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.

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.

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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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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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?

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 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?

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?

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 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?

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.

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…)

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…)

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.

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.

The New York Times

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.
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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.

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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:
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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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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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A group of world leaders known as the G-20 will meet this weekend in Washington, D.C. The meeting was called by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and President Bush agreed to play host.

This meeting has the potential to be quite historic.

World leaders are, understandably, attempting to portray the current economic situation as a “crisis”, which is true enough. However, they are also attempting to portray it as solvable within the basic structure of capitalism. In his Wall Street speech yesterday in anticipation of the “summit”, President Bush said this:

This is a decisive moment for the global economy. In the wake of the financial crisis, voices from the left and right are equating the free enterprise system with greed, exploitation, and failure. It is true that this crisis included failures - by lenders and borrowers, by financial firms, by governments and independent regulators. But the crisis was not a failure of the free market system. And the answer is not to try to reinvent that system. It is to fix the problems we face, make the reforms we need, and move forward with the free market principles that have delivered prosperity and hope to people around the world.

Among the pillars defining the agenda for the meeting, number 5 out of 5 is this:

Reaffirming our conviction that free market principles offer the surest path to lasting prosperity.

“Lasting prosperity” for who?

The billions who live on this planet with no access to basic services? The billions who toil in labor every day and still don’t have economic security? The many millions who want work but can’t find work? The many millions who, today, have work, but are in severe danger of losing those jobs - through no fault of their own?

“Consumerism” was a neat trick. They’ll write about it in history books some day. How to get as filthy rich as possible? Sell as many gadgets and trinkets to people as you can. Use extremely cheap labor, so you can sell the stuff at a price which is still affordable to many, and allows you to make a tidy profit.

Fuel the whole thing with debt. Keep creating more consumers, so your markets keep expanding and you can service that debt.

Except…when the whole thing implodes. When that happens …Whoops! Capitalism has no plan!

Darn the luck. We picked a plan that has no backup plan.
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Yogi Berra is supposed to have once said “When you get to a fork in the road, take it.” Berra has been famous for 60 years for his malaprops, the gist of which is that on some level they make sense. (The truth behind the fork in the road Yogi-ism is rather bland: he lived at the time on a circle at the end of a road. Whichever way you went, you would get to his house.)

The metaphor makes me think about the world economic situation. It seems to me that the capitalist world is also at a fork in the road. The illusion that the balloon would ever expand and never pop has been shattered. No, it didn’t pop. It just sprouted a million leaks, and you can’t plug them all. The air is quickly leaving the balloon, and no nation is capable of stopping it.

Other than Shanghai, which applauds the Chinese plan to inject almost $600 billion into public works projects, Asian stocks were pounded today. Hong Kong and Japan both lost over 5% of their already eroded value. U.S. stocks have been taking a similar pounding. The financial sectors in cities such as New York and London are on their way to becoming vertiable ghost towns. The earth is shifting beneath the entire system.

We are at a fork in the road.

On the one road we have some sort of limp, failed, collapsed economic system that never was all that fair and equitable in the first place. Pure capitalism is the pursuit of the accumulation of as much wealth as possible by as few people as possible. It always sounded like a recipe for a train wreck, and now the train wreck has come. so, road 1 might be called Irrationality, or Refusal To Accept Reality. Road 1 is the road of people muttering, “If we just tweak it here and there, we can save it.”

Road 2 is Robert Frost’s Road Not Taken. The Road Less Travelled By. In other words, Road 2 is the unknown. The rules for choosing Road 2 are that there are no rules. Down road 2 we encounter ideas such as confiscating that accumulated wealth and putting it to work tapping the enormous productive potential which capitalism, even at its hottest, has always ignored. Now, in its coolest phase, capitalism has no capability to make use of untapped productive potential.

Quite the opposite: capitalisms’s solution to its crisis is to create even more untapped productive capability. The geniuses who defend this insanity will tell you that we need cheap, available labor in order to be ready for the next great idea, such as technology. What technology? Don’t worry, we’ll think of something, and when we do, we’ll put all those people back to work.

Whoops, we slipped back onto Irrational Road.

Back on Unknown Road, we ask: is that the best we can do? Throw millions of people out of work and tell them to wait? Economists refer to “labor.” I like to think of them as “humans.”

I know, I’m such a softy.
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Today should have been known as Bloody Friday.

As the sun sets over the United States today, it does so over a current unemployment rate of 10.1 million people, up from 7.3 million people just a year ago.

On this same day, both Ford and General Motors announced that they were losing money rapidly and would soon be broke.

On this same day, the Dow Jones industrial average rose 248 points. Most of that rise occurred late in the day.

Does this make any sense? While it is true that the market lost ten percent of its value over the previous two days, which typically represents some buying opportunities, what sort of “bargains” were available in an economy that is so clearly tanking?

The financial sector has long since melted down. Now comes the manufacturing sector and the service sector, soon to be followed by the consumer sector.

What bargains?

Here’s the psychology of capitalism at work: companies are shedding jobs. That is good for the economy. Why? Because businesses are paring down, becoming more lean, which is what they need to do in a declining economy.

In other words, the stock market saw this tremendous reduction in jobs (240,000 in October, and another 179,000 jobs which were lost in August and September and previously not reported) as good news.

In other words, 419,000 jobs were reported lost today which had not previously been reported lost.

Good news? Only in the minds of “investors.”

Or perhaps they took as good news that these new job losses are actually less than the revised September numbers, which went from 159,000 to 284,000.

So, then, the rational thought would be: wait for the revised October numbers.

In any case, it is difficult to find a rationale for this move. Lost jobs mean lost consumers, and moreover, the psychology of a bad job market makes consumers more cautious: “Sure I have a job today, but I may not have a job next month. Better conserve.”

Will a stimulus package bail out the economy? Did the previous one?

It will help retailers survive Christmas, some of them anyway. The pain of this contraction has only just begun, and small measures along the way may buy a little time, but only a little.

Serious solutions are needed in the very near future, and all options must be on the table.

When economics begin to turn downward, things are always worse than they at first appear.

You would think that those who invest in the stock market would know that.

The world’s tenth largest economy has failed.

Gone bankrupt. Belly up.

The State Of California is broke. They cannot meet their obligations. They have proposed significant tax increases and an equal amount in service cuts, in order to have expenditures come close to matching income.

They will soon be begging the Federal government for a bailout.

California’s current budget deficit is $11.2 BILLION. That’s out of a gross state product of $1.8 Trillion. The deficit is expect to swell to $16 billion in 2009. California’s economy is roughly the same size as that of Russia.

It is a very large failure, monumental. Staggering. Historic.

And of course, California is “too big to fail.” Based on that logic, the Federal government will see no option other than to bail out the state. The size of the bailout will no doubt be above $10 billion.

That’s a lot of roads and bridges we could be repairing. A lot of schools we could be building.

Instead, it will go to fund the waste and mismanagement which led to this deficit in the first place.

Californians already pay among the highest taxes in the nation. The national economy is shedding hundreds of thousands of jobs per month. A large percent of those job losses will be in California.

This will further depress the budget. The state will need to raise taxes still further, and cut services even further.

California is not meeting its minimum service commitments today. That will only worsen.

This is a government in default. It is a failed state.

What will be the perspective of the working people of California as these measures are forced into passage? Will they accept the additional burden, the “pay more, get less” solution?

Or will a wave start in the west, and begin to spread?

If not now, when? When the pain is even greater?

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The Sumter Item has this video clip of raw footage taken at the scene where a 12 year old boy was shot while trick-or-treating by 22 year old Quentin Patrick.

At this time there is no known motive.

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Morris O’Kelly is a producer for the Tavis Smiley radio show. Morris, you may recall, was my counterpoint on the NY Times Fifth Down Blog last year and again in October of this year, and through that connection I was invited to participate in a citizen roundtable discussion on the Tavis Smiley radio show.

Your thoughts and comments are certainly invited and appreciated.

You may be one of those who always seems to have enough money on hand to pay your bills. You may have a nice savings account, and a retirement account, and perhaps some other investments that you can convert to cash when needed.

Or, you may be a person who is always willing to work but can’t always find work, and when you do, it’s for minimum wage or not much more. You are always behind on all of your bills, and you take turns paying each one at the last possible moment to avoid losing a car or having the electricity turned off.

Or, you may reside somewhere between those two extremes.

In our lifetimes, most of us have never seen what’s happening now to our economy. Two years ago we were talking about how to overcome our reliance on fossil fuels; one year ago we were talking about shifting resources in the war on terror, from Iraq to Afghanistan. Today all we can talk about is the meltdown of capitalism itself.

There will be an election in this country in 8 days. The next president will either be an economic neophyte who clings to free market principles, or an economic neophyte who clings to economic welfare. Neither man can even comprehend the magnitude of what is coming, thus neither man has any hope of constructing a meaningful response. And even if there was enough wisdom and understanding by either candidate to act constructively, he would immediately run into ideologues to his left and his right, willing to use his ideas to make sure the other does not get their way. In other words, stalemate.

Do you know how you get rid of bad ideas? You let them die. Unfortunately, there is a price to pay for doing so. Good people lose their good jobs, and go from somebody with a solid life to somebody who is in a constant scramble to stay ahead of complete destruction. Sure, Americans are resilient (as, presumably, are citizens of other nations), but when you don’t provide opportunity, it doesn’t matter how hard a man is willing to work. When you tell him that his $50,000 a year job is not coming back, and he has to fight to win a $30,000 job to replace it, you are telling that man that his former life is over.

The truth is that this economic tsunami is coming, and there is nothing that either candidate can do about it. Neither man has any idea where it will end or what will be lost; the market will determine those things. There are some bad ideas floating around, particularly McCain’s to buy bad mortgages and keep people in their homes, bad because only the market can determine the true value of those homes, bad because everybody bought in to the same rules, and now the rules will be changed to protect the losers.

The hidden truth of capitalism is that it contracts as well as expands. Any bet that the economy will only expand is a bet on a pyramid scheme; a certain amount of that money is destined to be bad money.

The losers take jobs with them; they take consumer spending with them; they take massive asset value with them. Any government which interferes with the process of resetting prices, risks an even bigger tsumami when all confidence is lost in the system as it continues to fail despite those efforts, and of course such governments risk actual bankruptcy, where bills don’t get paid and services don’t get provided.

Whichever man wins the White House, he will preside over the most massive loss of jobs in this country’s history. He will preside over a massive reliance on social services, and he will preside over a watershed moment not only in American history but in world history, in the alliance of nations, capital and labor. Many new ideas will come from the ashes of this destruction, and many people will be in a position to understand that capitalism never did hold all the answers. Perhaps we need a new system; perhaps the gap between the top and the bottom grew too vast. Perhaps too many people, for too long, allowed themselves to believe that the tough questions could wait.

If the American worker must lose because of these bad bets, then so must the people who made those bets. And when the time comes to determine what replaces what was lost, and who owns the assets of that new system, American workers should remember that nobody was looking out for them when the bottom dropped out, and that perhaps their own interests are best served by being in control of that new system.

I’d like to give a shout out to The Mo’ Kelly Report for embedding the following video of Donna Brazile, speaking at The New Yorker Festival.
This monologue by Ms. Brazile, who is seen regularly on ABC television’s Sunday morning program “This Week with George Stephanopoulos, is really in two parts. In the first part she talks about how far the country has come, and then she gets to some of the politics of this election, which she perceives to contain racial undertones. I agree with that observation. In fact, I agree with all of what Ms. Brazile says here, and I’m grateful to Mo’ Kelly for leading me to this clip.

I’m famous. The New York Times said so.

What will I do with this fame? I told my co-workers this morning, “I can die and go to heaven now. I’ve got a byline in the New York Times.”

But I will admit that, as I enjoyed a hot shower this morning before going to work, after having seen the post that Toni Monkovic, bless her his soul, had been preparing for several weeks, I did have one over-riding thought:

Maybe I should start a blog. Maybe I can attract some eyeballs.

Then I remembered I had a goDaddy account, and that I had installed WordPress. In other words, I already had a blog.

So, now I suppose the point would be to keep it up. Toni told me that she he wished she he could pay me for my thoughts. Well, maybe she he can. Maybe her his generous exposure will lead people to this blog, and maybe those eyeballs will translate into income. Maybe then I could quit my day job and share opinions online as my full time occupation. 

The economics aren’t impossible, when you think about it. I would need a couple hundred dollars a day in advertising income, to make this a full time pursuit. There are a number of ways to get there, so the trick is to get the eyeballs, and then maximimze the return on them.

I say it can be done. And I say, I’m the man to do it.

I’m nothing if not opinionated. In many ways, I’ve been preparing my entire life for this moment. As far back as I can remember, I analyzed absolutely everything, and then did so again. And I would discuss those thoughts with anybody who would put up with me. I retired the “Most Talkative” trophy. I crushed the field.

But there was always something going on behind the words. The words were simply a mad attempt to keep up with the thoughts. I’ve mellowed over the years, and I am still the most analytical person I know, by far.

So, I belong here. You belong here. Let’s kick stuff around.

The race card. Ugh. I know that it’s naive of me to dare think that, if we only stop talking about it, there will be no more racism.

That’s not exactly what I say. What I say is, until we learn to change the subject, we will be forced to keep talking about race. In other words, we have to try to stay in the present, and accept what we see.

A friend of mine lives in a suburb of Detroit, and has a child in football. He told me today that he sees enormous segregation throughout his area; white schools and black schools. So, there is a real question of equal opportunity, in some areas. So, it’s complicated. It depends on your particular life experience, whether or not you have had equal opportunity.

I just feel very strongly that idiots such as Limbaugh (who is, after all, an entertainer, let’s please remember) get to set the tone and topic of discourse. As I was driving back to work from lunch today, it occurred to me what really bothered me most about Limbaugh’s buffoonery on ESPN: he ambushed them. This is a group of football junkies, sitting around a table talking football, and Limbaugh plays the race card? The others were clearly stunned and sputtered in their attempts to respond, but the damage was done. When he heard what had gone on, McNabb was incredulous. Limbaugh seemed to have gotten away with something he should not have. ESPN spent the week backpedaling, Limbaugh eventually resigned, and the Sunday NFL Countdown crew came back the next week, minus Limbaugh, hats in hands, trying to figure out what had happened to their show.

It was offensive. It made me feel dirty to be a white person. It truly did.

Now, if ESPN wanted to host a roundtable discussion on the subject of race in sports, and the panelists had an opportunity to prepare their thoughts, and had some idea what the topic of discussion would be…different story. 

What Limbaugh did was designed to accomplish one thing: make himself the story. There is no greater self-promoter in entertainment today than Limbaugh, and that’s saying something on a planet which also includes Howard Stern.

There is a rule in the blog world, called Godwin’s Law, that says the first person to invoke Hitler or the Nazis as a comparison to the views of another, loses the debate and kills the thread.

I suggest that we have a very similar rule for situations where somebody plays the race card, unless of course the topic is race.

Limbaugh played the race card. Let’s go back and get this right: that means he loses.