not true. I won’t call it a lie, but it was always flimsy. First of all, how was that supposed to happen? Simply turn off the generators? Turn electricity into a rare commodity, which only the rich could afford? That was never going to happen. It was always going to be necessary to transition away from carbon while replacing it with something else, while also maintaining growth.

That conversation never happened, and now it’s just too late.

Clearly, we are going to need to adapt. If you live in coastal Florida today, get what you can for your property and move to higher ground. Say a prayer for the people of Bangladesh and Myanmar, because those countries will basically disappear. Prepare for a world with a lot less land to live on, much warmer than this world, with dried out rivers (no glaciers to feed them) and constant storm activity. Prepare for more desert, especially in the regions nearest the tropics, such as the American southwest.

I am here to tell you that all of those stories you heard will happen, and there is nothing we can do about it, except prepare.

There came a point early in Bill Clinton’s presidency when he realized that there was no chance of governing from the center. In other words, there was no chance of reaching a consensus between a majority of Republicans and Democrats in order to shape American society.

There was no clean way to do good.

Long before the 1994 midterm elections robbed him of his Congressional majorities, Clinton had been robbed of his initiatives regarding gays in the military and health care reform. He would spend his entire administration being rebuffed regarding climate change mitigation. In short, almost everything Clinton considered important never came to pass.

And yet, he will certainly go down in history as a better, more effective president than were either of the George Bush’s, and unless he learns the hard lessons of the Clinton era, more effective than Barack Obama.

Tavis Smiley famously said to Skip Gates, “I think America is ready for a black man to be president, I’m just not sure this is the black man.”

What did Mr. Smiley mean? I believe he meant that Obama was too much of an idealist. One thing we learned from the excellent documentary “Stand” was that Rev. Martin Luther King was a realist. He knew what evil lurked in the hearts of men, and he knew that not only would many resist his message, they would be galvanized into heated rejection of that message. King accepted those terms and forged on.

I think what Tavis meant was, could Obama learn those lessons? I have accused Obama of thinking of himself as the “National Professor”, whose job it is to teach us how to think more rationally and work together toward the best solutions.

Nice try.

How much more does Obama need in order to understand that his blackness did not end political bickering in Washington? The Republican party is not in awe of his blackness. Social conservatives are not in awe of his blackness. Many fellow Democrats and social progressives are surely not in awe of his blackness. In his effort to remain steadfastly himself, Obama is succeeding at pleasing nobody.

His mantra is “We’ll keep telling the truth until it stops working.” Wouldn’t it have to start working first?

I said before that you can tell a lot about a president’s style and his likely prospects for success by what happens in his first 100 days. Obama may be - and needs to be - an exception to that, much as Clinton was before him. Americans have a way of sending to the presidency men who don’t really have much experience at the matters he will be facing. It’s a sign of our deep distrust of those who may have too much inside knowledge. The disadvantage is that these men have a lot of learning to do. Each of the last three presidents had no national experience. Each had to mount an enormous learning curve. Until 9/11 galvanized his presidency, Bush 43 was also flailing aimlessly through his first year.

Obama may be too bright for his own good. He knows what’s right; can he accept what’s possible? Does he know when to fight to the finish and count the bodies later? Does he understand that watered-down health reform that only kicks the can down the street will be seen as a resounding failure? When has a better chance to make real reform come along? When is it likely to again?

As the old saying goes: “If not us, who? If not now. when?”

One must wonder if Obama understands that the promise of his presidency was vested in him by his populism. He asked us to hope and to dream and to trust and to persevere. Now, seven months into his first and perhaps only term, he has yet to spend even a small dose of his political capital on the issues he’s asked others to care so deeply about, when in fact the reason he is in the oval office at all is because he stirred those passions at the ballot box.

In other words, we sent him there to do the things he promised to do. It’s just that simple.

All the time Obama wastes seeking consensus is being utilized by his opponents to build a better steamroller. Does he realize that? Does he understand that he must get his hands dirty? Does he understand that his great triumph in becoming the first black president in the nation’s history did not change how the game is played?

I can tell you this: his opponents have not been wrong so far in concluding that there’s no fight in this dog.

Do you suppose that’s what Tavis was getting at?

By now you know about Diane Schuler. If you don’t, just google and start reading. She’s the woman who wiped out herself and seven others on the Taconic Parkway in New York on July 26.

It was determined through toxicology tests that she had drunk the equivalent of ten shots of vodka, so recently that some of it had yet to metabolize. She’d been drinking while driving her two children and her brother’s three daughters home from summer camp.

Something very disturbing turned up yesterday, and it makes one thing clear: from the first moment of this tragedy, the family has been orchestrating a cover-up.

The only question is: Why? What do they know that they don’t want us to know?

Here’s the proof: From the very start, Schuler’s brother and the father of the three lost daughters, Warren Hance, told police and the media that his sister had called him from the road, complaining that she was disoriented and could not say where she was, and that he had told her to wait for him to come and get everybody.

We of course know that she failed to heed that advice, that in fact her cellphone was found discarded near the area where the call had been made.

And, as of yesterday, we know that the initial contact was a phone call from Hance’s daughter:

Emma Hance called her father at 12:58 p.m. and said, “Daddy, there is something wrong with Aunt Diane and she is having trouble seeing and she is talking funny, she is slurring,” Mr. Ruskin said. That call was dropped after three minutes and Mr. Hance called back at 1:01 p.m., in a conversation that lasted nine minutes.

Kind of a hard detail to overlook, wouldn’t you say?

So, the chronology now looks like this:

9:30 AM - Schuler and the children leave the campground in Schuler’s Ford Windstar minivan.

10:00 AM - Schuler stops at McDonalds.

10:30 AM - Schuler leaves McDonalds.

11:37 AM - Schuler calls her brother to say that the trip has been delayed by traffic, but that she should have the daughters home in time for a rehearsal later that day.

12:08 PM - Schuler received a call. It is not yet known from whom.

12:58 PM - Emma Hance calls her father to discuss Aunt Diane’s condition. The call lasts three minutes.

1:02 PM - Hance calls Schuler. The call lasts nine minutes.

1:15 PM - Schuler’s phone, now apparently discarded, begins to log missed calls.

1:35 PM - Schuler, having turned onto an exit ramp of the Taconic Parkway two miles back, slams head-on into a Chevrolet Trailblazer in the passing lane, killing all three occupants of the truck as well as herself, her daughter and her three nieces. Her five year old son survives with critical injuries.

And by sheer logic, Schuler had been sipping from the vodka bottle the entire time.

She had also recently smoked marijuana. The toxicology report indicates that the level of the active ingredient in marijuana was sufficient to suggest recent use.

Anybody want to guess what a combination of vodka and pot will do to your senses? Especially a high level of vodka.

There has been rampant speculation that Schuler must be an alcoholic, and that her family must have known. I don’t see enough evidence, yet, to support that logic. If Schuler was indeed an alcoholic, she was clearly a functioning alcoholic. Functioning alcoholics are experts in not only hiding, but regulating their intake. Schuler went on a binge. If she was indeed used to drinking such a quantity of alcohol, then doing so on this day would not have been especially disorienting. If, however, this was an unusual amount for her to ingest, then it wasn’t the act of an alcoholic so much as it was the act of a person trying to get quick results.

And why would a seemingly normal suburban mother be looking to get drunk quick?

The early reports of her condition mentioned that Schuler had an untreated abcess in her mouth.

Well, that might do it. I think if I had an abscess in my mouth, I might be looking to kill the pain, especially with a car full of kids.

Some disturbing things, though: that’s a lot of alcohol, and Schuler had to be conscious of what she was doing while she was doing it. That suggests a reckless streak that, one would think, would be known to her closest associates.

And, of course, the fact that her brother did not admit, at first, that his daughter called him out of concern for Schuler’s condition. Why leave that detail out?

The implication is that Hance knew very well that his sister was drinking and probably drunk, and he was desperate for her to just pull over and let him come get them. One can only surmise that Schuler did not intend to let her brother rescue her from herself. One can only wonder if this scene had been acted out before.

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Are Netbooks the next big thing?

Maybe.

Woot was selling them pretty cheap recently so I ordered one. The thing’s about the size of a hardcover notebook, you know, the paper kind. The screen is incredibly small; mine’s about 8 inches. The system comes with Linux installed with a GUI interface and a set of applications, including Firefox. It’s not very peppy, but the theory goes that all we intend to use if for is internet related activity, so who needs much power?

In other words, is this the future? Small devices that get us online quickly and cheaply?

I say it is. There are so many advantages to being online instead of pinned to a specific computer, such as:

- any work I do is right where I left it
- a disk crash is not the end of my world
- I can use any internet-capable device to do my thing; if my device breaks, just replace it

Here’s the thing: souped-up PCs cost a bundle, as do full-power laptops. If it breaks or gets stolen, you’re out a chunk of dough. If the hard drive crashes, your world sucks. And you have to be where it is, or it has to be with you. Laptops are not small.

On the other hand, there is middle age.

Forget about reading the screen without magnification in the form of reading glasses. My fingers always seem to hit 3 keys at once. And after a lifetime of this key being here and that key being there, a netbook keyboard is a combination rubik’s cube and jigsaw puzzle. Function-Control-Down Arrow is “End”? Likewise for “Home” and almost any other function you can think of. So for a guy like me, it is a big step down or backward or whatever, but just plain frustrating. Everything takes too long.

So it’s not for me.

But how about the kids? I have five of them, from age 11 through age 19, and the 19-year old won’t touch it (same issues that I have except the eyesight problem), but the younger ones love it. It’s cute, it’s portable and it does what they need it to do.

So, the future? I say, based on my observations, that it is definitely the future, and the future is here. You can get a nice netbook for under $200.

So ask the kid: You want a PSP or a netbook? You might be surprised at the answer.

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I will give the last word on this topic to actor Joseph C. Phillips.

He gets it.

Bob Herbert writes an opinion column for the NY Times. Herbert, a black man, routinely comments on racial matters, so it is no surprise that he has weighed in on GatesGate.

Sadly I note, it is also not surprising, though quite disappointing that he does not get it.

Herbert wrote:

You can yell at a cop in America. This is not Iran. And if some people don’t like what you’re saying, too bad. You can even be wrong in what you are saying. There is no law against that. It is not an offense for which you are supposed to be arrested.

He’s just plain wrong. Disobeying a police order is a crime. Disorderly conduct is a crime. Disturbing the peace is a crime. The police arrest people every day whose only crime is disrespecting the police.

Bob, if disrespecting the police were not a crime, please imagine the chaos which would ensue.

Herbert wrote:

It was the police officer, Sergeant Crowley, who did something wrong in this instance. He arrested a man who had already demonstrated to the officer’s satisfaction that he was in his own home and had been minding his own business, bothering no one. Sergeant Crowley arrested Professor Gates and had him paraded off to jail for no good reason, and that brings us to the most important lesson to be drawn from this case. Black people are constantly being stopped, searched, harassed, publicly humiliated, assaulted, arrested and sometimes killed by police officers in this country for no good reason.

…

I wrote a number of columns about the arrests of more than 30 black and Hispanic youngsters — male and female — who were doing nothing more than walking peacefully down a quiet street in Brooklyn in broad daylight in the spring of 2007. The kids had to hire lawyers and fight the case for nearly two frustrating years before the charges were dropped and a settlement for their outlandish arrests worked out.

Black people need to roar out their anger at such treatment, lift up their voices and demand change. Anyone counseling a less militant approach is counseling self-defeat. As of mid-2008, there were 4,777 black men imprisoned in America for every 100,000 black men in the population. By comparison, there were only 727 white male inmates per 100,000 white men.

And that’s all I’ll quote so as not to run afoul of fair use.

But look at the point Herbert is trying to make: Because some peaceful kids got arrested and hassled by the police, Gates and other blacks have the right to “roar out their anger”; in the context of this discussion, he can only mean that it is acceptable and necessary to roar out in anger at an individual policeman doing his job, and that this is not a crime.

Preposterous.

Bob, what was so offensive about being approached by a police officer investigating a reported break-in, and being asked to step outside so the officer could do his job?

And Bob, what gave Gates the right to call Crowley a “racist” based on that single interaction? Would you have responded the same way that Gates did? Would you have felt justified in doing so? Would you have been surprised that, after telling you three times to calm down, the officer finally arrested you in mid-yell?

Bob, what sort of America do you wish to live in? And how do you propose we get from here to there?

Please be specific.

One last note: Herbert says that “Most whites do not want to hear about racial problems”. He has no way to know that. But one thing is true: We would much rather discuss solutions. And those of us who take this subject seriously and actually want better days, we deserve not to be made fools of.

As I commented elsewhere: “Heads it’s racism, tails it’s racial insensitivity? In other words, it’s never about the conditioning and predispositions of the black person?”

Is that your argument too, Bob? “Angry while black?” Are you serious?

Herbert seems to be taking the extreme position that Gates did nothing wrong, and that Crowley did. That is almost certainly completely backward.

Herbert is giving not the slightest ground to the police. There is no justification, in his mind, for the arrest.

Why, one would think he had actually been there and can state for certain that Gates did not go too far, and that Crowley over-reacted.

I wonder how he would explain that stance to General Powell?

Or perhaps, Herbert has as little use for the military as he has for the police?

My neat little belief system was rocked today.

GatesGate blew up into a whole ‘nother thing.

Hurry while it’s still there and listen to an audio segment at WTKK-AM in Boston where Wendy Murphy, who is the lawyer for Lucia Whalen, was interviewed. Also contained in the segment is Whalen’s 911 call that got the ball rolling toward the confrontation between Gates and Crowley.

All along we have been led to believe that Whalen identified the men as black. Today Murphy categorically denied that charge on Whalen’s behalf. Half of that denial was proved by the 911 tape, where Whalen guesses that one may be Hispanic and she has no idea what race the other person is.

The other half is palpably believable based on the first half. If Whalen did not know the race of the suspects when she made the 911 call, how could she know their race by the time Sgt. Crowley arrived?

Well, to be fair, she would have seen the driver leave and may have gotten a better look at Gates. So, she may have known.

However, Murphy flatly denies that Crowley did more than acknowledge Whalen’s cell-phone wave and tell her to stay back and wait for the other officers. In other words, Whalen never spoke with Crowley at all.

Well, then, perhaps she was interviewed by other officers. The narrative of the police report reads as though Whalen gave the race to Crowley directly, and did so before he entered the home. The police commissioner explained that the police report is nothing more than a narrative which may jumble some facts but which is essentially accurate.

This raises the question: could the report be used as evidence in a trial? If so, isn’t the accuracy of the report rather important? If Whalen give that information to another officer at another time, that is relevant. If it was another witness entirely who gave that information, that is relevant. No other witnesses were named in the document.

When you listen to the audio of the incident, which consists primarily of statements between Crowley and dispatch, nowhere are the suspects identified as black. The 911 call does not mention black. Whalen denies ever mentioning the word black. No other witnesses were listed on the report.

Which leads us to here:

Who the hell mentioned black?

The commissioner’s defense of the report raises more questions than it answers.

This “moving on” idea is going to have to wait just a little bit…

It is true that I believe that I do not need to know more about Henry Louis Gates and Jim Crowley in order to understand the essential elements of the incident which led to Crowley arresting Gates.

However, such ignorance would do me no good in coming to understand why so many educated black people are certain that there was a racial element to this encounter on the part of the police, and it would do me no good in understanding why so many people who know Professor Gates insist that he could not have provoked his own arrest.

In other words, it’s time for me to take the time to get to know more about this man.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was born in 1950 in Piedmont, WV. He studied at Yale and Cambridge before being offered a post in the Afro-American Studies department at Yale in 1975, at the age of 25.

After being denied tenure at Yale, Gates spent time at Cornell and Duke before settling in at Harvard, where he has been since 1991.

In 1988 Gates published “The Signifying Monkey”, a study of the origins of afro-American culture. It was considered an important work.

Gates has expressed the opinion that you do not have to be of a culture to be an expert in that culture. He believes that a white person, for example, can be an expert in black culture.

In 1997 Time magazine listed Gates as one of the 25 Most Influential Americans.

The above doesn’t tell me much about the man. I’ve watched what video I can find and listened to what audio I can find, to try to get a better feel for the person. He’s been a guest more than once on the Tavis Smiley show. That tells me a lot. It tells me that this man is prominent and that he is well spoken. Tavis doesn’t wast air time on jugglers and clowns, much like Charlie Rose. I respect that about him. It’s the reason I was honored to be a citizen guest on his program twice. Truly honored.

I get the impression that there are people who simply believe it is quite impossible for Gates to have gotten himself arrested. They know a man who is highly educated, cultured, worldly as well as world renowned, well liked and well respected among his peers, a positive influence for many.

And, after all, he was in his own house.

So, to many, this entire thing seems to be “Alice In Wonderland” absurd. Up is down and down is up.

One thing I can tell you about Professor Gates: He knows black from white. He has spent the better part of a lifetime studying differences between black and white society, black and white culture, black and white experiences and belief systems.

The man knows black from white.

And by both his account and the account of the officer, his immediate response to being asked to step outside was to say this: “No I will not! Why? Because I’m a black man in America?”

And I wonder this: would any of those who know and love and respect the professor, would any of you have expected him to behave that way?

I hope that, honestly, the answer is “No.” This man is simply too well educated to put himself in the position of being belligerent with the police, especially without provocation.

In other words, the man seems to have had a bad moment.

To differing degrees, the accounts agree that Gates kept on having that bad moment, right up until the moment he was cuffed.

So, it seems to me he might have been slightly incoherent, and who could blame him? He was no doubt exhausted from his long trip, and was probably disoriented to see an officer standing at his door.

But Gates has said he had an immediate reaction to the presence of the officer, and that he feared being arrested. My question: why? All the officer did was walk up to the door and ask the man to step outside. Based on this, the hairs on Gates’ neck stand up and he fears arrest?

Why?

And so, I maintain that the path to truly understanding this incident goes through the answer to that question.

One thing I know pretty well by now: This incident is not the “outrage” it was initially portrayed to be.

It may be another kind of outrage, and it is critically important how things move forward from here.

“It’s not about me,” he keeps insisting, almost pleading.

Oh, yes it is.

Professor Gates, like President Obama, keeps talking, hoping to make things better, and only manages to make them worse. His statement, released today on The Root:

“It was very kind of the President to phone me today. Vernon Jordan is absolutely correct: my unfortunate experience will only have a larger meaning if we can all use this to diminish racial profiling and to enhance fairness and equity in the criminal justice system for poor people and for people of color.

And to that end, I look forward to studying the history of racial profiling in a new documentary for PBS. I told the President that my principal regret was that all of the attention paid to his deeply supportive remarks during his press conference had distracted attention from his health care initiative. I am pleased that he, too, is eager to use my experience as a teaching moment, and if meeting Sgt. [James] Crowley for a beer with the President will further that end, then I would be happy to oblige.

After all, I first proposed that Sgt. Crowley and I meet as early as last Monday. If my experience leads to the lessening of the occurrence of racial profiling, then I would find that enormously gratifying. Because, in the end, this is not about me at all; it is about the creation of a society in which ‘equal justice before law’ is a lived reality.”

Henry Louis Gates Jr. is editor in chief of The Root.

Professor Gates either still does not get it, or still obstinately clings to the belief that if he repeats a fiction enough times, he can make people believe it’s true.

Noticeably absent in the above remarks are any apology to Sgt. Crowley for his argumentative and non-compliant manner, nor any acceptance of any responsibility at all for the way things turned out.

No wonder he wants this to not be about him.

Vernon Jordan is absolutely correct: my unfortunate experience will only have a larger meaning if we can all use this to diminish racial profiling

If my experience leads to the lessening of the occurrence of racial profiling

But he does want it to be about his blackness. And there is the real issue in all of this, because in every remark Obama has made, he has supported that view, that Gates was entitled to behave the way he did because he is black and therefore “sensitive” to relations with the police.

It ought to be a very interesting conversation between Gates, Crowley and Obama.

More importantly, we cannot settle this issue with innuendo and assumptions. And we cannot and must not give in to any sort of theory that white people simply don’t know better, that they have been “conditioned” to behave a certain way toward black people.

Two things, two real important things: ONE: Professor Gates must then also answer for the social conditioning which led to his own behavior, irrespective of the behavior of the officer; TWO, I want to assure you that a white man who behaved the way Gates did (obviously with different motivation) would have been arrested, and perhaps sooner, and perhaps tased. Whether he and his supporters admit it or not, Gates was shown unusual deference by Sgt. Crowley.

I’ve come to grudgingly accept that some positions are too hardened to budge off of their initial stance that this incident was caused by a racially insensitive police officer. I wonder what they will say when the final report comes out.

Oh how the spool unravels.

Professor Gates made that comment in the course of the following interview (at roughly the 12 minute mark):

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The problem, of course, is that most of us know by now that Sergeant Crowley is not the racially motivated caricature that Professor Gates tried to paint.

It is stunning to listen to Professor Gates give his version of events, and contrast that with Sergeant Crowley’s account. I’m no expert, but Gates sounds quite nervous and not at all down-to-earth when describing the incident. Although Crowley is trained to discuss criminal cases matter-of-factly, his interview comes across much more calm, much more clear. It is impossible to reconcile the two versions. Either Crowley arrested Gates for no reason, which is Gates’ version, or, in front of several other officers and several civilians, Crowley warned Gates twice to either quiet down or go inside, and only when Gates continued to fail to comply, arrested him.

I mean, that’s a lot of people you gave to get to tell the same lie.

So, I think it’s at least highly likely that Gates’ version lacks all the essential elements of truth. He has all sorts of motivation to try to portray himself as the victim. I know it’s unlikely, but I would hope the day will come when Professor Gates admits that his initial version of events was not completely truthful.

Not only does Gates say that officer Crowley has a problem, he accuses Crowley of lying on the police report. The only part of the incident which cannot be verified by others was the part inside the house, where Gates admits he refused to comply and admits that he tried to take charge of the situation. What Gates does not admit is that Crowley had completed his business and was trying to leave, and Gates followed Crowley outside and continued to rant and rave. This last part was done in full view of other officers, at least one of whom, a black officer, supported the arrest “100 percent”.

Now you might say he’s just lining up with a fellow officer. So let’s see what the other witnesses say.

To me, the credibility clearly lies with Crowley, with regard to the factual aspects of the case.

With regard to the sensitivity aspects of the case, I am completely willing to have that discussion, because I’m hearing some things such as Sgt. Crowley was unwittingly conditioned to treat blacks with less respect than he treats whites.

But that’s not racism!, those same people say. In other words, this theory holds that whites mistreat blacks in ways that whites are not even aware of. This theory holds that a white man would have been treated differently because he was white.

But that’s not racism!, they say as they try to dance on the head of a pin.

As the insults just continue to pile up.

Re-posting the interview with Sgt. Crowley:

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I very rarely video blog. Today I was motivated to. I’m not a pro at this and I didn’t prepare beforehand, so I ramble on a bit. I’ve sat through the replay myself, and other than the fact that I constantly switch names and titles, it’s not too drawn out. Yes, it’s about 15 minutes, but as I say in there, this is complicated stuff.

I would hope we’re not being clocked.

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Where is the apology?

Hell of a good question. The Cambridge Police Department, and it’s union, strongly supported their own practices and strongly condemned the president’s assertions.

As much as some want to make this about, as my good friend Morris says, that the police should have just walked away, I want to make it about the actions of Professor Gates, and his blunt repetition of the allegation that Sergeant Crowley was a racist.

My attitude is this: “Racist” is the white equivalent of the “N-word”. It is an incredibly powerful word to use and must not be tossed indiscriminately. And in fact we must not tolerate nor excuse those who do. We must condemn those who would be so reckless and so malicious.

Before I can honestly hear what anybody has to say about this, I need to hear them condemn Professor Gates’ behavior. If that person honestly accepts that Gates had no right to call Sgt. Crowley a racist and in fact that he owes the Sergeant a sincere apology, then we can have a meaningful conversation.

Otherwise, I don’t see how. We have to stop here, digest this moment, and get it right.

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For all his efforts to make things better, the more that president Obama says on the matter of Sgt. Crowley and Professor Gates, he makes things so much worse.

It is time to start questioning the innate decency of a man who cannot utter a simple apology, who can speak for 6 minutes and admit, in so many words, that he was the stupid one for saying what he said, without ever actually taking blame. If that’s not enough to make you question this man’s innate decency, try this: Based on his own words, Obama knows that Crowley is not a racist. Obama made a point of flattering Crowley’s character. And yet, Obama will not condemn Gates for repeatedly calling Crowley a racist. In fact, Obama went out of his way to suggest that Sgt. Crowley should have deferred to Professor Gates more than he did, simply because blacks may, based on history, have a suspicion towards a police officer who is doing his job.

This would be the President Of The United States declaring that the policy of law enforcement should be to defer to blacks more than they would defer to whites, to prevent a misunderstanding based on history. This would be the President telling the black community to rise up against any police action that you, in your subjective perspective, deem unacceptable. You are not responsible for your actions. You do not have to comply with his orders. You may carry on at will.

I’m nearly at a loss for words, which is where I find myself most of the time with this embarrassment of a president.

That the chief law enforcement officer of this country could categorically justify disobedience in the face of lawful police activity, that he could further assert that the police ought to defer more to blacks than to whites in the name of “sensitivity” - I hope that any thinking person of any color would stand with me and insist that this president answer for these allegations.

At one and the same time, he has gone much too far and not nearly far enough.

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The reason President Chicken took no questions:

“Mr. President, do you believe that Sgt. Crowley is a racist?”

“No, I’m sure that he’s not, and in fact I’m confident that his actions were not racially motivated.”

“Followup, sir: In that case, do you condemn Professor Gates’ allegations in that regard, and do you think that he owes Sgt. Crowley an apology?”

“…………”

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There are many, many things which are in the process of going horribly wrong with the Obama presidency, and I am sorting through them in order to write a coherent post on the subject, coming soon.

Meanwhile, we have last night’s news conference in which Obama decided to comment on the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, a Harvard professor who was breaking into his own home because the door was jammed. Gates was, as we all know by now, arrested not because he was a suspected burglar but because he created a raucous scene in which he directly and repeatedly accused the police of racism. His disorderly conduct arrest was likely designed to calm him down, and the charges were later dropped “in the interests of justice.” I’ve read the police report; if you have not, I suggest that you do.

And when the President Of The United States decided to comment on a situation about which he admitted he did not “know all the facts”, what did he say? He said: “The Cambridge police acted stupidly.” Not might have; did. Fact. Certain.

Really?

Couple of things: one, I’ve gone over this in my head many times and I honestly don’t know if the police would have asked a white man for his ID in this circumstance. The point is, it was not egregious for them to ask the professor for his ID. After all, they were investigating a possible crime. Confirming that this was, in fact, the resident would wrap this thing up in no time flat and let everybody go on about their day. Gates in fact refused this lawful police request at first and instead turned tables, immediately accusing the officer of being a racist.

As a white person, I take high, high offense to that remark. How does Gates know what is in the officer’s heart? This officer is behaving as he has been trained to behave, and he has to deal with such an accusation? He has to tell reporters “I am not a racist”? Anybody with any sensitivity should feel for this man, who was only doing his job.

But no, not only must he endure Gates’ endless berating and ex-post-facto insistence on an apology, now he must endure the wrath of the PRESIDENT?

I already had a lot of reasons to be disgusted with this president, but this one takes the cake.

At what point is Gates required to answer for his acts, if only as a matter of setting the record straight?

Gates wants an apology from a man he accused of being a racist? It seems to me the officer is the one who is owed the apology.

My other thought is how reckless it was of Obama to make that statement. Why? Because it undermines public confidence in law enforcement. If mistakes were made here, they were clearly made by Gates as well as the officer. Gates was the one who made the baseless accusation, Gates was the one who escalated, Gates was the one who made a public scene and Gates was the one who refused to calm down.

Gates, in other words, got himself arrested. This wasn’t racial profiling, this was an indignant black man who chose to make his blackness the issue. Any profiling that went on came from Gates, who assumed he knew what motivated this officer, and knew that it was not public service.

This is the same officer who, as an EMT in 1993 attempted to save the life of dying Celtic Reggie Lewis. Some racist.

But much more important is that this president has, once again, said something he should not have said. He should have remained unbiased and encouraged all of us not to react until we know all the facts. The police report speaks volumes; the officer commented today on Boston radio station WEEI.

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One day we will know how all of this went down, and I predict that it will not turn out that the police acted stupidly but that Gates did.

All he had to do was comply, like any other citizen would be expected to do. That’s all. Just comply. This thing would have been over in moments and he could have gone about his business.

I know that a lot of black bloggers give Obama crap for not addressing black issues more directly, more often. This is the issue he chose to inject himself into? And this is how he chose to do it?

People, we cannot excuse this behavior. This man supposedly represents all of America, and he called the police “stupid” while admitting he did not “know the facts”.

This man is qualified to lead the most powerful country on the planet?

Just what the hell is going on here?

I have a lot to say about what I see as the “slacker generation”, by whom I mean young adults who have not yet chosen a path for their lives, and are either still in school or are wandering aimlessly about the job market.

Back in my youth, in the 1970s, we had our kids who had no ambition, and generally 3 or 4 of them could be found hanging out here or there, not really doing much of anything and not really bothering anybody. We made minimal note of their existence and paid them little mind. They had their world, we had ours.

Today’s slackers have a thousand more ways to pass the time, a thousand ways to fool themselves into thinking that there just might be a point to their lives. One of the all-time great social experiments will be bearing all sorts of demographic statistical booty for decades to come. If we ever wonder why each decade our productive output shrinks on a per capita basis, we may one day wander back to these days, when so many people came of age and said “Eh.”

Which brings me back around to UCLA, about which I wrote yesterday.

James Franco, the up and coming actor and recent UCLA graduate, had been invited to speak at the commencement for the UCLA College Of Arts And Letters. One student put up a Facebook page in protest at Franco’s youth and inexperience. I took umbrage at both the insinuation that Franco was inadequate, and at he heavy-handed way the students went about taking him down, when all the man had done was accept an invitation.

This left the college in a bind, with commencement a  week away. They solved this problem by inviting Brad Delson, Linkin Park guitarist, who readily accepted.

Suddenly, the issue was no longer youth and inexperience. After all, Delson and Franco are both 31. And it could not be about the shallowness of his career path: both guys are in show biz. No, now it was about, well let’s see: Delson got his degree in 1999, while Franco dawdled and did not get his until 2008. Delson is raising a family; Franco is single. Delson has begun to develop his philanthropic side; Franco, as far as the world knows, has not.

Suddenly, a “contemporary” was OK under certain circumstances. Such as: “We got our little protest on, got somewhere with it…what’s next?”

In other words, the Great UCLA Slacker Protest was just their flavor of the week.

On November 2, 2008 in this very space, I wrote the following:

President Obama, you do not get to cry poverty to us, not this time, not after a $750 billion transfer of wealth from the workers of this country to the fat-cat bankers and professional investors. Not this time, when we have a unified progressive Executive and Legislative branch for the first time in over a generation. Not this time, when the world economy is melting down, entire nations are going broke, and many millions of people will be thrust into unemployment through no fault of their own. Not this time, when we need real solutions to the problems of everyday people in this country and in so much of the world. Not this time, Mr. President. Don’t cry poverty to us.

Last Thursday, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told a House committee:

“Unless we demonstrate a strong commitment to fiscal sustainability in the longer term, we will have neither financial stability nor healthy economic growth.”

He also said this:

“We expect that the recovery will only gradually gain momentum and that economic slack will diminish slowly,” he said. “In particular, businesses are likely to be cautious about hiring, and the unemployment rate is likely to rise for a time, even after economic growth resumes.”

Give the man credit for not being shy about it: “There will be more unemployed, but we are done giving out stimulus money. The fat cats got theirs, the working man gets none.”

This, while the U.S. Government consents to the breakdown of GM and the loss of thousands of jobs. This while the unemployment rate continues to rise, now at 9.1 percent of the labor force that hasn’t given up looking for work yet. This while the barely-discussed retail sector continues to take a pounding which will surely get worse when more and more jobs evaporate.

And here’s the real secret: Bernanke really is fine with it. Why?

Because the unemployed are desperate and motivated. They will work cheap, they will do any job, they will suffer most any condition and if they won’t, somebody else will.

In other words, it is the cheap labor provided by the unemployed that fuels what passes in the capitalist world for “economic recovery.”

And for those who get too desperate, there’s always jail.

Here on the Obama watch we are asking this question: Mr. President: What are you going to do in order to break this cycle of punishing the innocent and rewarding the guilty?

What, didn’t we vote for enough change?

We already know that the predators in the predatory lending scandal preyed upon the financially illiterate and the desperate, as well as the greedy. We already know that the predators cynically expected many of these loans to default, but at subprime rates and enough money down, their sliderules told them to expect a profit.

We now know how spectacularly wrong they were, and the primary reason was their own greed. There were no studies available to identify likely default rates among this new class of borrower, because lending practices such as this had never existed before. So, these predators convinced their backers to price these loans at historical rates, and gleefully wrote, then sold, billions upon billions of dollars worth of subprime loans.

Even, it turns out, when those borrowers could have qualified for prime loans, which would have saved these borrowers more than one third of their payments, and saved many of them from eventual default.

And where did these predators look for such unsophisticated borrowers? Why not the inner city, where home ownership rates were historically low, and where minority residents had previously been systemically blocked (”red-lined”) from receiving home mortgages? What an un-tapped market!

The NAACP and the City Of Baltimore, MD, have both filed lawsuits against Wells Fargo, accusing them of actually seeking minority borrowers and seeking to push them into subprime loans, even when those borrowers would have qualified for conventional loans. Borrower beware? Of course. But when people come to you and tell you they will loan you money so that you, too can own a home, a message you have never heard before, what sort of experience do you have to fall back on, to guide you? Will some people willingly accept what they’re being told? Enough to make a very large difference.

The Baltimore story is telling. Large stretches of predominantly black neighborhoods are now filled with vacant homes, foreclosed upon when the borrowers could not keep up the payments. Help has come too late for these disenfranchised, and perhaps we need a national commission to hear the complaints of those who were tricked by unscrupulous lenders using clearly predatory practices. Perhaps this commission should be empowered to make restitution of both money and credit worthiness to these borrowers, and put them back in their homes where possible. Perhaps the government should buy up these homes from the banks at low prices and manage the mortgages of the newly re-enfranchised.

Ah, such dreams.

We all know the real story: the banks get government money; they get to dump the bad loans; they get to keep the housing inventory; and they get to profit when these homes are re-sold. The unsophisticated borrowers? They get to keep their debt, their destroyed credit rating, and the difficulty they will forever have trying to secure another home loan.

If you needed any more evidence that Rome is burning, just ask yourself: what has the president said about all of this so far?

It has finally become clear why the United States elected Barack Hussein Obama to the presidency. It was not to chart a different course in economics. It was not to alter American foriegn policy toward hot spots of conflict. It was for moments such as yesterday, in Cairo. 

Yesterday in Cairo, the National Professor gave a lecture. He did it with a black face and a Muslim name. He did it in the cradle of Islam. And he said all the things that needed to be said.

What other American president could have ever done the same?

And so, we now understand: we elected Barack Obama to make peace with Islam. It was to put a credible face on a message to the Muslim world: Please stop trying to kill us.

Islam

One thing President Obama’s eloquence cannot do, however, is resolve eternal conflicts. Surely he knows this, and yet he uttered a phrase such as this:

the sweeping change brought by modernity and globalization led many Muslims to view the West as hostile to the traditions of Islam.

This is at once both unnecessarily apologetic and crudely drawn. If there is one thing we understand about Islam, it is that it’s most fanatical proponents do not consider their way of life “tradition” but the word of Allah. And there is, in the view of these fanatics, an absolute conflict between modern ways and their obedience to Islam. What president Obama needed to say was that the Muslim world needs to resolve these internal conflicts; the Muslim world needs a “Pope”, in other words, a grand eminence, most revered and respected leader, and a method by which to choose such a person, and that person must determine what Islam represents in a changing world, and that person must seek a path by which the world does not feel threatened by Islam, and vice versa.

I have come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world; one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect; and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles – principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.

Yes, president Obama has a tough job, no doubt, trying to make sense of the senseless, but how can he do so without acknowledging that these extremists represent an interpretation of the Koran which is at least tolerated and at best used strategically by the Muslim world itself? Extremism is a method of political disruption and change within the Muslim world; we expect to end Islamic extremism toward the west without resolving this baseline issue? And we expect to solve it without the expressed condemnation of the Muslim world toward such tactics?

President Obama goes on to acknowledge that his words cannot bring immediate change; what he does not say is that his words cannot bring about any change at all. What he failed to say was “It’s on you. Get this figured out.”

Afghanistan

Perhaps the most disturbing signals president Obama sent in this speech were those regarding the justification for war in Afghanistan.

When violent extremists operate in one stretch of mountains, people are endangered across an ocean.

In Ankara, I made clear that America is not – and never will be – at war with Islam. We will, however, relentlessly confront violent extremists who pose a grave threat to our security. Because we reject the same thing that people of all faiths reject: the killing of innocent men, women, and children. And it is my first duty as President to protect the American people.

Make no mistake: we do not want to keep our troops in Afghanistan. We seek no military bases there. It is agonizing for America to lose our young men and women. It is costly and politically difficult to continue this conflict. We would gladly bring every single one of our troops home if we could be confident that there were not violent extremists in Afghanistan and Pakistan determined to kill as many Americans as they possibly can. But that is not yet the case.

And therein lies the true issue: permanent war is justifiable as long as one person lives with the stated intention of committing violence against the United States. Does this president believe that we can continue to be fooled into believing that there is no other way to disrupt terrorism? Does this president believe that Americans expect terrorism to be eradicated from the face of the planet? Does this president forget that, prior to 9/11, the most devastating act of a terrorist to ” the killing of innocent men, women, and children” in America was committed by an American?

And does this president believe that we want our troops hacking thought the mountains in the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan, looking for “bad guys”? Trying to figure out who to shoot and who not to shoot, while trying not to get shot themselves?

President Obama then goes on to mention, in a single paragraph, that “none of us should tolerate these extremists. They have killed in many countries. They have killed people of different faiths – more than any other, they have killed Muslims. Their actions are irreconcilable with the rights of human beings, the progress of nations, and with Islam.” He also said “The sooner the extremists are isolated and unwelcome in Muslim communities, the sooner we will all be safer.” What he failed to address is the simple fact that these extremists believe that they are the ones who correctly interpret the Koran, and that they alone carry forward the true destiny of their faith.

Violence

This same story can be told by people from South Africa to South Asia; from Eastern Europe to Indonesia. It’s a story with a simple truth: that violence is a dead end.

President Obama was speaking of extremists with that line, but he might as well have been speaking of American foreign policy, a long list of efforts to disrupt the internal politics of sovereign nations by any means necessary, including and especially violence.

Long before the overt wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. provided weapons and support to elements within those countries who were doing our dirty work for us. By now, the rest of the world knows clearly what many in this country simply deny: this country spreads violence, and does so in order to achieve political goals. Did President Obama denounce these tactics? He did not.

I’m trying to make a conscious effort to keep my posts shorter; I will comment on the other topics in the speech: Israel/Palestine, Nuclear Weapons, Democracy and others; in a future post.

It seems I cannot absorb any information these days without gasping, scratching my head and wondering what the hell this person could possibly be thinking.

This means either that I am going insane or that I am far ahead of the curve, which in practical terms are roughly equivalent.

On the other hand, I made a woman laugh last night. We met briefly online at a site where Tavis Smiley was making an appearance after hosting his new documentary “Stand” for a select few (I guess I’m not that well connected yet or I would have paid for my own plane ticket to attend), and it was just the two of us killing time, and she found me amusing.

I told her that she obviously did not know me well, that I am the most annoyed person I know. It’s almost impossible for me to socialize anymore, because nobody wants to talk about the things that I consider essential to talk about.

Whew.

I wrote recently (amidst no evidence that anybody noticed) that the national government headed by president Barack Obama lacks clarity in its policy making and its positions. Nowhere is that more evident than in Afghanistan. So, I eagerly followed my Twitter link (I am JerzyWalt) to the latest New Yorker article on that very subject.

Sigh.

Steve Coll writes “The miscalculations across five Administrations are by now generally understood: near-unequivocal support for anti-American militias during the nineteen-eighties; averted eyes as Pakistan pursued its covert nuclear ambitions; the abandonment of Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal; the failure to recognize the menace of Al Qaeda during the nineteen-nineties; erratic investments in Pakistan’s democracy, economy, and civil society; and, most recently, a war in Afghanistan after 9/11 which did not defeat Al Qaeda or the Taliban but chased them into Pakistan, where they regrouped and have proceeded to destabilize a country now endowed with atomic bombs.”

The above is a list of things the U.S. did wrong, which implies that there are things the U.S. could have done right. Let’s examine that: we supported those who were fighting the Soviet Union; the alternative was to give up that chip? Perhaps, but does that sound like rational policy? We “averted” our “eyes” as Pakistan developed the bomb, or we welcomed it as a useful counterweight to India’s similar capability, India being more in the USSR sphere of influence and Pakistan more in the US sphere of influence? I read a lot of news in the 1980s and 1990s (and in every decade of my life, really); I recall plenty being written on this subject. It is plain ignorant to, today, describe it as some sort of clandestine, frowned-upon activity.

We failed to recognize the “menace” of al Quaeda in the 1990s? Does this guy get to just make stuff up? Clinton’s missiles may have missed, but they were aimed at al Quaeda. As I see it, 9/11 is a simple failure of airline security, spectacularly exposed. Is it now some sort of de facto principle of American foreign policy to declare al Quaeda an all-time significant threat? They’ve been more despicable than Hitler was? In any case, we knew who they were in the 1990s, and there is plenty of evidence that we had all the information we needed to pre-empt 9/11, but for an inept new president and his equally inept security team.

Our investments in Pakistan’s democracy were “erratic”? In other words, we didn’t pull hard enough on the levers of another nation’s political apparatus? And our track record when we do such things is…? (See: Iran, Philippines, most of Central America, a good chunk of South America, Haiti…you get the picture.) It is far from clear that there was anything that the U.S. could have done to help Pakistan avoid the circumstances which soak it today, except perhaps one: Not invade Afghanistan.

In other words, the point is this: the only sensible policy in that region is none at all. MYOB, and all that stuff. It’s their turf, their world, their stupid fight, let them have it. If the Afghanis do not feel like taking up arms against the Taliban, well, have we really forgotten that essential lesson of Viet Nam so soon? We cannot win a war for a country which is not itself committed to winning that war.

It’s just that plain and it’s just that simple.

Which is why, when not a speck of that sensibility was apparent as I read the New Yorker article, I got that feeling again that I’m either completely out of it, or far ahead of the curve.

And as I said, it feels like insanity either way.

Coll goes on to write: “For several months, the Obama Administration has been rethinking American policy, hoping to depart from this history of dysfunction. It has announced a formal strategy: an adaptive counterinsurgency doctrine that seeks to emphasize the security and the prosperity of the Afghan and Pakistani people above all; economic and development aid; vigorous diplomacy; and carefully targeted warfare, particularly aimed at Al Qaeda. Already, however, Obama and his advisers have had to confront the puzzle of which policies in their new portfolio will promote stability in the region, and which will promote instability.”

Yes, rethinking American policy, that’s what we need. Surely the Obama team will miraculously discover some combination of methods which has never been tried before; surely there are things we can do which will guide this fragile situation to an acceptable outcome.

Um…why? Let me put it to you in these terms: my 17 year old daughter has abysmal judgment when it comes to men. (Not really, but close enough for this analogy.) Surely there is something I can do, something I can say to fix that, so that once I’ve done those things, from that point on she will always choose wisely and the problem will be solved.

Preposterous on its face, right? I have literally no control and barely any influence when it comes to what her heart, mind and hormones tell her to do, and it would be equal parts ignorance and hubris on my part to believe otherwise.

Yet, we are supposed to believe that there is some combination of U.S. policies which will solve a centuries old dispute in a region about which we know next to nothing and within which we have close to zero influence.

The Afghanis know one thing for sure: we will eventually leave. And when we do, who will have their backs? So, what exactly is their incentive to side with a U.S. policy which will only mark them as targets upon our departure?

Would you do it?

So why should they?

Are you still basking in the glow of the wondrous event? Are you still giddy with delight? Are you still stunned in amazement that the United States of America managed, in the year 2008, to elect a black man to the presidency?

If so, then perhaps you have not noticed what a mess he is making.

First and foremost, President Obama has utterly failed to establish coherence and clarity in the national government. Are we closing Guantanamo or aren’t we? Are we going to release men who have spent seven years in harsh confinement on non-existent evidence or aren’t we? Will these men be given human rights or won’t they? Are we done fighting fruitless wars or aren’t we? Are we going after American officials who lied to and misled other Americans or aren’t we?

Are we investing in industries that work and will lead us forward, or in industries that are dead and dying and represent an era which nearly killed the planet? Are we interested in rational climate change policy or in balancing right-wing nonsense with left-wing nonsense, and thereby sentencing future generations to a world which was wholly unprepared for the coming changes?

Today’s young men and women being sent into the villages and mountains of Afghanistan and being told, “figure out who to shoot, and don’t dare be wrong.”

Tomorrow’s young men and women being told, “You will have to be the ones to figure out what damage we did to the environment and what to do about it.”

I still shake my head at Tavis Smiley, an earnest and well-intentioned man, asking for some sort of verdict on this presidency at the 100 day mark, and pleading in the end for a shred of optimism.

This administration could correctly be accused of committing a comedy of errors, except none of it is the least bit funny.

And now Nancy Pelosi has gone rogue. The Speaker Of The House, first woman ever to hold that post, has accused the CIA of lying to Congress, of giving “misleading briefings.”

The specific issue to which Pelosi refers is the use of waterboarding as as an interrogation technique, but the ghosts she is really waking up are the ghosts of Bush Administration policy, especially during the first term, when the administration ran amok and assigned itself absolute powers to decide which laws it would and would not follow, and which information it would and would not share.

Pelosi may be entirely correct, but now that she has put the accusation on the front pages of the nation’ newspapers, they must be addressed. And so countless news cycles will now be laced with this issue at a time when it is vital that President Obama focus on the issues which confront this country and the world today and tomorrow.

I was skeptical of Obama’s mantra of “change” from the time of his primary campaign in Iowa and New Hampshire. I saw a man who had found certain buzz words but who was scarily evasive on substance. But by January and the Atlanta debate, I knew he would be the nominee, because by then he had found a way to make Hillary Clinton look like a female version of John McCain, and he had found the right arguments (really, one: “Are you ashamed of your vote to authorize the Iraq War?”) and bludgeoned her with them.

It wasn’t hard to run against the Iraq War, which was winding down during the campaign anyway, ensuring that President Obama would not have to actually make any tough calls on that front. But who else was available to vote for, who might have been promising real change in American military policy?

We were led to believe that man was Obama. He was the man to take a fresh look at American strategy and tactics, to recognize the need to reclaim American prestige and honor abroad. And he did have a very successful whirlwind trip across Europe and the Middle East in the early weeks of his presidency, and he may one day demonstrate that the outpouring of good will he received throughout that trip can and will lead to brighter days for American honor abroad.

Please don’t accuse me of writing some sort of obituary of this presidency so early on. However, there are some very disturbing signs, even at this early stage. There is not a single decision this president has yet made which could be declared “bold” or even “daring”. Nothing, not one thing. And he has made a steady series of decisions which could, in contrast, have predictably been made by either a President McCain or a President Mrs. Clinton.

In other words, was that mirage I saw in Iowa and New Hampshire a “good call” by my gut? Was Obama willing to say anything to get elected? Was his lack of a Washington track record the exact asset he needed to attack a government gone awry? Was he permitted to run a stealth campaign, and are we all now supposed to be so enraptured by the history making precedent that one of his parents was black (the absentee parent, in point of fact; Obama was raised by white women) that we don’t allow ourselves to ask him: “Change? What change? Specifics, please.”

Or does change mean: “Bush spent stimulus money on THAT; I”m spending it on THIS.”

“Bush chose to bail out THOSE industries. I choose to bail out THESE industries.”

“Bush chose to fight THAT senseless foreign war. I choose to fight THIS senseless foreign war.”

In discussing this with my daughter last night, I said that I don’t see Obama so much as a transformative figure but more as a transitional figure. There were candidates in this past presidential election season who did promise real change; Kucinich and Paul come to mind. But they had no chance to win even their party’s nomination, let alone the actual presidency, because they lacked access to money.

Obama showed that a candidate can raise millions of dollars on short notice if he has a well established internet fund-raising mechanism. Obama can rightly be described as the first person to figure out how to use the internet to win the presidency.

We can only hope that this discovery opens the way for exciting, engaging new voices to emerge and generate a degree of momentum which might propel them into the thick of a presidential election. We can only hope that these voices are well enough supported so that they cannot be ignored, so that either President Obama gets about the business of bringing actual, badly needed change to this country and by extension the world, or we can get busy finding somebody who will.

Sexting, a term which did not exist in 2008, is the act of sending a sexually explicit photograph from one cell phone to another.

Children do it. Perhaps they are being curious, perhaps risque, perhaps malicious. To none of them does it seem to be anything more than something to do.

Wrong. Wrong in a big way. Law enforcement considers these acts child pornogrpahy. Nevermind that everybody involved is a child, nevermind that in most cases all of the participants are fine with it. The law says it is a felony and a sex crime.

Philip Albert, an 18 year old who lives in Florida, got mad at his girlfriend one night and sent her sexually explicit photos to people on her contact list. He is now a registered sex offender. Of course, she was also in possession of child porography, even though the subject was herself.

A Viginia High School assistant principal was arrested for being in possession of child pornography for simply investigating a sexting incident. Those charges were later dropped, but the man’s reputation was of course smashed to bits.

Now think of this: your lovely young daughter takes a risque picture of herself using your cell phone. Guess what? You are now in possession of child pornography, and even more disgusting, of your own child. Have fun fighting that one in court while keeping track of all the headlines and rumors you will need to dodge along the way.

The real problem, of course, is the heavy-handed approach this society has taken in the last generation with regard to the sexual exploitation of children. What began as an honest effort to indentify behaviors which could harm children has evolved into a one-size-fits-all withch hunt, where many acts are considered to be roughly equivalent.

On a topic I will write more about soon, a 21 year old Pennsylvania man faces dozens of felony counts for engaging in consensual sex with a 15 year old. On her next birthday that activity will be considered legal. For want of several months, this young man, a bright  college student, may be going to prison for decades and will certainly spend the rest of his life on a sex offender registry.

As much as many of us abhor the over-sexualization of children, we must be careful with our terms. Is a young woman of 15 a child? Is her 21 year old boyfriend a pervert? Are 14 and 13 year olds who swap naughty pictures of each other felons?

Does anybody care to slow the train down a little to stop and think about who is being run over by this madness? Lives irreparably harmed, not by the acts themselves, but by society’s and law enforcement’s reactions to those acts?

Is anybody out there who is willing to stand alongside me and say, “Stop The Madness!!!”?

Anybody?

Thanks to my impeccable connections and significant social status (OK, because I know Morris O’Kelly, who works for him), I was invited to re-appear on the Tavis Smiley radio program this past weekend, to discuss the first 100 days of the Obama administration. Here is the audio from that segment:

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I didn’t get to say all I had on my mind; hell, I was lucky to remember half of what I intended to say, and they had to cut some of that for the sake of brevity. Brevity is not my strength…

Basically, as those who followed many of my earlier posts are aware, I am skeptical that President Obama can make a significant difference in the arc of human history, and I am highly skeptical that he can win a second term. ‘Tis true that the Republicans do not currently have their act together, but they remain a formidable force, as evidenced by Arlen Specter’s realization that he, a three term Senate incumbent, could not win the Republican primary next year, and so he switched to the Democratic party. We’ll see how much of a Democrat he turns out to be.

And for certain, the Republican party will not stay down indefinitely. They will find their voice and they will find compelling figures to speak in that voice, but more than anything else, they will wait for their chance to pounce when events do not turn out the way President Obama wants them to.

In the Tavis Smiley interview I commented that the U.S. government is the only thing standing between U.S. Auto and bankruptcy, which is a clear attempt to interfere with the marketplace, which has for years been steadily choosing more and more foreign made autos, which are uniformly better made and in many cases, cheaper; i.e., a better value than American made autos.

Why? Well, U.S. Auto became complacent, for sure, but the real underlying reason is that the cost of making an auto in the U.S. is much higher than it is in other countries, primarily because of the health care and pension burdens borne by U.S. Auto.

It is quite correct to point out that the union movement won those benefits, at a time when the industry was flush with cash. These obligations prevent these companies from becoming more “lean and mean” when economic circumstances change, and herein lies the conundrum: these benefits were won fair and square, and standards of living for hundreds of thousands of workers are based on those benefits. Should workers be forced to give them up? Funny you should ask: even as President Obama drags these companies through the wringer, he insists that pension and health care benefits will be preserved, especially for retirees.

In other words, the structural reforms needed to allow these companies to compete on a level playing field are not only not coming, they are being specifically ruled out.

Now, don’t read this as me saying that the unions should be blown up. My feelings run strongly in the direction of protecting workers and their hard won standards of living. No, this is to point out the incredible difficulty President Obama faces as he tries to interfere with the market. This is to point out that there are degrees of complexity beyond the grasp of any man or woman who attempts to unravel them. This is to point out that this is an entrenched problem with no clear solutions.

As I pointed out to Tavis, the only thing we know for sure is that President Obama is using the peoples’ money to keep these companies afloat, and it is not clear how we get that money back.

I also commented on the war in Afghanistan, a war which President Obama has committed to fight for at least another five years, a war which he intends to intensify in the near future. What I don’t understand is why. Does President Obama believe we can win in Afghnanistan? We had the Taliban completely on the run several years ago, and now they are perhaps stronger than ever and are making dangerous inroads in neighboring Pakistan. The actual enemy, Al Quaeda, has clearly been severely weakened and marginalized; they were never more than a scraggly bunch of haters in the first place, with one spectacular success to their name: 9/11. That single victory had enormous repercussions, especially with regard to American prestige. President Bush chose to take the bait and treat this band of terrorists as a state-level enemy, and now American might has been committed, for five years and counting, to tracking them down in the mountains of southern Asia, as if it would be possible to find and kill them all, as if there would be a point at which we could declare “victory”.

I thought we had elected Obama to bring fresh ideas in this regard, to perhaps counsel us that it is time to treat these terrorists as criminals and bring them before courts of law; to disrupt their ability to conduct finance and to travel; to work with other nations to see to it that the organization can no longer control a population through force and terror. In other words, to treat them like the gnats that they are.

Evidently not.

So, 100 days in, and doesn’t it seem as though President Obama is on TV every other day?, the jury is most definitely still out, as I said to Tavis. Perhaps in a year we will know if President Obama truly does have new, bold ideas, and if so, how those ideas are playing out.

As of today, his ideas seem not so bold and not so likely to succeed and, if truth be told, not so different than a President McCain or a President Mrs. Clinton might have come up with.

I, for one, am still waiting for evidence of the great new leader we were promised.

Ann Coulter has a new book: Guilty: Liberal “Victims” and Their Assault on America, and is currently making the rounds of various talk shows. A quick trip through YouTube turns up a nice sample.

I don’t have a catchy word to describe my political point of view, and I’ve never felt I needed one, but I would probably consider myself more liberal than conservative as the terms are commonly employed. More than anything else, I abhor the reckless efforts by people such as Coulter to paint her political opponents with a broad brush. It may be fair to label certain political points of view as “liberal”, but it is not fair to accuse all “”liberals” of using victimhood as a tool. Is it fair to accuse some of playing politics with victimhood? Yes. Is it possible to find examples of that all across the political spectrum? Certainly.

Our current president is making great hay with the vicimhood of the working poor and the squeezed middle class. He got a lot of votes from people who believe that the economic system treats them unfairly. Are a large number of these people simply lazy? For sure. They would love nothing better than to have the government provide them with a level of comfort that they never have to earn. But - are there real victims of economics? Certainly. Are their issues and concerns real? Just as certainly.

Our previous president built an eight year mountain of debt and a relentless assault on liberty by declaring this country victims of a scraggly group of haters. Was he playing the victim card in order to win votes and pursue his agenda? He most certainly was.

So, it cuts both ways.

In listening to Coulter in her interviews, I’ve begun to notice that she’s not quite as erudite as she perhaps thinks she is. She believes that the word “prescient” has three syllables, not two. She believes that it’s important to separate the wheat from the “chafe”. She believes that doing nothing to rebuild the economy is quite correct because the market will sort things out and decide who are the winners and losers.

Where was this sort of commentary when it was the Bush administration providing the stimulus? What is Coulter’s response to the assertion from liberals as well as conservatives that the world banking system teeters on the brink of collapse? Is it Coulter’s view that this, too, should be shaken out by the market? Does she not recognize that the unfettered market is what caused the problem in the first place?

When will Coulter be writing her book: “Greed: How Corporate Pigs Have Nearly Destroyed The World“?

Maybe I should write that book. It seems somewhat unlikely that Coulter will.

So let’s see: during Bush’s eight years in office we started two wars, blew up the deficit and nearly ground capitalism to a halt. During much of that time he had a willing Congress at his disposal.

Blame the liberals?

My question is this: since Coulter and Rush Limbaugh are both single and seem not to be attracting much interest from the opposite sex, doesn’t it make perfect sense for them to get together? It doesn’t really matter if they aren’t sexually attracted to each other; they have so much else in common that it probably wouldn’t even be an issue. They’d be too busy bashing liberals to even have the time for sex anyway.

But give Coulter credit: she is a media firebrand. She dutifully writes outrageous books, goes on the liberal media, takes her bashing in good spirit and cashes her royalty checks. (No doubt she also receives hefty advances.) Coulter is an industry unto herself.

I do think it’s time to fire back, though. I do think it’s time we figured out who we can elevate as a liberal counterweight to Coulter’s right wing hate mongering.

The problem is, I’m not much of a fan of hate-mongering from either side of the spectrum. I think it’s a senseless waste of human brain power to engage in the sort of sweeping judgments that play well to certain crowds while stalling actual progress.

So if I was to attempt to become such a counterweight, I’m afraid there wouldn’t be much bashing in my book, well at least not ideological bashing. But I would actually find it useful and entertaining to write a book bashing the bashers.

Now there’s an idea…

It’s been three days now since a civilian American freighter, the Maersk Alabama, was engaged by pirates in the Gulf of Aden, who were repelled by the crew but managed to escape with the captain. They are currently surrounded by a flotilla of U.S. Navy vessels, and are still holding out for a two million dollar ransom. The navy is trying to prevent them from reaching shore with the captain, while also making sure not to provoke any action which might cause them to harm the captain.

Today’s New York Times reports that Somali elders, who are in charge of the pirates’ actions, have offered to forego the ransom and allow the captain to go free, in exchange for which, they expect the pirate to be allowed to flee.

On Saturday, a group of Somali elders from Gara’ad, mediating on behalf of the pirates, spoke by satellite phone to American officials, according to Abdul Aziz Aw Mahamoud, a district commissioner in the semiautonomous region of Puntland in northeastern Somalia. The elders proposed a deal in which the pirates would release Captain Phillips, with no ransom paid, and that the pirates would then be allowed to escape.

But Mr. Abdul Aziz said that the Americans insisted that the pirates be handed over to Puntland authorities, and the elders refused. By noon local time, the Americans cut off communications with the elders, he said.

So, let me get this straight: the United States has decided to make Captain Richard Phillips, civilian, a political pawn?

Let me get this straight: they have gone back to the family and said “They offered to release the captain unharmed for no ransom, and we turned them down.“

So, now what?

More waiting? How is this in the captain’s interests? And if this is not about the captain’s health and safety, then we would have surely attacked by now, no?

Or perhaps we wish to provoke an escalation, an excuse to blow them out of the water? I don’t know, maybe it’s me, but they have 250 other hostages; are we prepared to risk their safety as well? What if the pirates decided on an eye for an eye?

Are we prepared to blockade Somali ports? Are we prepared to send in the Marines? Are we prepared to open a third front in the global war on terror?

I have to say, that makes no sense to me. Didn’t Mr. Obama campaign for the presidency on the stance that the U.S. military is already stretched too thin? Surely, and I may be way off here, President Obama has no intention of stretching them even further?

So here is where I’m confused. If we have no intention of escalating, why does it matter that the pirates be arrested? Do we expect the Somali court system to solve the piracy problem? Is it our place to insist that they do? Isn’t that meddling, and wouldn’t it have unforeseen consequences?

No, that doesn’t make sense to me either. What makes sense to me is that we get the captain back, safe and sound, while paying no ransom.

Now if we could only find a way to accomplish that…

So, do you suppose we could go back to the elders now and say “Sorry, we had a blonde moment, of course we accept that offer.”?

Is it too late to wipe the egg off our face?

Closing thought: liberal commentators have been fond of asking lately, “Who put the grownups in charge?”

One question that has lingered is, “How grown-up will this administration be when it comes to military conflict?”

Here we are. Now I really want to know: Does it matter to the American people that somebody arrests these pirates, or does it matter that the captain is returned safe and sound, with no ransom paid? I’d really like to know the answer to that.

Exit question: How does President Obama spin this if anything happens to the captain?

By now you are likely aware that a Dallas police officer, Robert Powell, chased a family into a Plano, Texas hospital parking lot, and while his wife’s mother lay dying inside, detained the driver, professional football player Ryan Moats, in order to lecture Moats on his behavior, threaten to tow his vehicle, threaten to jail Moats, take his time writing the ticket, and then lecture Moats some more more before finally letting him join his family inside, some 13 minutes after the encounter began, during which period of time Moat’s mother in law passed away, and during which period of time hospital personnel twice came outside to ask that Moats be allowed in, because his family needed him and the woman’s time was near.

Amid outrage from his own department as well as the general public, officer Powell issued an apology on Friday.

In Oakland last week, 2 officers were shot, one dead on the spot and the other dead of his wounds the next day, after pulling over a motorist who, it turned out, was a parole violator and came out shooting rather than go back to jail. (He later killed two SWAT officers before being gunned down himself.)

As motorcycle officers, they had no cover and were easy targets.

In other words, any traffic stop has the potential to become brutally violent. For sure most don’t, but it’s the not knowing when one will that plays on an officer’s mind.

In a situation such as this, chasing a vehicle that will not stop, which veers suddenly into a spot close to the door of a hospital, and people leap out of the vehicle and begin to race into the building, an officer has a lot to consider and very close to zero time to make his assessment.

Thus, I have no quarrel with Officer Powell’s initial actions. His senses were on high alert, as they should be. His initial actions were chemically influenced by that adrenaline rush. A lot was going on and he had to determine what it was.

However, nothing explains almost every decision he made after that. Moats was completely physically compliant, but did continue to insist that his mother in law was dying. As in, at this moment.

That one piece of information was enough for officer Powell to put the entire incident, and the actions of every person in that vehicle, into perfect context. That one statement told Officer Powell everything he needed to know, to simply at that point say “I understand, sir, please be on your way. Best wishes to you and your family.”

Whatever it is that Officer Powell lacks - empathy? - that prevented him from making that simple judgment, must be assessed and addressed before it can even be considered to allow him back out on he street. As his own chief noted, his behavior lacked the discretion expected of a Dallas police officer, and I’m sure we all agree, of any police officer anywhere.

However, I want to reiterate that Powell’s initial actions made sense to me. In fact, he did make one good decision - to let the women go. In actuality, they disobeyed his command and he could have escalated on that simple basis. But he did the smart thing and the right thing in letting them go.

Why he then detained Mr. Moats for another 12 minutes is an eternal mystery that I doubt Powell himself will ever fully understand.

He needs counseling and certainly he needs further training, and he needs to be an object lesson for all officers: don’t treat people in a way that you cannot later justify. Your initial actions may be justifiably cautious, but your obligation is to shift along with information that you receive, and to at all times be able to justify your actions.

And please, don’t threaten us. We know you hold all the cards, and we’re already plenty scared. You look like jerks when you threaten us, and that just makes your job harder.

Believe it or not, respect works best. I have always given and received respect in my several encounters with traffic police, and of course received my share of tickets, but no high alert emotions or any chance of escalation.

Officer Powell ran a real risk of making a bad situation worse. Would he have shot Moats if Moats had insisted on joining his family? One real consequence of doing the wrong thing is that it usually leads to even worse things.

That it did not happen here is entirely due to Moats making the decision to sacrifice being at his family’s side, because it was clear to him that this officer was unhinged and capable of anything.

Officer Powell, your apology is only the start of the actions you must take to justify ever returning to the streets.

And I’d love to hear your explanation, if you ever figure it out.

I’ve always considered PeTA a strange outfit. They do things like throw blood on mink stoles, to protest the idea of wearing fur as a luxury. Their mission seems honorable: to get us to think about the way we treat animals. Certainly there has been known to be a lack of ethics in the treatment of animals.

So, to them goes a certain degree of admiration. But now, what have we? We have the case of Michael Vick, who will soon be released from federal prison, where he has been serving a jail term since 2007 for his role in the Bad Newz dogfighting ring in Virginia.

Vick, of course, was a number one NFL draft pick of the Atlanta Falcons in 2001, a star quarterback who could run and throw with the best of them. Vick expects to return to the NFL when he is released, perhaps in time to play for some team this season.

But what have we? A demand from PeTA that Vick undergo a brain scan to prove he is not a psychopath, before being permitted to resume making his living in the NFL.

And here is where PeTA finally crosses the line, finally reveals what we’ve suspected all along: PeTA is hostile to humans. PeTA believes that if it weren’t for humans, animals would be just fine. Just ignore the fact animals in nature are known to commit rape, assault, murder and infanticide, that animals in nature can be and often are hostile to each other, and barbaric toward each other. Never mnd that nature is a rough place.

No, you see: Humans are the problem. Not all of them, of course, just the ones who fail the scan.

George Orwell is thinking of suing for copyright infringement.

Big Brother, thy name is PeTA.

What I can’t understand is, why don’t they just ask Vick to do a PeTA PSA? For sure he’d love to. He’d love to be given the opportunity to publicly atone for his misdeeds, to demonstrate to the public that he has come to understand why it was wrong to treat dogs the way he and his friends did. PeTA’s letter to the NFL admits that Vick has volunteered to do exactly that.

And it would be wonderful for PeTA to show off their “convert”, a person who went from not getting it to getting it. A truly uplifting story of sin and redemption.

So, why not?

Hmm…searching for a reason…

Could it be Vick’s skin color? In fact, throughout this entire saga, who among us hasn’t wondered at least once: would they be looking to throw a white man in jail for two years for dogfighting? Would Brett Favre be doing time for something like this?

If you haven’t, well, I have.

And now, Vick is almost done serving his time, looking forward to resuming life as a useful person, atoning for his wrongs, standing up straight and accepting responsibility for his actions, as he has done all along (after a bit of a slow start).

And PeTA’s idea? Let’s body-slam the guy. Let’s put him through whatever sort of hell we can think of.

Why?

Why, indeed?

Well, let’s see: The New York Times is going crazy with this item, I’ve just written a post about it…

Just spell my name right, that seems to be PeTA’s motto. Just spell the name right.

If my view is not yet clear: this disgusts me. I think those who call for Vick to undergo a brain scan should be among the first to volunteer. Test one, test all. Call it your “brainprint.”

And don’t forget to drop off your DNA sample as well.

I hope somebody reads it. Hey, if you do read it and get something from it, how about telling a friend?

I started this blog after a chain of events led me to discuss the election last October as part of a panel of citizens on the Tavis Smiley radio program. I was told by the person who arranged it, “I don’t know why you’re not doing media.” In other words, he considered me to have been somewhat engaging, and that I ought to do more of it. Well, I had no idea that all I had to do to be more involved in media was to choose to, but now I was being told exactly that.

So, I started this blog. I’d started other blogs before, and some of them are still floating around. What I decided to do this time was to speak in as honest a voice as I could, with regard to the politics of these times and the politics of the economics of these times.

See, when you’ve grown up with something that always was, it’s natural to take for granted that this is the way it has always been and will always be. I grew up in a house with a single black and white TV, with rabbit ear antenna reception for most of that time. My children live in a house with satellite reception and five TVs, including a home theater. They only know it wasn’t always this way because I remind them.

My parents grew up in homes where the primary source of entertainment was radio.

Anyway, so I thought I would start this blog to remind people that nothing is forever. Just because we can’t imagine it any other way, that does not justify a blind acceptance that the current economic system should be salvaged. There were economics before this period of the last 50 years or so, and there will always be economics. There will always be the development, accumulation and trade of goods and services. Most likely, currency or some other financial instrument will be involved. We may or may not continue to gather “wealth” as a retirement hedge. It is possible that some other instrument will replace the accumulation of wealth.

The only way capitalism works, if it has any chance at all, is when people do not attempt to accumulate wealth, but rather when they understand that wealth must be put back to work. When done with entrepreneurial spirit and discipline, capital can very quickly flow to good ideas and help exploit them. What we have dsicovered, however, is that the unscrupulous have learned how to exploit that system for their own gain, to the detriment of all. And they have been allowed to get away with it for generations, because they learned two simple truths:

1. Humans are very easily led, and profit can be made by understanding how to control that tendency.

2. Politics can be bought.

The result of these twin discoveries was that companies formed one after another with one simple design: to convince humans that they needed something, no matter how frivolous it actually was. Certainly, many useful things also were developed, and continue to be. However, it is also well established that separating people from their money is the highest pursuit of capitalism. The voracious, zero-sum nature of this economic system practically requires such an approach.

The great consumption of resources which turned out to be possible within this rapidly growing system gave rise to issues of the health of the planet and its occupants. Industries routinely fought efforts to control such damage, primarily to avoid incurring any costs they did not absolutely have to incur. Some successfully argued that the government was interfering in free enterprise, and labeled their opponents as something which was bad for the economy and therefore bad for us.

And so you have likely grown up equating capitalism with democracy. After all, isn’t socialism the evil system that ended when the wall came down? Wasn’t democracy what they won? The right to live as they choose, to buy what they want, sell what they want, do what they want? Isn’t free enterprise a basic foundational virtue of democracy?

That sounds good, until you ask yourself some more questions. Such as: should access to quality health care depend on your income? Should a person be paid a fair wage for an honest day of work? Should energy be a for-profit enterprise? Should people have to pay for water, sewage and the garbage man? Should an elite few be permitted to control vast sums of wealth?

I’ve always looked at capitalism this way: the object is to own the most money. The object of capitalism, by design, is to accumulate as much wealth as possible. In theory, the game would be over and you would be the winner. In practical terms, a lot of people get abused along the way.

I look into the future and ask: why does it need to be this way? That one single virtue of capitalism, that it can flow very quickly to a good new idea and help to maximize that idea’s potential, has been so overshadowed by all of the system’s negative tendencies: to not care about the environmental damage it can do; to not care about the conditions of its workers, nor their fate when no longer needed; to not care about the future consequences of actions which are producing profit today. To not care that its very intertwined and complex nature makes it extremely vulnerable to unintended consequences with wicked potential.

Thomas Friedman, over in today’s New York Times, this populist poet, this chubby wonk with the bushy face, this oracle of whatever the hell he thinks he’s talking about, blathered on about how immature our democracy seems, when Republicans are attacking Obama for spending all this money, and Obama misses chances to be warm and fuzzy and above it all, and in the end Friedman uses the word “hopefully” incorrectly, four times. I use it correctly in the title to this post.

I wrote a post a couple of weeks ago about “yesterday’s conversations“, that all I hear around me are points which seem so irrelevant to me now. And here is teacher’s pet Friedman talking about the good of the country and saving capitalism as though they are inseparable goals.

Whereas, I see the two as incompatible.

In recent days, President Obama has been seen picking winners and losers in the NCAA college basketball tournament, and on NBC’s Tonight Show, where he bantered with Jay Leno about the economy, and about his lack of bowling skill. He also opened his mouth and inserted his foot when he compared his attempts at bowling to “something from the Special Olympics.”

So brazen was his gaffe that, riding Air Force One back to D.C. after the taping in California, Obama called the director of the Special Olympics to apologize.

This is simply the latest in a series of statements or actions by Obama or a member of his team, which, taken in aggregate, begin to raise the suspicion that this administration is not quite ready for prime time.

Where is Obama’s comprehensive plan to combat carbon emissions? Wouldn’t step one be to curb the White House’s use of carbon emitting machines, such as, oh, just to pick an easy one:

Air Force One?

And I distinctly heard Obama say to Leno that Congress’ efforts to tax the AIG bonuses was misguided, that the effort should be spent on “making sure this doesn’t happen again,” leading to this question: if the Senate passes a similar measure and the bill is presented to Obama:

Will he sign it?

And when will Obama definitively declare whether or not he will rescue failing industries, and what the rationale would be for that in a free enterprise economy? And when will he declare that bailout funds are no longer available? And when will he weigh in on the Federal Reserve’s decision to print another trillion dollars of currency? When will he speak clearly with regard to the future implications of all of the loose money being tossed around today?

When will we see comprehensive job training for displaced workers?

On two separate occasions in the last month, Obama has assured the nation that stocks are a good long term investment (which ones, coach?) and that the economy will, he garuntees, recover (when will we get all the value back that we’ve lost, o wise one, and which sectors should we invest in and which should we allow to die?).

I’ve been saying for some time now that nobody knows what’s going on and thus nobody knows what to do about it, and thus we are trying everything we can think of, most of which has never been tried before, and so here is the only garuntee we can make:

There will be unintended consequences.

Some will say “we’ll just deal with that when it comes”, but what if what comes is worse than what we have now? What if the best course was simply to let it burn?

And remind me again, because I keep forgetting: Why are we so intent on saving the system that is designed to kill the planet?

Mark it down now and remember I said it when the time comes:

Obama will be a one term president.

As frightening a prospect as it is to envision Rush Limbaugh naked, it is equally fascinating. The de facto leader of modern conservatism, Limbaugh has wasted no time taking on the new President. To Limbaugh, Obama is a recipient of some sort of affirmative action agenda, and is surely a socialist, albeit perhaps in the European model moreso than the Soviet model.

And now that the Democratic party has chosen to accept this challenge, and to elevate Limbaugh to the actual position of Republican Party leader, Limbaugh is slowly but surely unraveling.

Soon he will be completely naked.

First, he chastened the new *elected* Republican Party leader, Michael Steele, for daring to challenge Limbaugh’s supremacy; Steele, an African-American and the first ever to hold this position, quickly retreated in a fusillade of apologia. It was unseemly and embarrassing for all concerned.

Now comes the cover of Newsweek magazine with the word “ENOUGH” seemingly taped across Limbaugh’s mouth. The article is written by former Bush43 speech writer David Frum, who is in the process of being lambasted from one “conservtaive” talk show to another. He is receiving a ton of email inviting him to get out of the party.

So, just as capitalism is in the process of eating itself, so is the Republican party and what is left of the “conservative movement” championed by Goldwater and Reagan. A movement that began as moderation defined as extremism has evolved into extremism defined as moderation, and the public is buying this version about as much as they bought the original version: with a heaping dose of skepticism.

It can very rightly be argued that the nation was due for a conservative movement 30 years ago, as a brake against the excesses of the post-war liberal society which had grown in the U.S. to dangerous proportions, affecting quality of life across the board. Too much of the peoples’ money went to things that had little or nothing to do with preserving prosperity.

As we gaze back on the wreckage of Bush43’s eight years in office, we see what happened to that movement. It replaced one form of big government with another, only more insidious. In place of a big government which considered war to be a last resort, we got big government that ran toward every frontier with guns ready to fire, and we stretched our forces too thin, disrupted the peaceful lives of millions of men and women, many of who had already served their time and were brought back because they were still considered part of the “ready reserve”. We destroyed our international prestige among friends and foes alike.  We replaced permissive government with ruthlessly doctrinaire government, telling people how to live and how not to live in ways that once would have been considered distinctly ‘un-American.’ We slashed taxes but kept such pressure on wages, through policies which made it much easier to import cheap labor and export actual work, that incomes remained flat through the entire period, even as costs went up.

In other words, it turns out that it wasn’t “liberalism” that was the problem, it was being in charge for too long that was the problem. We need turnover in order to take a fresh look at things and see how well ideas have been working. Instead, Limbaugh would have us believe that the ideas are fine, it is we who are wrong. LImbaugh insists that we want cradle-to-grave security and comfort, and we want all of it provided for us, and we will destroy the country unless we change our ways.

And you know what? Once, there was a grain of truth to that point. Once, this truly was a “welfare society”, with the expectation that government spending and services would continue to expand because we were aflluent enough to afford it. As economic growth slowed, we could afford less, and we had to make choices.  Republicans and especially Conservatives seized on this circumstance to push a “smaller government” agenda, much of which was achieved from 1980 forward.

The problem now is that “small government” turned into “lax regulation” and the pendulum swung way, way too far. The extremist conservative view, that the best government is the least government, has been shown to be a dangerous lie, in a way that “liberalism” never was. All of the things that conservatism was deigned to cure, even things that never happened, are now happening under “conservatism.”

Limbaugh is trying to make the case that conservatism did not go far enough, or was interfered with or poorly executed. He has no proof of this, no previous model to compare to. It’s all theory, and it’s all designed to accomplish one thing: keep his name front and center.

Which is why it will be impossible to miss his public unraveling. He will turn it into the most dramatic death scene ever, worthy of comparison to the most moving of operas.

And the lesson will be, as it always is: Evolve Or Die.

If you don’t love your babies,
it’s no shame.
We can’t help how we feel, who we are. Maybe you don’t even love yourself.

If you don’t love your babies,
maybe you made a mistake.
It’s OK, we all make mistakes, big ones and small.

If you don’t love your babies,
it’s not your fault.
We can’t turn love off and on like a switch.

If you don’t love your babies,
then maybe what’s best
is that you don’t try to raise them at all.

Do you want to be the next cautionary tale? Do you want the Washington Post to run a series of articles on what’s wrong with the system that let you kill your babies? You don’t blame your babies for your inability to love them, do you? After all, they didn’t make you the way you are. They came into this world as innocently as you once did.

Life chewed you up and spit you out, perhaps. Life dealt you some harsh blows. You never got enough hugs.

I feel you.

But you do not want to be the person who destroyed another life out of spite, or because you didn’t know any other way to be.

You know the pain that bad parenting inflicts, because most likely you experienced the wrong end of it first-hand. Times get tough and some people get tougher in the wrong way. They get tougher on those closest to them, those who they should be reaching out to for support, those they should keep on the most special terms, those who they should be able to trust and to love.

I feel you.

Life is brutal and for many it just keeps getting more brutal. But you do not want to be that person who looked at an innocent baby and saw somebody that should be blamed for your circumstance. 

Maybe you just don’t want to admit that it’s all too much for you. Maybe you just don’t have it in you to take that one big step, and give up your babies so they have a chance to live a different life than the one you did, than the one you are capable of giving them.

Do it before you harm them, physically or emotionally. Do it because they do not need to grow up with anger, fear and hate in their hearts, because they don’t need to live under the threat that any day may be their last at your hands, or that you will commit an unspeakable act of harm against them.

Don’t turn away. The horror is real. Don’t turn away and let it go on. You have the power to do one right thing.

If you don’t love your babies, learn to love them just enough to want for them a better life than you can give them. Just enough to know that they deserve a chance, a chance that you can’t give them.

It sounds awful: “Give up my kids.”

If this makes it any easier, just remember: they aren’t yours. They belong to the world. You don’t “own” them, you are assigned to care for them. If you cannot do that -

No shame. 

But then go do the right thing. And do it for yourself. You deserve to be free from the stress of having these terrible thoughts and feelings. You deserve to avoid doing something that could ruin the rest of your life.

Let’s take a situation where nobody wins, and make it into one where everybody wins. If you need help - reach out. Tell somebody. They’ll help you figure out what to do next.

Then do it.

I keep having this same pervasive feeling. No matter what I read, where I read it, I keep having this overwhelming feeling that we are having yesterday’s conversations.

On the Tavis Smiley radio program in October, I predicted that the American economy will shed 5 million jobs within the first two years of the Obama administration. It now looks as though it will be within one year. On the Washington Post in a blog exchange a few months later, as the Dow Jones Industrial Average sank below 10,000 and people were predicting that there would soon be a bottom, I said that the Dow won’t bottom out until it fell below 7,000. The Dow is now at 6,500 and nobody believes we are anywhere near the bottom.

I’ve reminded people that the 25% unemployment rate of the depression was a more honest number than the one used today, because today’s number excludes those who have become “too discouraged” to look for work. They are no longer counted as part of the work force at all.

Here is the real news:

Nonfarm payroll employment continued to fall sharply in February (-651,000)

The number of unemployed persons increased by 851,000 to 12.5 million in
February, and the unemployment rate rose to 8.1 percent. Over the past 12
months, the number of unemployed persons has increased by about 5.0 million,
and the unemployment rate has risen by 3.3 percentage points.

Among the marginally attached, there were 731,000 discouraged workers in
February, up by 335,000 from a year earlier

The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more)
increased by 270,000 to 2.9 million in February. Over the past 12 months,
the number of long-term unemployed was up by 1.6 million.

When we include the 5.588 million people who want a job but for various reasons don’t have one, the total workforce climbs to 159,304,000, of whom 18,025,000 are currently unemployed, for a “real” unemployment rate of over 11%. If that number was to represent the population of a U.S. state, it would sit comfortably in fifth place, poised to take over fourth place from Florida within another month or two.

But I digress.

The point I am trying to make is that we lie about the numbers, but it doesn’t matter anymore. It’s like lying about stealing a pack of gum from the store when five minutes later somebody else came in and shot everybody dead. Yes you were bad, yes you lied about it, but it just doesn’t matter anymore.

I’ve been saying for months that we keep throwing the peoples money at “investments” that shrink perhaps even faster than we can keep up, and thus the liquidity vanishes almost immediately. There is already talk of the need for a second round of stimulus even before the ink is dry on the “first” stimulus, which of course is really at least the third bill designed to stave off economic doom.

And yet, we are arguably closer to that doom than we were in October, in January, even a week ago. It is unclear if Citibank can be saved; it is not known how bad the bloodletting will be at AIG, with two rounds of bailout down and nobody knows how many more to go; it is almost certain that General Motors will cease to exist before summer starts, and thus venerable brands such as Pontiac, Oldsmobile and Chevrolet will also cease to exist. Saturn has already been handed its death notice.

In other words, fundamental, permanent change is occurring, not only in the United States but around the world. The global economy is intertwined in a way that nobody can intelligently explain, which nobody - not a single human - has the capacity to understand nor control. We have built “HAL”, we just didn’t realize that the way to do it was not to build one supercomputer, but instead to connect thousands of computers which all obey similar instructions, and which are only as accurate at predicting the future as the people who wrote them, which is poorly.

We are only now coming to grips with the reality that we have no idea how to stop it, no idea how to fix it, no idea how to turn it around. Don Ameche screaming at the end of Trading Places: “Turn those machines back on!!!!!”

Of course, he was really wishing to have the value of his investments restored. Those investments were already gone, already worthless. Nobody wanted to pay his prices, not after the market had crashed.

Here we are. The market has crashed. Down around 50% from its high. We know it hasn’t hit bottom, and we have no idea where that will be. Will the U.S. economy lose another 3 million well paying jobs this year? Will it be more? Will 2010 be better or worse?

Nobody knows.

And yet, we find ourselves on Mo’Kelly’s blog discussing Michael Steele versus Rush Limbaugh, an utterly pointless diversion at such a time as this; Dwayne T. wants us to think about the meaning of commitment, as though that will drag us out of this mess. No offense to these fine men, but we don’t have the time for this. We have only enough time to decide who will be in charge when everything goes up in flames, and what the goals of the new order will be.

Zach bemoans his lack of a girlfriend and men’s poor hygiene; Zack, my friend: find out who your comrades are, man or woman, and don’t worry about how they smell. Worry only about how close by your side they will be when the end of life as we know it comes.

It is coming. It is unavoidable, and it exceeds all predictions as to its speed and intensity. So, we are also wrong about its depth, we just don’t know by how much.

We need to start having tomorrow’s conversations, and there is zero time left to lose.

We tried to tell you that there was trouble in the middle east, that we needed to become less dependent on foreign oil. We tried to tell you that we spent more energy than we needed, and were not efficient enough. But you were too busy driving SUVs to the supermarket, and taking your ATV out for a spin at the quarry, and revving up your party boat in the summer. You were too busy earning bonuses on Wall Street while putting workers out of work, and calling it “efficiency.”

You were too busy being the better class, the masters of  the universe, you were too busy manipulating what you saw as a game, manipulating it so that you would always win. We were too busy surviving amidst a swirling economy that rewarded youth over experience, cheap over local. A system that pushed good people aside if they dared to earn the right to make a little more than you felt the need to pay.

All through this period of great expansion, you tossed people into the street and expected them to rebuild their economic worth at the end of their working lives, rendering their experience null and void. You were too busy leaving entire classes of people and their children to rot in sullen economic conditions, too poor to move and subject to the most harsh social conditions. We tried to tell you that people without opportunity will turn to opportunism, which means crime. We showed you the numbers; you were too busy building jails to throw them into, certain of your wisdom that a tough approach would send the proper message. What it failed to send was relief, and the problem only worsened.

We were too busy trying to keep families together while a significant member of that family served their time, and then re-integrating that person back into society. Sometimes there was no way to accomplish that: the same lack of opportunity that forced us into impossible choices, still remained.

You were too busy telling us that we need more religion, more morality, that we deserve God’s wrath because we have lived too selfishly, the same tactic a terrorist uses to justify bombing a school. You were too busy telling us that our problem was that we expected too much. We were too busy trying to get you to understand that a $75 trash bill and a $100 water bill have to come from somewhere. And then there is the $300 electric bill, the $200 car insurance, phone and internet if we intend to be civilized people, not to mention rent, food, clothing and so forth, and where is it all supposed to come from?

We were too busy trying to figure out why two middle class incomes are barely enough to keep one family afloat. Which is why we were all too busy to see that we were killing the planet. Oh sure, we saw a few things that we could fix. Air quality, water quality. Things we could understand, like black cities and dead lakes. But when we were confronted with a simple fact: that we were taking millions of years of carbon out of the ground and depositing it in the air and water in a century, we were just too damn busy to try to make sense of it.

And so we were too busy to understand that in all of human history, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had always stayed in a tight band between 180 and 280 parts per million. This was clearly the range that nature preferred, for hundreds of thousands of years, all of human history and beyond. Now, in a century, man had added another 100 parts per million. And we were too busy to try to make sense of that increase, and we allowed others to make sense of it for us. And we were too busy to notice that some of those people had no idea what they were talking about, and so we did not realize that we, too, had no idea what we were talking about.

And so we were clueless to the meaning of terms such as amplification, persistence, forcings, feedbacks and tipping points. We were too busy feeding off of this giant economic machine known as capitalism, too busy riding it as hard as we could, for blood or survival, riding it as though it were the giant horse and we the riders, and if we fell off there would be no getting back on.

And so we were too busy to notice that this overheated planet was being fed by an overheated economic system, and this economic system finally, inexorably heaved and fell, and passed its own tipping point. And so we watched in morbid fascination as the system imploded on itself, taking industries and institutions with it, and revealing ever greater catastrophes as it did. We became numb to new revelations of misdeeds, and when the sober governors of our fates told us that we had to bail out this mighty machine lest it die and take us with it, we nodded, shrugged, and went on about our business.

We were too busy to ask, why are we saving this dying system, so that it may finish the job of killing the planet? Why are we asking this system to recover, so that it may go on creating unequal classes of those who lust for profit and those who struggle to survive? Why is it that we want to go on living like we’re living?

(With a loving nod to Gilda Radner, gone too soon and forever a brilliant light…)

“We now turn over the microphone to our guest editorialist, Miss Emily Litella, who has some important views to share with us. Miss Litella:”

“Thank you, Cheddar. I’m good and worked up over this. I keep hearing about all this effort to get rid of small pirates, and it got me to thinking, maybe they can’t do anything else! I mean, it must be difficult to go through life as a small person, never being able to reach the top shelf, needing special cars for small people, and so forth. It’s a hard life, just think about it! Now I say, let’s not punish the small pirates, let’s embrace them! Make them feel special, even though they’re small. Perhaps if we spend more time building up their self esteem and less time making them feel that they can’t do anything right, it just might bring about a better…”

“..Uh, Miss Litella.”

“Yes, Cheddar?”

“Miss Litella, that’s Somali Pirates.”

“Salami? That doesn’t make any sense. Who likes salami enough to…”

“No, Miss Litella, SOMALI. From Somalia. It’s a country on the African coast.”

“Oh, oh I see. Are they small?”

“I believe they’re regular size. They hijack cargo intended for foreign destinations, and they hold the ship and crew for ransom. Sometimes they kill innocent people. When goods don’t get through to their intended destination, people suffer.”

“Suffer? Oh, that’s bad. I’m not in favor of that.”

“No, I don’t think that anybody believes that you…”

“Somali? Not small? I see…well…that’s very different, isn’t it?

Nevermind.”

Where did your long hair go
Where is the girl I used to know
How could you lose that happy glow
Oh, caroline no

Who took that look away
I remember how you used to say
Youd never change, but thats not true
Oh, caroline you

Break my heart
I want to go and cry
Its so sad to watch a sweet thing die
Oh, caroline why

Could I ever find in you again
Things that made me love you so much then
Could we ever bring em back once they have gone
Oh, caroline no
(c) Brian Wilson, 1966

I will honestly admit that I was stunned when Caroline Kennedy, who we all adore, well those of us over 40, anyway, announced her “candidacy” for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Hillary Clinton.

I was stunned because Caroline (sorry, I just can’t call her “Kennedy”) had never shown the slightest inclination to be in the public eye in this way. Stunned because, where was her experience in this arena? Gene pool? That may have worked in an earlier time, not in these modern times where information is old after ten minutes. 

Stunned because it seemed such a clumsy move.

One thing is certain about the Kennedy clan: they know politics. So, it can be said, does the Clinton clan. How was it possible that these two clans didn’t come together, take the political temperature for such a suggestion, and quickly advise Caroline that while her public service ambition was admirable, perhaps she should offer that service in some other way?

Now, some of the shine will inevitably come off of this sublime human being, quite unfairly but necessarily. Governor Patterson is quite right to select Andrew Cuomo, who has live his life in New York, who has held several state offices, and whose father was a beloved Governor of New York, turned down a Supreme Court seat, and is still among the most popular living New Yorkers. If Caroline had received the appointment instead of Cuomo, the Democratic Party in New York would have unraveled right before our eyes. [Note: Paterson came out of left field with his actual pick. See below.]

Rightly so.

Kudos to Governor Patterson for keeping his head down and weighing his choice carefully, and for resisting any pressure which may have been brought to bear, to take Caroline for her star power or for her family’s long commitment to public service. Although it won’t be announced until Saturday, the word is on the street that it’s Cuomo, which is why Caroline has withdrawn her name. [New word on the street, according to today's NY Times: "Mr. Paterson, according to two well-placed Democrats told of his thinking, was leaning toward selecting Representative Kirsten E. Gillibrand, an upstate lawmaker in her second term in Congress."]

Now that she’s stuck her neck out, however, it would be undortunate if Caroline went back into hiding. Sure, time will pass and people will forget, but when they do remember, her legacy would be one of a clumsy stumble and then retreat.

Better that she take her “personal time”, let her uncle’s illness take its course, and then ask her own governor or her president if either of them has any use for her services, in a volunteer or appointed position, wherever her passion for service may lie.

A star is a star, and Caroline will ever be thus. She and her little brother kept a nation stitched together at it’s most shattered moment. Daddy’s gone, Mommy’s gone, Junior’s gone. They’re all gone.

All we have is Caroline, our sweet Caroline.

Dwane T. Hodges is a good friend of Bennett Blog, a frequent commenter and a class human being. He and I have engaged in deep and meaningful discussions here, at the Morris O’Kelly blog and at the New York Times. Many of our discussions share a common theme: public mis-perception regarding the experience of being a black man in the early twenty first century.

Based on a recent exchange, it became clear to me that Dwane has something to share that would do me and perhaps others a lot of good - he has a way of relating his experiences without bitterness or rancor. He really just wants us to understand.

I asked Dwane to author a guest post and he graciously agreed. What follow are his words, unedited an uncut.

Thank you Dwane, for taking the time.

- Walt Bennett

By Dwane T. Hodges

I always think about him at Christmas time.  And why not, Jonny was the man who first got me “interested” in Christ.  He was my number one hang-out buddy in college, and a man everyone knew as my “little brother”.  Jonny could party with the best of them; the brother could dance his behind off.  We even had a routine where we would take two girls on the dance floor, dance them over toward each other, then leave the girls and dance with each other.  We were silly, fun, and wanted to make the world a better place… me through social activism, Jonny through Jesus.  With his influence, I began to incorporate his way into mine.  Had I known that he was going to die at the hands of the police at such a young age, I would have listened a little more, and a little sooner.

Jonny Gammage.  For many, he is the symbol of Clarence Thomas’ high tech lynching in our modern times.  His death made all the major newspapers in the country.  His family was on Oprah.  He had organizations that fight police brutality formed in his name.  Yet, had he not been the cousin of pro football player Ray Seals, he would have been just another of the many guys who die in police custody each year where an “internal investigation” finds no fault.  Johnny was the first post-Rodney King police brutality case to receive national attention.  The difference between he and King was: whereas King was a man who had prior issues with the law, Jonny was a college grad and a businessman who had been the president of our college gospel choir, and was known to be a “choir boy” in most other ways.  He was a good looking man with pretty dark skin and wavy hair that women adored, yet he was always gentlemanly toward them.  He was an inch shorter and 10 lbs. heavier than I was, but at a small 5’7” and 140lbs., he still had a powerful presence.  But most of all, Jonny was a friend to many, and an enemy to none. 

So it’s Christmas, and Jonny is not here.  He was supposed to come visit that Christmas, since it coincided with my sons second birthday and he hadn’t seen him yet… but he died October 12, 1995.  My son turns 15 on December 23rd of this year, so it has been 13 years since Jonny has been gone… and I still miss him.  Not only do I still feel the pain of his passing, I still suffer from the memory of how it happened.  I still remember how my first wife feared that I would lose my mind from grief.  As I was still harassed by the cops in Buffalo on a regular basis, my tension grew to terror.  I never understood before how the KKK burning crosses could cause such fear in people, but now I knew first hand.  Every police car pulling up behind me, or next to me, could be the reason my sons grew up fatherless.  I remembered the time I was pulled out of my car at gunpoint while driving one of my students home because I “looked too young to be driving this car” (verbatim from the officer), and I realized how lucky I was then.  Klan hoods and police badges, or as KRS-one said, Over-seer and officer, it’s the same thing in a different time.  And now that my son is turning 15 years old, in the same way that fathers in the past had to warn their children about how to deal with the Klan, I have to teach my son how to deal with the police.  

It’s a rites(or rights)-of-passage that every Black father has to take his son through.  How to deal with being stopped for walking, running, driving, shopping, sight-seeing, or standing there thinking while Black.  The advanced course comes shortly afterward… how to deal with the police when stopped as a part of a group while Black.  In that case, you have to read the crowd, and adjust the rules from the first lesson accordingly to make sure that 1) you can save everyone in the group, or 2) if you can’t save everyone, save yourself.  Some folks say I am starting my training late.  This is true, but I did give him some basic instruction on simple things like shopping (if you pick up an item, put it in a cart if you plan to buy it.  Never walk out of the aisle with an item in your hand if possible… that can be construed as intention to steal for a Black man).  I found it interesting that Soledad O’Brien, in an interview after her CNN special on Blacks in America, said one of the most painful things she heard about in her research was “the talk”.  She said every man, from celebrities D.L. Hughley and Michael Eric Dyson, to the poorest working class fathers, all said that telling their sons how to “survive” an encounter with the police was a mandatory part of child rearing.  When a co-worker said that all parents need to teach their children how to behave when questioned by the police, she quickly corrected her.  She said its’ not how to behave, it’s how to survive… there is a difference.  Spoken like a woman with black male siblings.  

There is no denying the pain that’s felt by families of people who lose their loved ones in unjust ways by people who are supposed to represent justice.  Even when police self-reported that Jonny begged for his life before he died, no one was punished.  I am one of Barack Obama’s biggest supporters, but I would be a fool to believe that police brutality will disappear because there is a Black president or Attorney General.  Legislation can’t stop hatred, but I don’t care if you hate me… just don’t hit me.  Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., put it best:  “It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and that’s pretty important.”  At the very least, Jonny’s killers should have received third degree manslaughter.  But they received nothing,., and those who knew Jonny, either directly through shared lives, or indirectly through shared race, received a reminder that it was still alright to kill a Black man in American if the authorities okayed it.  I’m not anti-police, I’m anti-abuse of authority, and anti-discrimination by authority.  When Fidel Castro came to New York, he made the claim that no White man had ever been convicted of raping a Black woman, and dared someone to find a case. They protested his visit, and attacked many of the things he said, but strangely, no one ever addressed that issue.  I know that none of the White men who raped my mother over the course of her life were even arrested.  No justice, no peace.  Like my mother, Jonny had no justice… and years after the deaths of both of them, I have no peace.  

Yes, its Christmas, and Jonny will be on my mind.  I won’t spoil his birthday or Christmas with finally telling my son how Dad’s friend in the photo album died.  But I will tell him soon afterward.  I hear and read how things have changed, and are changing.  We have a Black president, so that must mean that racism is over.  Black people have irrational fears, our country protects all its citizens equally.  There is no reason to pass on issues of the past to future generations… it’s a new day.  I understand how folks may believe those things… because it looks different.  But that’s the thing about perspective, depending on where “you” move, things always look different.  If your father was a White racist, and you have a mixed group of friends, things look different.  But they still look the same to your father.  And they look the same to your brother who chooses to keep all White friends, because he is a good kid and listened when his father taught him about “those people”.  And like any father, unless your brother changes what he believes before he has children, he will try to pass on his perspective to his children.  They told us back in college that things were different.  The Civil Rights Movement was 20 years in the past.  But ten years later Jonny died at age 31.  So I have to teach from my fears, because the worst fear is that something will happen to “my” son because I failed to teach him.  

Merry Christmas to all.  Happy birthday, son. I Miss you, Jonny.

If you took the time to enjoy your weekend away from the madness of the economic meltdown, let’s get you caught up.

Congress agreed to authorize the release of up tp $15 billion from a fund which was already earmarked to help U.S. Auto retool for cleaner vehicles. That money will now be used to provide lines of credit to keep the Big Three operational. The media is already referring to this as a “Democratic bailout of the auto industry.”

As if a Republican congress would have let them fold. Any takers for that theory?

Workers at a factory in Chicago staged a sit-in after the company announced on Tuesday that Friday would be the last day of operation, and that certain benefits which employees had accrued would not be paid, nor would they be offered severence pay. The workers expected to be arrested; instead, they have become celebrities. They ask the question that more and more workers will be asking: you bailed out the banks, you’re bailing out big business: where’s our bailout? What did we do wrong? Why are we being punished?
(more…)

Reuters

Reuters

I wonder if you heard those voices from the future the other day, when the Bureau Of Labor Statistics, destined to become the most well known government agency, released the latest employment numbers.

Did you hear those 533,000 voices saying “Our jobs are gone. They no longer exist.”? They joined the 723,000 voices from the jobless future who were heard in September and October, 1,256,000 voices in the last three months.

Did you hear 298,000 newly unemployed who expressed certainty that those jobs will never return? Two million such voices in the past year? Nearly 5 million overall, almost half of all the unemployed?

Did you hear the voices of the 277,000 who stopped looking for work because they believe there is no work to be found? They join the voices of 4,800,000 others who had already made that decision.

The government tells you that the new unemployment rate, seasonally adjusted, is 6.7%. They tell you that, adjusting for those who no longer look for work and those who want full time work but can only find part time work, the number is over 12%.

Those are numbers. Can you hear the voices?
(more…)

My heart has been sideways all week, ever since the new Britney Spears record came out.

I am a sucker for well done pop music, and I always have. Going back to my early days, when my mother engulfed me in pop music from the 50s on forward, I loved well made pop.

I morphed over time, and by the early 1980s I could not stomach pop music. By the time of “Don’t You Want Me” by Human League, pop had become pure factory music. I moved on, and had to drop former favorites one by one (Journey, Styx) as they sold out to the Market Gods.

The market, as it had from the beginning, also turned out its own favorites. If you had the right look and could sing a little, they would surround you with enough professionals to present you in the most marketable way. New Kids On The Block, Vanilla Ice, Backstreet Boys and many others were pre-packaged and sold more on the basis of style than musical merit.
(more…)

Today we delve into that microcosm of American society commonly known as the world of sports.

As we spin the globe we focus on the port city of New York, New York, home of the football Jets and Giants.

This past Friday, Plaxico Burress of the Giants shot himself in the leg with a gun in New York City, where you need a permit to carry a loaded gun or you are guilty of a felony with a three and a half year mandatory minimum sentence. Burress did not have a permit.

The team invited him back to their facility.

The team invited him back to their facility.

When the team doctor determined that Burress would not heal before season’s end, the team suspended him without pay. But first, they invited him back to their facility.

Saturday morning, while Burress was being treated, secretly, at a New York hospital, Sean Ellis of the Jets was racing to practice when he passed a police car while going too fast. When he was pulled over, the police officer later stated, Ellis was uncooperative. Eventually a search was conducted, which turned up marijuana and a pipe with which to smoke it.

He played on Sunday.

He played on Sunday.

This would seem to mean that the Jets did not have him piss into a cup and did not then test that piss to see if it came up positive for marijuana. This of course means that they did not wish to know.

Because the legal process takes time to unfold, and because the agreement between the players union and the league calls for no action to be taken until a case is resolved, the Jets and Giants knew that both players remained eligible to play.

That does not come close to explaining why either team would want any such thing as to let these players anywhere near the team.

In the middle of the playoff hunt, these men put their selfish interests ahead of a unit of over 50 men, who have sweated together and struggled together and lost together, and learned how to win together.

Burress stepped outside that circle, committed a felony and caused himself injury. He will no longer be around the team, but only because the wound was too severe. The Giants’ reaction was to welcome him back, and the team has gone on record stating that he will remain a Giant even after his conviction.

The Jets didn’t even announce Ellis’ arrest until 5 days later. We have no idea how this behavior affected Ellis’ preparation, or how much the incident disrupted his and the team’s concentration. We do know that the team was flat on Sunday and got spanked. Ellis was a non-factor, as was much of the defense and the entire offense. Certainly the players all knew what had happened and knew it would become a distraction.

See, one way to avoid the distraction is to send the man home. Let the 50 something other men carry on together.

If this seems harsh, then I say the world has become too soft. If it is harsh to make a man pay a stiff price for causing such harm to his team’s efforts, then I say we aren’t really all that serious about the team effort. And that is a terrible thing to tell those 50 something men, and the organization which supports them, and the thousands of fans who make the effort and pay the expense to see them on Sunday and spur them on, and to the many thousands more who tune in, wherever they are, and watch with pride as their men go to war.

It spits on that.

Today’s news: 509,000 newly minted unemployed workers, after 530,000 new unemployment claims the previous week. That’s 1,039,000 new unemployment claims in the last two weeks, as the Christmas shopping season gets underway. That number would rank as the tenth largest city in the country, just behind Dallas, Texas.

Ongoing claims are at 4,009,000, the highest since the early 1980s.

And remember: this thing is just getting started.

Today, AT&T announced a cut of 12,000 workers, four percent of its work force. Dupont announced a reduction of 2,500 workers. European job cuts are also beginning to mount.

Shadow President Obama’s promise to create or salvage 2,500,000 jobs, made only a few weeks ago, will, as I predicted, end up being dwarfed by the number of NEW jobless which occur. At the current pace, in the seven weeks between the announcement of Obama’s plan and his inauguration, 3.5 million jobs or more will have been lost.

This does not factor in the potential collapse of the U.S. auto industry, a very real possibility which would cause an intense cascade effect.

And there remain the 5,000,000 workers who are simply too discouraged to even seek employment anymore. That number will also surely grow, and you will read about it here. The government may choose to ignore these workers; I choose not to.

Obama’s plan is not enough. It’s not enough domestically, simply because it won’t even keep up with new jobless claims, let alone repair any of the existing damage. It’s not enough on a larger scale, because it does not address the root issues. Only an international, coordinated effort can do that.

Capitalism runs smack into Nationalism. In a time of crisis, it is every man, woman and child for themselves. We’ve seen it before and we are seeing it now.

We’ve discussed the rumblings coming from China. Russia is also becoming antagonistic. There is tremendous unrest in pockets of Europe, France particularly but not exclusively.

I’ve made this point before and I’ll make it again: watch for an increase in “crime” which is met, especially by the right, by cries for more “law and order”, more prisons, more mandatory jail terms.

Let me state this clearly: SURVIVAL IS NOT A CRIMINAL ACT.

Crime goes up during tough times because people are desperate. The crime is that they are placed in this position to begin with. Millions of displaced workers will be competing for the same low level jobs, competing on the basis of how little they are willing to work for. Those meager wages will not be sufficient to pay the bills. Food? Rent? Heat? Medicine? Too many paychecks will stop short of fulfilling all of those needs. Petty crimes will certainly rise. Violent crimes will invariably rise as well.

Do we excuse a man who sticks a gun in the ribs of another man and takes his money? No. Do we excuse a man who steals a bottle of cough syrup from the pharmacy? If I say “yes” to that, I am not advocating in favor of petty crime. Rather, I am advocating in favor of addressing, directly, the conditions which led to that crime.

If you are going to take up arms against your oppressor, you had better win. If you fall short, you will be crushed.

Start making up your mind now: do you defend this system no matter how much pain it causes? Will you abide the treatment of desperate people as criminals?

Or will you recognize yourself in the faces of the desperate? Will you understand that you are every bit as vulnerable, that your turn may soon come? If I lose my job, within a month I’ll be writing this column from a public library and sleeping on somebody’s couch; my family will be shattered.

Why? Because there is no way I will replicate my salary in a depressed job market. Not a chance. My world will unravel. I will have to give up my home. What will become of me? How will I repair and rebuild my life?

I’m 48. Starting over is not impossible, but it took 30 years to get to this level in my current line of work. It’s utterly unrealistic to expect to get paid a decent wage in any new line of work.

Such is the fate of millions of American workers, and many millions more across the globe.

Remember the old communist phrase? “Workers Of The World, Unite!”

Well? We know what’s coming. We know it for sure. We know it’s big and we know it has catastrophic potential.

Will we burn the whole thing down? It’s a very real possibility.

Atlantic Rhythm & Blues …

…Can I Change My Mind…

…I’m In Love…

…Too Weak To Fight…

Resistance is futile. Immerse yourself. There is no other way.

The big three made their pitch to Congress yesterday. They were all about appearances, too. Driving from Detroit in hybrids instead of flying in separate corporate jets, as they did several weeks ago. Promising to slash their own salaries to one dollar, and to cut executive pay and bonuses.

Just please, please, throw them this lifeline. And do it soon. Real soon. Is this week possible? Next week at the outside?

So, it’s the same pitch, only now several weeks more urgent. Each company is still bleeding red ink, still locked in a credit freeze, still unable to sell vehicles. GM lost over 40& of its sales in November, and other automakers, including venerable Toyota, all saw sales fall off a cliff.

Welcome to the latest chapter in this saga, where the government bails out an industry only to see it collapse further. First the financial sector, and now the manufacturing sector.

How long before steel, rubber, plastic and other manufacturers come running to Congress, begging that they be allowed to live,too?

The question remains the same: exactly when do these companies expect to become profitable again? This meltdown is months old; the recession is a year old, but sales did not drop sharply until the last couple of months. The meltdown is the disaster on top of the slowdown. Capitalism was already trying to grow its way out of the recession. A typical recession lasts 18 months, and they tend to begin and end months before they are recognized as such. Just another example of voodoo economics: they tell us that the recession started last November. They didn’t know that til now?

Of course Congress will cobble together some sort of rescue package, to keep these companies afloat through the spring. Come spring, when the economy is in even worse shape - far worse shape - than it is today, these three companies will be back on Capitol Hill, explaining that they have done everything that was asked of them, but these darn tough economic times just keep hammering away at them, and therefore Congress must, it simply must, extend the lifeline.

Between now and then, through one mechanism or another, they will destroy the compacts they have spent years building with their labor force and retirees. This will be an “at all costs” bailout, the object of which will be to make the case that a dead company is no use to any workers at all, so compromise is the only option.

Well, no.

This isn’t about compromise, it’s about capitulation. The workers are going to be expected to bear the pain of this inept attempt to salvage an industry that for too long lines its own pockets while stonewalling every effort to make them more accountable. More accountable for safety. More accountable for efficiency. More accountable for enviornmentalism.

All along the way, their paid lobbyists and paid Congressmen played hardball. Now, they come to the people’s house and dare to insist that they must be saved, at the expense of the workers who built the industry that they spent years undermining.

So, one option is to let the workers take over. The government assumes ownership of the industry, consolidates the not-so-big three into a single entity, and allows the workers to buy it from them. With financing, of course.

Who do you trust to right this industry: the fat cats who enriched themselves while the business model they created collapsed from beneath them? Or the workers who know that their livelihood depends on building cars that people want to buy?

Cheaper, more efficient cars. That would be a good start. Why was Japan able to see this need but the U.S. wasn’t? You already know the answer: SUVs made more profit than smaller vehicles. That is, until they couldn’t sell any more SUVs.

And showed up on the peoples’ doorstep.

stop hatin and playin hard
i got a loaded bodygaurd
dont make him pull out the glock and pop

Uffie, “Pop The Glock”

Before this past weekend, had you ever heard of Plaxico Burress? If you are a follower of NFL football, then you have. You know him as a talented, eccentric pas receiver who caught the winning touchdown for the Giants in the Super Bowl last season.

Today you know him as the dude who shot himself in the thigh with his own gun.

He did this at a club in Manhattan, an upscale club in a fancy hotel. There is a strict law in New York City that makes it a felony to be in possession of a loaded firearm without a city-issued permit.

That’s a very difficult permit to get. New York does not recognize permits from other jurisdictions. Burress’ permit from Florida had expired in May, anyway.

Burress makes his home in New Jersey during the season. They have similar laws.

Burress is facing mandatory jail time. You may want to argue second amendment issues, but they are moot. The law is on the books, and Burress clearly broke it.

The case will take time to unwind; his next appearance is not until March. He will most likely resume his season with the Giants once the wound heals. He’s in the first year of a $35 million contract. The Giants want some performance for that money.

Here’s the issue: Why did Burress feel the need to carry a Glock to a club? What was he doing in a club where they let people carry guns? (The word is that they knew he had a gun and allowed him to bypass security.)

Was he prepared to shoot, you know, somebody else? Was he preparing for violence?

The man is a multi-millionaire. He can afford whatever level of security he deems necessary. He can do so WITHIN THE LAW. He can hire people who ARE permitted to carry concealed weapons in New York.

He can do all of those things. Why didn’t he?

Well, stupidity would certainly seem to be a good guess. But I suspect something deeper.

Since the early days of rap/hip hop, gun violence has been glorified. NWA, Ice-T, Snopp Doog and many others have all rapped about putting a bullet in somebody’s brain. There is a glorification of gun violence in the hip hop world. You don’t just pack, you pack the hottest, most lethal weapons you can. It proves that you can handle your business on the street.

It buys you cred.

My belief is that Burress was trying to swing with the hard boys. He wanted cred. He wanted to show off his lethal weapon and have others ooh and ah in awe. He wanted to be a Bad Dude.

Does any of this make the slightest sense? Not to me. How can you have street cred when you make $35 million? At some point in your success, you ain’t street no more. It’s just that simple.

Snoop now disavows violence, and has for years. Others have also spoken out.

Not enough, and frankly, too many still exploit this vein. Too many hip hop artists (and others of less renown, death metal and so forth) still glorify violence and especially gun violence.

If Burress had hit a major artery he’d likely be dead. If he had felt threatened and drawn his weapon, he might be facing a homicide charge. How was he better off for carrying this weapon?

It is past time for black artists and athletes to speak out against the glorification of gun violence. Most of these incidents are black on black. It serves nobody any useful purpose to continue to deny the abject destructiveness of this culture of violence.

Think of the kids. What are we teaching the kids?

Let’s do what’s right. Let’s please, please start speaking out and taking a firm stand.

You aren’t the sharpest knife in the drawer if you illegally possess a weapon.

Somebody please tell it like it is.

Update: After getting a look at his wound, team doctors determined that Burress would be unable to play again this season. The Giants then placed Burress on the non-football injury list, ending his season and relieving the Giants of the obligation to pay his remaining salary for the season. What this does to Burress’ financial situation will unfold over time. According to the New York Times:

Monday he was charged with two counts of second-degree criminal possession of a weapon; he faces a mandatory sentence of 3 ½ years in state prison, with a maximum of 15 years, on each count.

If credit is the oxygen that the financial sector of world capitalism requires for survival, then consumer spending is the oxygen that manufacturers require for their survival.

There are very few manufacturing sectors remaining inside the United States. Manufacturing is highly reliant on human labor, which is much cheaper elsewhere than it is in the United States.

For example, China. China’s port cities have boomed in the last 30 years as the country has flung open its borders to multi-national corporations who love the idea of making things cheap. Chinese manufacturing and shipping sectors have grown exponentially, fueling an overall rise in China’s economic output and making them the envy of the world.

Last year the Chinese economy grew at a rate of 12%. Growth rates in the west were in the one to two percent range for 2007. China is expected to grow at a rate of 7 percent for 2008. Good news, yes?

No.

That number actually represents a slowdown in the world of capitalism, where this years’ success is next year’s expectation, and then some. Investors are not prepared to accept slower growth and maintain the same price levels for those investments. Already, there are signs that investors are cooling on Chinese stocks. This means less capital for those industries.

Thus, the domino effect tags another victim.

The population of China hovers around 1.3 billlion people, 4 times the number of people in the United States. The vast majority of those people are peasants, living in the rural areas and making meager subsistence livings. In the last generation they have been encouraged to migrate to the cities, and tens of millions have done so. They continue to come, in search of promised opportunities in an ever expanding economy.

They are beginning to bump into each other. Shanghai alone has over 15 million inhabitants. The slightest slowdown in the growth of such regions has calamitous potential. Already, brand new factories and mills are being shut down before they can ramp up. Businesses are capsizing.

And this is only the beginning.

The United States is but one example of the problem. The U.S. is a major destination for Chinese goods. As consumers in the U.S. pull back on everything from TVs to automobiles to clothing to electronic gadgets, overseas manufacturers must adjust to the diminished demand. And just as the U.S. auto industry has no “Plan B” when sales dry up, nor does China.

From today’s New York Times:

President Hu Jintao of China warned at a government meeting over the weekend that the global financial crisis was threatening to undermine the country’s booming economy and that China could lose its competitive edge as trade growth slows.

“China is under growing tension from its large population, limited resources and environmental problems, and needs faster reform of its economic growth pattern to achieve sustainable development,” the president said.

Warnings of unrest in China are no small deal. When even a portion of a population of 1.3 billion gets angry, that can quickly add up to a lot of unrest.

As I noted last week, Shadow President Obama’s plan to restore the American economy to vitality is only a small piece of a very large, very complex puzzle.

We have seen belligerence from China before. They humiliated a new president when their own jet crippled a reconnaissance plane, which was forced to land on Chinese soil. These guys know how to play the nationalist card, know how to play the angry bear card, and know how important is their growth to the growth of the world economy.

And make no mistake: the only plan that capitalism has for repairing itself is to grow its way out of this trench.

Without cheap goods, there is no world economy. Without Chinese manufacturing there are no cheap goods, or at least far fewer of them.

All of this is a sure sign that spending will slow even more than it has, which will in turn put even more pressure on large cities with millions of idle workers.

Just something to keep in mind.

Mr. Will,

As an avowed social liberal, I consider you to be an important voice, not because we see things the same way but because we don’t. I am a keen admirer of your intellect, as I possess a sharp intellect as well. I am nowhere near as educated nor as well read as you, and I am constantly being educated and enlightened by following your train of thought.

Having said that, I have become disturbed with your recent inability to complete a thought. Your columns will start off on a sharp tack, then veer this way and that, then sort of slow to a stop. No coherent development, no walloping final point.

I’ve noticed a tendency amongst social conservatives such as yourself to assume the burden of defending capitalism. Although I understand that social conservatives fancy themselves fiscal conservatives, what I see is an unbridled defense of free enterprise. In other words, Convervative seems to equate to Capitalist. Thus, you collectively have demonstrated that you feel a duty to represent free enterprise in its best possible light in this, perhaps the worst of times.

What I see is that you have undertaken an impossible task, and will likely be undone by it.

Your Sunday column in the Washington Post today clearly calls for government to get out of the way and allow business and industry to cast aside workers, and to greatly reduce the income for those they keep, in order to regain efficiency.

If you are as analytical and skeptical as I believe you are, then you will at some point question whether or not free enterprise capitalism is the best we as humans can do. You will ask if the pain and misery which batters untold millions during economic slowdowns is an acceptable price for economic renewal.

You will ask yourself if our labor and material resources are really being used as wisely as possible. And while you are wondering that, you will ask yourself why this economic system has no use for 9 percent of its potential labor force which is ready and willing to show up for work, if asked. You will, if honest, acknowledge that you consider it acceptable to allow this number to grow.

You will ask yourself why the essential elements of human life: food, fuel, shelter, health care, medicine, are also the most expensive, and thus out of reach to some extent for more than a quarter of the population of this country.

You will ask yourself why more than two thirds of all workers are one or two paychecks away from poverty.

I will ask you this: Would you consider it elitist to defend policies which inflict pain that you will never have to endure? Would that not be a perfect definition of the term?

Imagine this: ABC fires you. WashPost/Newsweek fires you. Your syndicate drops you. Nobody will pay you a penny to publish a word you say.

Your savings lose all of their value. Your home plummets in price and you can’t profit from selling it, but you can’t afford to keep it.

You have to walk away.

Far-fetched, of course. There is a certain momentum to your life that only a sex scandal could derail. But what I want you to do is imagine it. The question is: what would you do next?

Now, imagine a 50-something factory worker, making perhaps $50,000 a year, with perhaps 25 years toward a nice pension. Then his company goes broke and he is out of a job. The pension fund is also broke and therefore worthless. He can’t find anything like the work he used to do. He finds himself in late working life, with no education which has any value in the job market, and no chance whatsoever to make even half of what he once earned.

My question for you is: What did he do wrong?

The New York Times

As far back as I can remember I have been a music lover. I grew up in suburban New Jersey to the sounds of WABC-AM and WCBS-FM (Golden 101!). ABC played contemporary pop and CBS played oldies, mainly songs from the late 1950s and early 1960s. My mother seemed to know all the words to all the songs, and had perfect recall for song titles and the artists who performed them.

I remember I went to New York City with a friend once and we wound up at something called The New York Experience, sort of a museum of modern New York. There was a jukebox there with the Del Vikings’ “Come Go With Me” on one side of a record, and their lesser hit “Whispering Bells” on the flip side. When I got home I quizzed my mother: what was on the flip side of “Come Go With Me”? I was so proud to tell her, once she gave up. She responded with a quizzical “Oh”, because those songs had been released at different times.

I hadn’t yet learned about reissues…

I discovered FM when I was 16. A student in my high school home room brought in a single of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”, a truly remarkable song for 1976. I asked why I hadn’t heard the song before and she sneered “because you listen to AM”, the “AM” curling out of her mouth like an epithet.

My radio only got AM! Oh…..

I bought a cheap combo player from a friend that had AM/FM/turntable, and found some pop stations with better clarity than AM. It took a couple more years to find progressive FM, and then I was home.

WNEW-FM was THE progressive, album rock FM station of the 1970s. OK, WMMR out of Cleveland was also famous, but FM signals do not travel as far as AM signals; I had no chance of picking up a Cleveland station in New Jersey.

Dan Neer, Dennis Elsis, Allison “the night bird” Steele, and the king of them all, Scott Muni. They didn’t have slick, huckster voices. What they had was a passion for the music. WNEW also played live concerts from up and coming performers such as Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel and Meatloaf. I would lay in my bed at night and listen to these concerts, transported, transfixed. The most joyous days of my childhood were those nights.
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And so the last several days have seen spectacular images coming from the Indian port city of Mumbai, a key commercial center of this vast nation. It will be some time before the smoke clears, literally as well as figuratively. It will be a while before we know who did this and why.

We can make the early assumption that a commercial center was attacked on purpose. Surely if the attackers wanted to target religious and other cultural centers, they could have done so. They chose hotels popular with foreigners. They chose a commercial hub.

They were attacking commerce.

Was the point to disrupt capital flow into and out of India? Was the point to blame commerce and capital for social ills? All issues to be unraveled during the investigation.

The tendency at a time like this will be to blame individuals or small groups who profess a “hatred” for freedom loving ways of life. It is clear that attackers such as these do not care that they are killing human beings with families and loved ones and productive lives. The attackers care much more about the statement they are making.

The phrase “we do not negotiate with terrorists”, made popular by the U.S. and Israel (even though both nations do exactly that, routinely) is another way of saying “We deplore their tactics; therefore we will not address their issues.”

Which is an easy way of sticking your head in the sand and hoping they don’t shoot your ass off.

Certainly there will always be a need for effective intelligence and law enforcement. Certainly there can be no excuse for killing innocent individuals in order to make a political point. No movement which behaves this way can be given a seat at a negotiating table.

However, how much longer can we go on demonizing those with whom we disagree? This attack may have nothing to do with al-Quaeda, nothing to do with the Taliban. It may be some other expression of extremism. But whoever did this, represents an ideology that is not going away.

Think about that.

In the eight years of the George W. Bush presidency, the United States pursued a policy which represented the belief that extremism can be eradicated.

No, it can’t.
(more…)

Read this article from today’s New York Times:

Nationalism of Putin’s Era Veils Sins of Stalin’s

then read my comment:

This article manages to utterly mangle any potential it had to teach.

First, the phrase “sins of communism” is far too vague and, in the context of anti-communist tendencies in the United States, presumably pejorative.

Surely the average well educated New York Times reader can differentiate between Marxism-Leninism and the brutality of Stalin and his successors.

So, the first point was missed entirely: revealing the many ways in which Stalin actually rejected his predecessor’s political philosophy runs an unavoidable risk of resuscitating Lenin’s legend. The man is already revered in Russia; peeling back the layers of the atrocities which were committed after his sudden, early death would expose how the revolution was abandoned. It is not a far leap from there to consider whether the true revolution should be resumed.

So, Putin wants nothing to do with potentially bringing the country back to that period.

(more…)

…or a ham or whatever you stuff into your face on Thanksgiving. Go be with your family.

Take a break from the worries of the world…

…they’ll still be here tomorrow.

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…lame intro, the rest is classic Mitch…

President-elect Obama made it clear early on: “The country has only one president at a time.”

The public mood could not be more clear: “Can we change that?”

Yesterday, Obama announced the formation of an economic advisory group for the express purpose of having an economic recovery plan ready to go “on day 1.”

One can only wonder if Obama grasps the folly of any such plan.

One of the key contradictions of capitalism in its imperialist form is this: companies and the broader economy are squarely multi-national and indeed, in many ways borderless. And yet, populations are still governed within national borders. President-elect Obama is making plans to defeat an international economic crisis by making changes within the borders of one country, the United States. And the solutions he is proposing amount to “stimulus”: flooding the existing markets with dollars in the hope that the money will find its way into the hands of “consumers.”

In other words, he is attempting to re-float the sinking ship.

He has no intention of letting it sink. As I mentioned recently, the bailout of Citibank sent a clear signal: we will not let major institutions fail, because the risk of a complete system failure is too great.

Nevermind that nobody has the slightest idea how to prevent such a thing, other than to buy the bad debt, flood these financial institutions with cash and hope that they don’t make the same mistakes again.

Two immediate problems with that theory (and the long term is even scarier): 1: the bottom has not been found yet, and cannot be found until the government gets out of the way and allows the market to establish prices; 2: the economic growth which provides value to investments has been shown to have been not a bubble but a balloon. An even more apt description, one which I’ve used more than once, is of a pyramid scheme.

In other words, the value was only there as long as new investors could be found to pump up the prices. Once the well dried up, the air came rushing out of the balloon and the pyramid came crashing to the ground. Except, the pyramid is not done collapsing. Not by a long, long shot.

Over two million workers lost their jobs and filed for unemployment benefits in the last four weeks. As predicted here, Obama’s plan to create or salvage 2.5 million jobs will soon seem paltry, and indeed will equate to perhaps one third of the jobs lost in the time between his announcement and his inauguration. Nobody wants to float real numbers because there is no historical precedent for this growth in the number of unemployed at such a rapid pace. Analysts keep trying to compare this situation to past slowdowns, but the comparisons fail because the comparisons are being made to recessions which were near their bottom. This one has only just begun.

And so President Bush has essentially stepped aside and is not interfering with Obama’s shadow government. Obama’s economic advisers are working directly with Congress to fashion the shape and depth of the policies which Obama considers most urgent, particularly his $500 billion job rejuvenation plan.

It is a very good idea to invest in infrastructure, especially when private sector jobs are scarce. Obama has no choice but to ignore the budget deficit, and he will do exactly that. But what does he plan to do about the other 15 million or more who will still be unemployed after his job package ramps up?

His intention is to wait.

If the economy rebounds, the private sector will create more jobs. Obama will wait and hope that the government stimulus is enough to breathe life into that engine, and he will attempt to manage the interim pain.

As I said on Tavis Smiley back before the election, Obama is destined to be an agent of change he cannot even fathom. The issues he must tackle, right away, will bear little resemblance to the priorities he staked out during the campaign. If he is deft, he will attempt to fold the former into the latter.

But this is no time for idealism.

The Washington Redskins football team holds an annual giveaway of turkeys, food and gifts at their stadium. Yesterday, people were lined up as far as the eye could see to receive this meager assortment.

It was better than they could do for themselves.

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It’s a breathtaking array of headlines in this morning’s New York Times:

U.S. Unveils $800 Billion Credit Program

President-Elect Starts Taking On Burdens of the Job

Home Prices Hit 2004 Levels in Quarter

When you also consider the $500 billion stimulus package being considered by Congress, and the eventual jobs program which president Obama will be forced to put into place, this bailout is approaching two trillion dollars.

That’s $6,000 for every man, woman and child in this country.

And the meltdown, remember, is global: this rescue will take many times over that amount, when spread among all of the countries in crisis.

And - we’ve only just begun. The arc of this meltdown is in, perhaps, it’s first ten percent. Perhaps less.

Where did all the value go? The better question is: was it ever there in the first place? The actual value of goods and services may not be the same as what a customer is willing to pay at times of high confidence in future returns. In other words, “expensive” money may seem like “cheap” money, if you expect to profit from that investment despite the cost. During an economic boom, this is exactly the psychology: get in while you can! Get out before the bust.
(more…)

U.S. Approves Plan to Help Citigroup Cope With Losses

So proclaimed the New York Times this bright and beautiful Monday morning (you sure look fine…).

Too big to fail? Oh, yeah. Hell, yeah.

No question about it.

Why is Citibank too big too fail? As one analyst put it recently, the credit market is capitalism’s oxygen. Without the relatively free flow of credit, the system grinds to a halt, seized up for lack of lubrication.

Citibank is a key contributor to that lubrication.

The U.S. government has agreed to commit 306 billion dollars - do these numbers even have the capacity to shock, anymore? - to underwrite shaky obligations held by Citibank (if Citibank can’t pay the obligations, the government will) and will inject 20 billion dollars directly into Citibank’s available capital.

The details:
(more…)

Yesterday, president-elect Obama announced that he will put America back to work on his watch. He promised 2.5 million new or salvaged jobs during the course of his plan to rebuild the national infrastructure and develop new, clean sources of energy.

On the surface, putting American workers back to work is clearly something we can all support. After all, so much money has gone into bailing out those who made the huge bets that crashed the world economy; how about a little something for the workers beyond extending their unemployment benefits?

At the same time, the national infrastructure clearly needs attention which it has, for too long, failed to receive.

In a recent column, Pat Buchanan struggled to make sense of the death of American Auto, blaming its demise on unfair competition from abroad, where work, wage and living standards are not as high as in the United States. In other words, the decked is stacked against American Auto. He made the point that for the first time in U.S. history, the government employs more workers than does manufacturing.

President-elect Obama intends to double down on that scenario, or so it would seem.

How will this money be spent? Will the government directly run these projects? Will they be doled out to the companies which promise to do the jobs most cheaply; i.e., beat down workers on wages and benefits? Will start-ups, minorities and other entrepreneurs be encouraged to compete for these projects?

There is still a lot of support for “big business” in the halls of government. The fact that the Senate is dragging its feet in bailing out American Auto should not fool you into thinking that Congress is alright with American Auto failing.

No: they are alright with American Auto declaring bankruptcy, which will allow them to basically dismantle the agreements they have with workers. As others have pointed out, the hourly labor cost paid by the Big 3 is much larger than their competition. There are some specific reasons for this, among them the high cost of health care and pensions. These were generous deals for their time but were deemed affordable based on the industry’s profit level.

They aren’t sustainable in times like these. As a result, Congress looks at the situation and says “Your cost structure is too high. You can’t make money. Why should we throw good money after bad?”

Take it out on the workers.
(more…)

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Ladies, remember when you went gaga over the latest teen hearth-throb? Think back to when you were 12 or 13, just beginning that transition from tomboy to little lady. And then you first saw Jordan Knight or Justin Timberlake, and something strange happened inside your chest and you felt weird but in a good way?

Welcome to our world, ladies. Except, we men, well many of us, we worship at the alter of sports.

We tend to be huge fans of the game itself, whatever game it may be. Many of us do like more than one sport, but we typically have a favorite sport.

And within that sport, we typically have a favorite team. And we typically made that connection when we were very young, perhaps 8 or 9.

Maybe it was Dad’s favorite team. Maybe we liked the uniforms. Maybe a player we worshipped played for that team.

My father was a Johnnie Mize fan. When Mize played for the Giants, my father was a Giants fan. When the Giants traded Mize to the Yankees, my father, still young, switched his allegiance to the Yankees, where it remained until he died, only last year. He took his allegiance to the grave.

As will most of us. Once a fan, always a fan.

I have several strong allegiances, to which I will admit now: Basketball: the New York Knicks. Baseball: the New York Mets. Football: the New York (OK, Hackensack, NJ) Jets.

When I was younger, had more discretionary income (before discovering the joys of being a parent 5 times over, that is), I was like any other Jets fan, attending as many games as I could, booing when they sucked, cheering like a maniac when they did well. Over the years the Jets have had, it seems, far more losing seasons than winning ones, far more years when they were among the worst than when they were among the best.

Still a fan. Just an irritated fan. (OK fellow Jets fans, fill in the blank: Rich _______ Kotite.)

This year may be different. Even if you know next to nothing about sports, even many of you ladies who only tolerate sports because your boyfriend is basically a sports lunatic, have heard that Brett Favre retired from the Packers after 800,000 years as the most exciting quarterback in the solar system, then changed his mind, decided that the Packers didn’t really want him back, and accepted a trade to the Jets.

Hallelujah! And so forth. The Jets finally did something to make their fans proud. They finally said to the pack, we ain’t following, we’re leading. You react to us for a change.

We appreciate it.
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(…the one who didn’t lose a bag of tools…)

This is the second in a series of articles focusing on the term of President Barack Obama.

The word is out now, that Hillary Clinton will be the next Secretary of State. What makes this most interesting is the issue which became an early, central theme in the Democratic Primary Race: talking to our enemies “without preconditions.”

When Barack Obama uttered those words in a debate, Clinton pounced. Her immediate response was to label such comments “naive” and “dangerous”. She insisted that handing this sort of prestige to an enemy of the United States, or even the mere suggestion of it, revealed Obama’s lack of fitness for office. It became a strong early wedge issue, the first time Obama was really on his heels a little bit.

He responded by asserting that he had meant what he said, but that this did not mean he would meet without low level talks to set the agenda and so forth. In other words, he wasn’t hopping on a plane to Damascus any time soon.

What makes this so interesting is the message coming from al Quaeda this week, in the wake of Obama’s election from Ayman al-Zawahiri, as reported by Fox News:

The second of these messages is to the new president of the United States. I tell him: you have reached the position of president, and a heavy legacy of failure and crimes awaits you. A failure in Iraq to which you have admitted, and a failure in Afghanistan to which the commanders of your army have admitted.

The other thing to which I want to bring your attention is that what you’ve announced about how you’re going to reach an understanding with Iran and pull your troops out of Iraq to send them to Afghanistan is a policy which was destined for failure before it was born.

It appears that you don’t know anything about the Muslim Ummah and its history, and the fate of the traitors who cooperated with the invaders against it, and don’t know anything about the history of Afghanistan and its free and defiant Muslim people. And if you still want to be stubborn about America’s failure in Afghanistan, then remember the fate of Bush and Pervez Musharraf, and the fate of the Soviets and British before them.

And be aware that the dogs of Afghanistan have found the flesh of your soldiers to be delicious, so send thousands after thousands to them.

As for the crimes of America which await you, it appears that you continue to be captive to the same criminal American mentality towards the world and towards the Muslims. The Muslim Ummah received with extreme bitterness your hypocritical statements to and stances towards Israel, which confirmed to the Ummah that you have chosen a stance of hostility to Islam and Muslims.

There was much more, including some distinctly personal and racial attacks. al-Zawahiri is not a fool, nor strictly a jihadist. He is a cleric and an intellectual, and he represents a clear line of thinking in the Muslim world.

Will Obama meet with him? Will Obama negotiate with him? Will Obama seek peace through diplomatic means with him?

Will he be sending Secretary of State Clinton to the middle east to meet with al-Zawahiri and other “enemies”?

Just exactly how will this New Diplomacy work?
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All the pain inside amplified by the
Fact that I can’t get by with my nine to five
And I can’t provide the right type of life for my family
Cuz, man, these goddamn food stamps don’t buy diapers

The above lyrics are, from the brilliant title track to Eminem’s semi-autobiographical 2002 movie “8 Mile”. Several things have combined to place that and other lyrics in my head today.

The other lyric running through my brain today is from Stevie Wonder’s incredible “Innervisions” album from 1973. The song I’m referring to is one of the most gripping, powerful songs any man ever wrote, “Living For The City”:

A boy is born in hard time mississippi
Surrounded by four walls that aint so pretty
His parents give him love and affection
To keep him strong moving in the right direction
Living just enough, just enough for the city…

His father works some days for fourteen hours
And you can bet he barely makes a dollar
His mother goes to scrub the floors for many
And youd best believe she hardly gets a penny
Living just enough, just enough for the city…

Hard Time, Mississippi.

Welcome to Hard Time, America.

Another half million workers applied for jobless benefits this past week, well over a million in the last two weeks. What this means for the country (and the world) cannot be predicted, other than that it will be immensely painful.

What can be predicted for the cities, however, is much simpler.

Violence.

The poor and underprivileged always suffer first and worst in a downturn. Well, folks, we are way past downturn. We are deep into a meltdown. This economy is in a race to throw off as many jobs as it can, as soon as it can.

My prediction of 5 million new jobless within a year, made only a month ago, seems timid.

I was afraid of that.
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Barney Frank, United States representative from Massechusett and chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, was on the radio this morning, calling not only for a $25 billion bailout of the Dettoit “Big 3″ automakers, but for more after that, if needed. He insists that this will be a loan only, and that Congress must insist on reforms which will right the industry, in order for them to receive the money.

In today’s New York Times, former Massachusetts governor and presidential candidate Mitt Romney called for the industry to declare itself bankrupt, shed current management, and rebuild itself from the ground up.

The automakers and many analysts worry that, once they enter into bankruptcy, they will not have access to the lines of credit they will need to operate, and thus would be forced into liquidation.

If the Big 3 liquidate, the estimate is that 3 million jobs may be lost within the auto manufacturing industry as well as in the ancillary industries which supply parts and which deliver and sell the finished products.

If you’re scoring at home, what this means is that nobody has any idea what to do.

What seems certain is that there will be some contraction in “Detroit”, a moniker which represents the northern auto industry controlled by GM, Ford and Chrysler. This contraction may end up being complete. If so, the north as an industrial center will most likely cease to exist as we know it today. The vast majority of industries in the north are tied to heavy manufacturing, and are built on enormous scales of size. Without an underlying robust manufacturing industry, these ancillary industries will topple in rapid succession.

What seems utterly unknowable is: What to do about it?

The public was not even able to stomach the idea of bailing out Wall Street; Congress essentially had to ignore public will in order to pass the legislation. Those same congressmen will have to run on their record in two years (in the House, that’s everybody; in the Senate, one third), and the relative success or failure of the economy will be perceived by the voting public as a referendum on the plans their congressmen and women did or did not support.

If the government bails out Big Auto, then who’s next? “The Public Dole” is taking on a whole new meaning.
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Paul Simon’s beautiful, stunningly original 1986 album “Graceland” rightly took home the Grammy award. It contains a haunting, nearly wordless song called “Homeless”, which contains the line above.

Today’s New York Times reports that veterans returning from the Gulf War are, for a variety of reasons, losing their homes. They may be unable to work, or waiting for benefits to kick in, or facing debt which accumulated while they were away.

Returning home to find themselves homeless.

Some have families, some just themselves. They come back with scars both physical and emotional, with no clear way forward, and often with not near enough support.

President-elect Obama, as well as Senator McCain, both promised to attend to the needs of veterans. Both insisted that veterans deserve the best possible care and support after having served their country.

The article quotes officials of various agencies: unemployment among returning veterans is 18%. A quarter of those who do find work, fail to earn a living wage.

What does this mean? Frighteningly, it means that these men and women believed that a hitch in the army was their ticket to the middle class. Many of these men and women had no viable job or educational prospects in the first place, which was why they enlisted.

They emerge from their service time with new skills, for sure; it’s just that those skills have no application in the civilian world. Combine that with stress and other factors, and you have a volatile cocktail.
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You may not shed a tear over the fact that the financial sector is shedding jobs.

I’d understand.

Question: The town you live in: do more or fewer than 53,000 people live there?

Probably a good chunk of you said “fewer.”

Well, Citibank just announced plans to lay off your town.

Or, the equivalent number of its own employees. Combined with previously announced reductions, that’s a 20 percent shrinkage of its work force.

Twenty percent of the American work force is roughly 30 million workers. The resulting unemployment percent would be 26% or so, roughly what it was at the depths of the depression.

That was only 75 years ago. It could happen again.
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In today’s column, “Socialism? It’s Already Here” George Will writes

Sugar import quotas cost the American people approximately $2 billion a year, but that sum is siphoned from 300 million consumers in small, hidden increments that are not noticed. The few thousand sugar producers on whom billions are thereby conferred do notice and are grateful to the government that bilks the many for the enrichment of the few.

You should read the entire column, and when you do you will understand that Will is not advocating socialism, and the sort of practices which he refers to as socialism are usually ill conceived and poorly executed. True socialism would involve a true realignment of the ownership of the means of production.

Which brings me to this quote:

Conservatives rightly think, or once did, that much, indeed most, government spreading of wealth is economically destructive and morally dubious — destructive because, by directing capital to suboptimum uses, it slows wealth creation; morally dubious because the wealth being spread belongs to those who created it, not government.

We’ll assume that Will meant “rightly” as a pun, not as a definition of correctness. What I want to address are two points Will makes above: 1) redistribution of wealth, based on need, slows wealth creation; 2) the wealth belongs to those who created it.

It’s hard not to consider these positions to be intellectually dishonest, or else they don’t make sense alone or together. Will asserts flatly that optimum wealth creation can only occur when markets are completely free. This is every bit as utopian as the most pie in the sky collectivist dream. Will ignores the social decay which sets in when capital only flows where it “grows best”, meaning quickest, meaning it flows toward the best “opportunities.”

In this consumer-crazy system in which we live today and which is in the process of melting down, “opportunities” are represented by potential profits, which is determined by the popularity of something versus its cost. So, the free flow of capital would lead it to prefer catchy gadgets which can be made cheaply.

We convince ourselves that these gadgets in some way improve our lot in life, and never ask some basic questions, such as: what were the labor conditions under which this product was made? And, could the productive capacity and raw materials which went into making this gadget have served a better purpose?

These are important questions when we are concerned with the health of a civilization, yet they are questions that capitalism never asks. Only government has, and only occasionally, managed to ask questions of capitalism that it would never ask of itself. Will would have us believe that the market settles all things for the best. He cannot possibly, actually believe that.

Second, he states that the wealth belongs to those who created it. He will never be more right, and in this case I do mean “correct.” Wealth belongs to those who create it: the workers. Those who manage the broader aspects of the business are also workers and deserve fair wages, but no human’s work is worth 100,000 times more than the work of another human. And if it were somehow so, it would reveal deeply disturbing truths about the relative capabilities of humans as a species.

Or, to put it another way: if the current system is the best we can do, we aren’t very bright.
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