DOG BYTES

The Legend of Uno and Duo

2012-01-26T10:20:00.000-05:00

Here's a little change, which I hope some viewers will find amusing. It might be called 'parable as legend.'

http://youtu.be/DQz1mJxju0U

The Dog Is from Where?

2011-12-20T19:33:00.000-05:00

An intellectual battle rages between researchers centered around the UCLA lab of evolutionary biologist Robert K. Wayne and the Royal Institute of Biology, Stockholm lab of Pier Savolainen for pinpointing in time and space the origin of the dog. Savolainen and his colleagues place the first dogs in the ‘area south of the Yangtze River” not before 16,000 years ago. Their findings are based on mitochondrial DNA studies, and the last few times out, they have engaged in all manner of mental contortions to keep their first dogs from breaking free of their geographic isolation.

Wayne and his colleagues end up looking at the Middle East wolf with significant contributions from European and Chinese wolves, going back 40,000 or more years. Their estimates are based on scans of the entire genome, especially of the nuclear DNA (from both parents, whereas mitochondrial DNA comes from the mother and the Y chromosome from the father.

Now comes in PLoS One a study of the Y chromosome in wolves and dogs, including village dogs from the Middle East and the Area South of the Yangtze. Sarah K. Brown of the University of California, Davis, author of the study, says the evidence points to three major patrilineal clades--in Africa, the Middle East, and the area south of the Yangtze, with the latter being the primary center of domestication, based on its higher levels of diversity. Furthermore, she says that all European and modern North American breeds fall within that clade.

A persistent bias in all these genetical analyses assumes that the highest genetic diversity is found at a point of origin; indeed, the statistical analysis the researchers use is based on that assumption. Another built-in bias assumes that an expanding population radiated out evenly from the place of origin.

Both assumptions have been shown to be inaccurate, but they persist in part because statistically they must and in part because the results are what the researchers want to prove their point. They do not.

For all we currently know the founding dog population--or its descendants--could have been decimated by war, disease, or the influx of a few favored dogs--or masses of dogs. Mitochondrial diversity can be increased by preferential keeping of breeding females for food production, as was apparently done in the Area South of the Yangtze River. It can also increase through expansion of the dog population in an environment where it is relatively isolated from large-scale infusions of fresh blood that might overwhelm the native stock.

If the dog was born on the move, we would initially expect a smallish population formed by inbreeding and outcrossing to other dogwolves and wild wolves--in other words breeding with what was available. In How the Dog Became the Dog, I suggest that the important regions for that kind of mixing and matching were where various game and migration routes met, like the area of the Black and Caspian Seas and the Caucasus Mountains and the region of the Altai Mountains and Amur River headwaters. A population of Middle Eastern dogwolves on the move with Homo sapiens from the area that is now the Persian Gulf passed through, even lingered in the former on its way to residence in the latter in the neighborhood of 30,000 to 40,000 years ago.

As the ice sheets of the last glacial advance retreated the descendants of these people were on the move again--east, south and back to the west. At least one of those movements would have brought dogs to the Area South of the Yangtze sometime after 16,000 years ago and probably closer to less than 10,000 years ago. Impossible?

A signal problem with the Area South of the Yangtze River is an apparent dearth of wolves and people, two essential ingredients in formation of the dog, until the dog appears 7,000 to 8,000 years ago, and it’s not for a lack of digging. Another questions involves how dogs would exit the region in time to catch the great migration into the America’s beginning by many current estimates before 16,000 years ago, not to mention the rest of Asia and Europe.

For now, it would be nice to see some village dog samples from northern China and Mongolia and more from the Carpathian Mountains and the Caspian and Caucasus region.

Read an excellent analysis at The Retriever, Dog, & Wildlife.

Chesapeake Bay retriever [final]

2011-11-30T13:00:00.000-05:00

A reader named Matthew Phillips contacted me with a question about the origins of the Chesapeake Bay retriever, specifically whether it had any Native American dog heritage. I would run his query, but there are technical difficulties. I would answer him privately, but he left no email address. He apparently has already queried retrieverman, who is the authority on these breed histories. There is a legend that Catahoula leopard dogs have Native American dogs in their ancestry, and similar arguments are sometimes made about various of the curs. The Chesapeake Bay retriever is at base a St. Johns water dog, I believe, a cur from that island where the basic dog was cleaved into two or, if you count the Chesapeake, three dogs—Labradors, Newfoundlands, and Chesapeakes. That's my notion, but there are many people who would disagree.

Farley Mowat in Sea of Slaughter (1984) argues the the black St. Johns water dog was the dog of the Beothuk, the native people of Newfoundland, and that it was different from mainland dogs. The Beothuk were killed off, but their black dog survived as the St. Johns water cur, which essentially was a mixed breed of the sort that came to exist in America where European dog with local dogs and apparently wolves. Although it was a dog with input from many sources, it bred to a broad type.

So if we follow Farley Mowat, we would conclude that the Chesapeake is derived in part from Native American dogs. But Mowat is a lone rider on this question, it appears, and, according to retrieverman even backtracked on it. It important to remember that English and European settlers brought their own dogs and had little interest in Native American dogs, which they considered wolflike unrefined savages, like their human companions. They killed both. That is not to say that some mixing didn't occur; it is to say that the dominate lineages, even for Catahoulas, are European.

The official breed history says the Chesapeake is descended from two Newfoundland dogs bound for England in 1807. The Newfoundland was apparently the St. Johns water dog, said to be from England, crossed in the 17th century with one of the large mountain dogs, although I suspect it was initially just a large, slightly curly version of the St. Johns dog. The claim of English decent was, I suspect, an attempt to claim that the Labrador and Newfoundland were at base good English dogs.

Landraces, or autochthonous breeds, aside—they are types of dogs that have formed in particular areas or regions, to which they are adapted--there are two primary ways to create a breed—consolidation of a particular type from a more variable landrace and crossbreeding of different dogs to create a composite then consolidated through inbreeding to fix the desired traits. In both cases the gene pool is severely narrowed. Although admixture brings an initial burst of variability, it is quickly bred out once the desired form is achieved. The Carolina dog is consolidated from a more general type. As far as I know, no genetic evidence suggests that it or any of the other putative Native American dogs live up to expectations. But the surveys are not complete, and that allows anyone to claim just about anything. Suffice it to say, that the Chesapeake is a distinctive and distinctly American breed. The St. Johns water dog, if it still exists, should be protected.

The dog is ancient. The genetic sorting of breeds has shown that some of them have not mixed with other breeds for a long time, and for that reasons researchers have called them 'ancient breeds.' It is, I think, an unfortunate choice of words. What that means in terms of behavior is a much discussed question with no easy answers, no matter what some experts suggest. In any event, the Chesapeake is a mix of Chesapeake Bay water dogs, all probably of European descent.

Contacting Me

2011-10-30T06:52:00.001-04:00

Several people have tried to contact me by leaving comments to posts on this blog in response to my essay in the October 29, 2011, Wall Street Journal, on the origins of the dog and an interview in Salon posted on October 28. If you do contact me in that way and you would like me to respond, please incude your email address in your comment; otherwise, I have no way to reach you. Blogger—Google, of course—sends comments to me from a 'no reply' box. I then have the option of publishing them or not. As a rule, I don't publish the personal messages, so your email address will not escape. Were I to publish your comment, with your permission, I would strip off your email address. I set this system up to keep me from being bombarded with messages from that group of on-line commentators whose idea of rational discourse consists of insulting in no particular order the writer's intelligence, education, motives, and parentage—and occasionally proclaiming that whatever disease or disability he or she might have is obviously well deserved.

So there it is. If you would like me to respond personally, include an email or phone number.

Obama Care Is Bad for All of Us

2011-09-27T15:56:00.001-04:00

“U.S. Health Insurance Cost Rises Sharpely, Study Finds”–that’s the headline for Reed Abelson’s story in today’s New York Times, and it it should surprise no one. I say should because the average rise of 9 percent in health insurance costs for American workers seems within the bounds of what the Obamans consider circumspect or restrained. If they really believe that they are truly incompetent and should be removed, or they are nothing more than tools of the insurance industry, which has used them to gain extraordinary profit. If they are simply lying in the hope that someone, anyone might believe that Obama’s healthcare reform benefits anyone but insurance companies, then they are more delusional than the Nixonites in their darkest hours. That anyone who voted for this misbegotten piece of legislaltion still feigns shock and surprise at what is happening is living, breathing, but about to expire politically proof of why the Tea Party continues to score well in the polls despite an antediluvian social polciy.

What i find saddest about this article is its portrayal of a president and administration with no learning curve–none. They are vain, ignorant, and incompetent, but unfortunately so are their chief allies and their enemies. Obama won election in part because people wanted healthcare reform. The Democrats were trounced in 2010 because no one wanted the healthcare bill they passed. In 2012, they will be trounced again because of healthcare–costs that suppress the depressed economy and a ‘reform’ act that makes everything worse. Losing twice on the same issue is proof of stupidity.

The Passing of the Kate

2011-09-17T19:46:00.000-04:00

The Kate (10 March 1998 to 13 September 2011)

The intrepid kelpie Katie barked her last about noon o’clock on September 13, 2011, letting the vet who had kindly come to relieve her of her suffering know that she was The Kate, boss dog of all she surveyed, the one creature on earth solely responsible for the well being of two hapless bipeds and that in the name of all the gods and goddesses who had ever dared to lay claim to this lost planet, she was not about to go gentle into the great cosmic void, even though she had been telling those same two bipedal klutzes that her time had come, her spine was failing along its entire length and her pain was constant. Her eyes had the unfocused distant stare of an animal waiting for death. When she did move, which was seldom, she propelled herself as fast as she could in an inevitably doomed effort to keep ahead of her failing hind legs, and then sprawled on the floor, she would look shocked and betrayed. After one particularly rapid propulsion across the room the night before her death, she stood by me and gave a plaintive whine/yelp, call it a ‘welp,’ indicating clearly that she wanted to go. And so she went, her head in my lap, with Gina stroking and soothing her, and telling her as the anesthetic took hold that she could finally rest, that she would look after the old klutz.

I had told Gina the night before, after the Kate’s welp, that she would on principle not go gently. That was not in the nature of a dog who had only two speeds--naught and ought, i called them, zed to flatout with nothing between--but was also capable of the most carefully calibrated maneuvers. She routinely ‘matrixed’ walls for six or ten feet at a stretch and once performed a three-foot vertical jump from a stand still to the top of the back of a sofa and then walked five-feet along it before sliding down next to me, couch bound with a fractured femur. For all her athleticism, or perhaps because of if, she needed to be engaged, primarily with people, other dogs being more hindrance than accomplice to her games.

The initial object of her desire was a tennis ball, and within ten minutes at ten weeks of age, she learned that if she wanted to ball tossed for her, she had to bring it back to the thrower, who for the Kate was always precisely defined as the person she chose to throw her the ball. She played frisbee for a while, but that was replaced by a tennis ball. Traveling farther and faster, it nonetheless stayed in play longer--floating on the water, bouncing off the ground--thereby allowing her to deploy her full athletic repertoire and show off the mental acuity that earned her the moniker, ‘two brain.’

Tennis ball for the Kate was an exercise of acrobatic precision. She loved running under the long throw and catching it over the shoulder, then pausing so that her audience might appreciate her skill--and invariably there was an audience, including people who ordinarily wanted nothing to do with dogs in the park. She would enlist individuals in her game, dropping her ball at a person’s feet and backing up, eye on the ball, barking if they were too slow by her measure to understand that they were to throw the ball. The Kate abandoned those who threw poorly while favoring those with canons for arms. If she dropped a ball, she would race it back to the same thrower and demand that they repeat the throw until she got it right. When arms failed or the heat was too great for running, she would engage in short order drills, displaying reactions to make the best shortstop envious.

At poolside, she would wait, poised until the ball was tossed gently in a high arc over the water and then leap for the catch, twisting, tucking, turning to grab it before she hit the water. It will doubtless be said that such contortions stress the spine, contributing to problems of the sort that beset the Kate late in her lfe, but then she would have been denied an activity she loved that helped keep her in excellent physical condition.

The Kate recognized no inside or outside if there was a ball to be had. We routinely warned visitors not to engage the Kate with a tennis ball unless they wanted her to plague them the whole time they were present--or until they begged for mercy. We emphasized that when we said don’t touch the ball, we meant with any part of their anatomy. The warning was expansive, because the first time we warned guests to avoid playing ball with Kate, no matter their instincts, she unveiled a new game, she brought the ball to the most dog phobic guest, the one who had ignored her most assiduously and carefully positioned it on her chair so that it touched her leg while succumbing to the pull of gravity. She waited for the ball to hit the ground before returning it to the same person and repeating the process until she relented and rolled the Kate the ball and then did it again and again with obvious pleasure. The game became a part of the Kate’s repertoire. She had a special appeal to the disaffected, a capacity for engaging them in order to please herself.

Then the Kate’s spine began to deteriorate and her lungs to fill with fluid. Retired from ball playing, she would rest on the pool steps, her front feet planted on on level, her hindquarters floating above another, and bark. We would joke that she was reciting all the sacred texts of the world, but we knew that it was the Kate’s proclamation that translates roughly: ‘I am here now, and I am Kate B. Kate, also known as the Kate, a creature unique in the world, and you can be the same.’

For thirteen-and-a-half years the Kate shared our lives. She arrived as a nine-week-old puppy, named Katie, a gift from a rancher friend in Texas who thought she was a little short in the wheel base to handle the 1,000 pound steers he ran on his ranch. She entertained, amused, sometimes aggravated but always engaged and amazed us. The diminutive faded from her name.

Did she love us unconditionally as some writers on dogs proclaim? Did we love her? I have pondered that question for a long time, and I think it fair to say that at its best what lies between humans and dogs is something like love that is much more paradoxical and elusive. At their best humans and dogs form am empathic union that is essentially nonverbal and nonmaterial while being intensely physical and communicative. It is a relationship grounded in an unquestioning loyalty that neither side demands--or let us say that those who demand loyalty invariably fail to receive it--but that both sides expect. Like true love itself this empathic union is often approximated, rarely achieved. Even within the same household, individuals will have different relationships with the dog or dogs. Yet when it forms and is nurtured, that empathic union can become transcendent,

Kate was the last one standing of the six dogs we have had in 30 years together--and the eleven I have had in my sixty plus years. Each of them was unique, including the one who was neurologically miswired to the point of self-destruction. I would be hard pressed to say that Kate was the best of them, although she was the most brilliant and the best athlete, but my relationship--I dare say, our relationship--with her was subtly different for a host of reasons that boil down to one.

She was The Kate. She is emblematic of them all.

A Reminder

2011-08-24T05:36:00.000-04:00

Occasionally people come to this blog hoping to find a way to contact me directly by way of making a comment. Indeed, that works—all comments come to me for deciding whether to print them—most I do, although as a rule I don't allow anonymous comments. There are easy to conceive circumstances that would force a person to cloak his or her identity, but in this country, Anonymous too often is a cover for incivility or worse. I support anyone's right to say anything he or she wants as long as they attach to their comments an identifiable nom de plume or nom de guerre.

That said, if you are trying to contact me, do so through a comment, noting whether you want it posted, and including in the body of the message your email address—Blogger does not include your return email address in the comment it forwards to me. It strips them off.

Fear and a Shrinking President

2011-08-09T05:18:00.001-04:00

In today's Guardian Ha-Joon Chang observes that much of the current crisis has less to do with economic policies or lack thereof than with the failure of governments to curb the power of ratings agencies and financial institutions that had just a few years ago brought the world to the brink of Depression. Now, at the least, they have triggered a financial panic the likes of which have hot been seen by anyone living.

Panic—generalized, objectless fear—is driving this sell-off, which has drained trillions of dollars in valuation from the world's markets and caused investors to flee to U.S. Treasuries as one of the few safe investment havens. That is correct: the Standard and Poor's downgrade of America's credit rating from triple A to double A-plus has had the effect of reinforcing the place of US. debt as the most secure in the world. That fact alone ought to slow the panic, but it does not.

The irony should be lost on no one that those trillions of losses would have covered increased taxes on the wealthy and still left trillions in profit that would not have vanished, because there would have been no panic.

The Obama put himself in front of the world yesterday in an attempt, we must assume to calm the markets. He failed. They have fallen more precipitously since he spoke, and the reason, I think, is that he failed to say, 'Basta!,' to the rating agencies and financial institutions. 'You have proved yourselves bad citizens, purveyors of false and misleading information for purposes of market manipulation. We are going to rein you in, and if you won't be reined in, we are going to shut you down.' That is a speech, the Obama lacks the ability and capacity to make. Indeed, yesterday we saw a leader shrinking from, not rising to, the occasion.

The result was more fear and more panicked selling.

Half-Baked Obama

2011-08-07T15:26:00.000-04:00

Drew Westen, a psychology professor at Emory University, has a smart, damning, and ultimately depressing—for us—assessment of Barack Obama as president in the op-ed section of today's New York Times. Obama's inability to lead—or his refusal to do so—has meant that he has squandered one of the great opportunities in history to change society in a way that benefits not special interests and wealthy individuals and corporations daily growing wealthier at the expense of working men and women but that improves the lives of those same workers, as welll as the weak, old, frail, and disadvantaged. Read Westen for the details and then shed a tear for alll of us.

Off the Workers

2011-08-07T05:39:00.000-04:00

Using newly released U.S. commerce department figures, today's New York Times lays out in dollars and cents the decline of the American worker. The bottom line for those not wanting to read the story is that corporate profits have risen at the expense of workers, whose salaries and wages as a percentage of national income have fallen to below 50 percent by one measure and by any standard are near record lows.

Betraying Democracy

2011-08-07T04:05:00.000-04:00

I had thought that the political establishment from all parties would go into full attack mode on the eejits at Standard and Poor's who downgraded the sovereign long-term debt of the United States because they didn't approve of the political process that pushed to the midnight hour before performing a technical task. Well, la. I don't care for that process either. I especially don't care for the obstructionist Republicans and the self-negoitator, the current Republican president. But I like even less having a credit rating agency or any other private enterprise or group presume to tell any 'democratic' government that it does not run properly, which is effectively telling the people how to act and behave.

The Congress and president should be united in their outrage at this arrogant assault on democracy. They should do now what they should have done in 2007 when the subprime crisis began to unfold—break up the huge banks and credit ranking agencies and other financial institutions responsible for the subsequent economic meltdown. The failure of our elected officials to do so betrays the oath they swore to the Constitution. Whether they act out of ignorance, hypocrisy, corruption, or any or all of the above matters little. Their failure to defend the fundamentral principles of democracy disqualfies them from office. They should be removed.

time to deep six the credit rating extortionists

2011-08-05T22:36:00.003-04:00

With Standard and Poor's downgrading of U.S. credit worthiness, it should be clear that the macabre debt ceiling dance the U.S. president and Congress just performed was not about credit worthiness or fiscal policy or economic fundamentals. It was a battle between extortionist credit rating agencies—Moody's, Fitch, and Standard and Poor's—and most recently the U.S. government, although Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and now Spain and Italy have also been engaged. As usual, President Obama rolled without much of a fight, and Congress went along after multiple public tantrums only to have Standard and Poor's declare the world's largest economy incapable of meeting its long-term obligations. S&P, Fitch, and Moody's were involved in giving their credit blessings to those trash securities that have brought us to this state, so why on the face of it should we believe anything they say? The agencies might say they are simply providing advice to investors, but they are really economic terrorists profiting from the instability they bring to the markets with their pronouncements on a nation's or business's credit worthiness. Let them pass judgment from behind bars—that's where they belong.

The real paralysis in the U.S. is political. and it is due to the large and growing disconnect between the people and our elected officials who serve only monied interests and their own venality. We need a mechanism for dissolving Congress and calling new elections. We also need to recognize that the current electoral system is corrupt—in thrall to the rich—and I include the President with Congress. The size of the Congress should be doubled at least and people seeking to represent those smaller districts should actually have to go meet and talk to their constituents. I say that because of a deep suspicion that a fundamental reason people don't vote is that they don't know the candidates. The candidates don't know them either, leaving them to represent anyone willing to contribute toward their permanent advertising budget.

Questions in Blood

2011-06-11T16:22:00.000-04:00

In Pakistan recently, a teenage boy accused of robbing people in a park at gunpoint was arrested, shot twice while pleading for his life, and left to bleed to death, as the video on CNN clearly shows. His gun reportedly was confiscated immediately following his arrest, not to reappear.

In Miami Beach on Memorial Day, at around 4 am, a dozen police officers surrounded a stopped car and opened fire, killing both car and driver in a fusillade of bullets and wounding four bystanders. Notwithstanding 'discovery' by police two days later of a semi-automatic pistol hidden in the car, there is scant to no evidence that the young man fired at anyone or anything. By every account but their own, Miami Beach Police on the other hand, physically tried to destroy evidence and intimidate witnesses. Unlike the young man in Pakistan, the young man in Miami Beach, Raymond Herisse, did not beg for mercy—he was given no chance to before he was gunned down.

No one has been arrested or suspended in either country. In fact, the Miami Beach police apparently have the full support of their city government. There is no independent investigation into what happened. More dangerous, these trigger happy thugs are out on the streets of the city where they can threaten anyone with impunity.

The Pakistan killing has raised protests around the world. The question from Miami Beach is where are the ACLU, Amensty International, Human Rights Watch and the rest of the NGOs devoted to social justice and human rights?

Urban Beach Week Agony

2011-06-09T05:49:00.001-04:00

Most readers of this blog will by now have seen far more of the cellphone videos of the killing of car and driver on Memorial Day, during the crescendo of Urban Beach Week, than i because I don't have a television feed. But I've seen and read enough to know that we are lucky no riot followed the pollce mayhem at 14th Street and Collins Avenue in the wee hours of Memorial Day 2011. Indeed, that they did not says more about the general good spiritedness of the Urban Beach Week crowd than any news report I've seen or heard.

They certainly were better behaved than the police, who tried mightily in the aftermath of their shooting to death of a car and driver to provoke a full blown riot. The police tried to seize any camera or camera phone that might have recorded their perfidy. They maced and physically assault people, and let us not forget, they shot four innocent bystanders. The police deny these charges, David Smiley reported in the Miami Herald, although it is a bit hard to refute video tape showing an officer pointing his gun in the witness' face—this witness being the one who taped the police overkill. Smiley's story ends with a cryptic statement that police found a gun in the car they shot up two—that's right, 2—days after the event. Elsewhere, the gun was identified, I am told, as a 9mm Baretta 92f, a rather large semi-automatic pistol said to be possibly the most abundant 9mm in the world. It is hard to fathom how that crucial piece of evidence could have gone unseen for two days, especially since police insist that the driver of the car had fired at them.

When I heard a report that the police shooters included officers from Hialeah, the heavily Hispanic, largely Cuban, city built on the mainland on the heart of the historic Everglades, I flinched. People on the Beach who have been pushing for an end to Urban Beach Week routinely claim that their objections have nothing to do with race, but in fact race cannot be ignored. The self-interested tolerance that represents one of Miami's finer qualities eventually comes face to face with racism and loses. Thus, Haitians who make their way to the coast are locked up until they can be shipped back to their impoverished homeland, while Cubans are immediately and legally welcomed. For 51 weeks a year, DWB (driving while black) is problematic in South Florida resort communities, including Miami Beach. The singling out of people of color for special scrutiny is behavior born of racial intolerance that doesn't change for one week a year.

What can be done to clean up this mess? Miami Beach officials need to recognize that a significant number of police officers, perhaps including the chief, have committed a heinous act that might also leave them open to criminal charges. For that reason they cannot be expected to investigate themselves, and so the city needs to request an independent investigation by the U.S. Justice Department or sponsor its own fully independent investigation. If it has not done so already, the city needs to collect the badges and guns of all officers involved until those investigations are complete. It needs, as well, to rethink and redesign the training of its officers. Finally, it needs to talk to the organizers of the Urban Beach Week in an effort to make it safer for everyone.

Those might seem like simple recommendations, but simple changes are often the hardest to make.

Who Was Out of Control

2011-06-07T15:26:00.001-04:00

Who was out of control during Urban Beach Weekend? That is the question the forces of righteousness on Miami Beach should ask themselves as they watch the cellphone video of a dozen or more out of control, armed and dangerous police officers shooting a car and its driver to death on crowded Collins Avenue in the wee of hours of Memorial Day. The car was stopped when police running toward it and and those standing close by unloosed a fusillade of bullets that riddled car and driver. They then appear to go after witnesses, especially those with camera phones, including the people taking this video.

I'm sure excuses and justifications will be thrown about with abandon—indeed, that's already begun—but a look this short video, made available through the Miami Herald shows that what happened went way beyond police brutality. It was an atrocity perpetrated by officers who from all appearances worked themselves into a frenzy of fear and loathing and rage that left one person dead and at least four non-combatants wounded.

While the necessary independent investigations move along, those of us who live on the Beach should worry less about Urban Weekend revelers and more about our police, their training and judgment. Certainly none of the officers involved in the shootings during the Memorial Day weekend should have a badge or a gun until this barbarity is thoroughly adjudicated.

Miami Beach Urban Weekend

2011-06-05T07:01:00.002-04:00

I've kept this blog free of local politics primarily because Miami Beach and the rest of South Florida are so weird that they are not easily described or understood. What I find most curious and admirable, used advisedly, are the simultaneous distrust of and tolerance for people who are different, the recognition, no matter how begrudging, that if I am to be allowed to be different, I better do the same to others, even if I don't like it—the Golden Rule turned into practical politics. Everyone benefits, whatever their motivation. It has not always been thus; like the rest of the country, especially not excepting the rich resort communities, these cities were founded in inequity and never made a turn toward true democracy.

Put another way, Miami is place where you don't ask a person on first or subsequent meetings what he or she "does," largely for fear you will hear something that turns you immediately into an unindicted coconspirator. Miami is a place where someone you've known for years can suddenly one day come up to you and state: "Contrary to what many people think, I am not in the Federal witness protection program." Miami Beach is a place where a small crowd of 'gentlemen' gather on the boardwalk to stare at a nice set of buns sandwiching a thong only to become offended when the object of their desire rolls over. They accuse him of deception. Miami Beach is a place where gay and lesbian couples with children are commonplace.

Miami Beach is also a place more than a quarter of a million young largely African-American men and women have gathered every Memorial Day weekend for the past decade or so for a raucous debauch. Each year one or more of them go home in a box, victims of gunshot or automobile or motorcycle accidents.

As a rule, they have shot each other, but this year, Miami Beach cops did the shooting. They killed one young man and wounded four or five others. Their gunshots also caused a car to run into one of the city's squad cars. These events have triggered cries from some residents of the Beach to shut down the Urban Weekend, as if they had any legal right to do so. A number of people object to the sea of scantily clothed revelers moving from beach to street and back, to make me think they must not live on the Beach where scanty garb is the fashion. People object to the noise—it is purely obnoxious, but no worse than for any other over the top event —the Super Bowl, for example—and the contempt the visitors have for the city, as seen in their inconsiderate sloppiness.

What should concern those of us who live on the Beach is not the behavior of the Weekenders, but of the Miami Beach cops, who already had become known for their harassment of and rudeness toward Beach residents. Beach police managed a shootout with one car that resulted in a dead driver and wounded bystanders and cops. The other shootout with a car lead to a crash that wrecked a policer cruiser and the other car. It also led to the arrest of the driver, a veteran firefighter, it turns out.

Police should not be firing their pistols at cars anywhere but especially not on crowded streets where the risk of injuring innocent bystanders is great. It is well documented that Miami Beach cops are lousy shots to begin with. When you add to that the natural and well documented propensity of people not to fire directly at another person and semi-automatic pistols with ten or more shots in a clip, you have a recipe for mayhem. And when you top that off with poorly trained cops who don't have the brains to step out of the way of a moving car but instead think they can stop it by standing in its way and firing at the driver, mayhem turns to bloody chaos. How much easier would it have been to step out of the way of the car rather taking a stand, gun blazing, as if you were a Soviet-era border guard sworn to prevent someone—anyone—from escaping to freedom? How hard would it have been to follow the car until it stopped or could be safely stopped and then arrest the driver rather than fire round after round into the car, him and the crowd.

People demanding an end to this annual gathering might think about why they came this way. Rather then feeding people's worst instincts, city officials might concentrate on training their police better, starting with the lesson that they serve all the people and ending with the ability to respond intelligently to strange situations—that is without opening fire. These steps would serve everyone.

But beyond all of that, city officials must make clear to the police that anyone seeking to block a full inquiry will be fired immediately. Early police attempts to stop people from posting or sharing their videos of the shootings were ham-fisted attempts at censorship that are intolerable. That is the stuff of dictatorships.

A Brief Note

2011-04-14T18:34:00.001-04:00

I have never been accused of being a neatness freak; in fact, chaos seems to attend me. I once kept piles under piles whose contents I could recall well enough to locate the paper or note or memo I wanted. The computer has killed that--90 percent of what I must recall is stored electronically in generally incomprehensible filing systems. At least they are not physically manifest and therefore not mappable the way papers, magazines, and books were. As a result things go missing or untended more often, and thus it sometimes is with comments to this blog. I have various feeds and filters set up, but they clearly miss a lot; thus, if I have missed posting your comments forgive me and be assured it was for no reason other than I didn't see it.

Occasionally people try to contact me through the blog. If you do that please remember to include an email address I can use--or a phone number--since blogger puts in its own 'do not reply' email address to discourage spammers.

The next post will be about something interesting--I hope.

The World As We Know It

2011-04-04T19:06:00.002-04:00

For as long as I can remember, which now is approaching sixty years--granting that before one year of age, memory for me is more a function of guess work and received wisdom than actual recall of events, although I have definite knowledge in the form of some kind of memory of events when I was just days old and certainly from two on--years that is. My short term memory is known to process directly into long term, and it's anyone's guess what that means--all that aside--for as long as I can remember certain of the town criers have been preaching apocalypse, the end days, with every war, 9.0 magnitude earthquake, land scrubbing tsunami, civilization burying volcanic eruption, and nuclear meltdown serving as further proof of the end of our time on this planet--perhaps even the end of life in the Universe, which is a little hard to credit. But who can say?
I prefer to think that when life ends, it is dispersed into the quantum gruel, maybe to be reconfigured, maybe not. Certainly reincarnation is a matter of faith at present, and I suspect well into the future. Saying that, puts me in the camp that believes life in the Universe is rare, and that, despite the lack of evidence to the contrary, is as an absurd assumption. I'm going to have to go with Heraclitus on this one and say that the Universe is in constant flux, a dance of destruction and construction. There's no one behind it---not even a phony wizard in this Oz. It is, and it follows its own rules which themselves are doubtless always in flux.
Tempting though it might be to look for an astroid or some cosmic lightning bolt that would purify the Earth, such an event is unlikely.We are far more likely to be hit by a succession of lesser--a relative term--catastrophes from which we ultimately cannot e scape. Their cumulative power is too great, and we are too weak or overextended. From a certain remove, of course, these take on the characteristics of a single event.
But they are not. They are constants in our lives.

Obama Doctrine?

2011-02-11T19:46:00.000-05:00

Simon Tisdall in the Guardian is normally one of the more sane and thoughtful commentators on contemporary international politics, so his giddiness over the Obama's comments following Mubarak's backflip on resigning last night, Thursday; rather than this Friday morning warrants some attention. Certainly in forcefully and openly siding with the protesters, the Obama did finally plant himself on the side of the angels. Whether in doing so, he elucidated a clear doctrine that places the U.S. on the side of the forces of democracy everywhere remains to be seen. I would like to think Tisdall is right--and the Obama continued in his new voice after Mubarak resigned--but we'll see what happens when Jordon and Saudi Arabia start to wobble in weeks to come.

Backing the Wrong Pony

2011-02-01T17:00:00.002-05:00

At this point, it is clear that Obama'a chief goal is to divide zero. The latest proof of this desire comes from his response to the people's uprising in Egypt. Reuters reports today that the Obamans were caught "off guard" by the force and ferver of the protests. No doubt they were, but the decision to attempt to shield Mubarak by encouraging him to undertake democratic reforms and the people to play along with him shows a deeper level of incomprehension than that brought on by surprise at a spontaneous revolt. The Obamans response reflects the typical American habit of backing friendly--that is, bought--dictators rather than the people or even the nation. The Obama's embrace of that wrongheaded American habit is made worse because it bespeaks rejection of his own calls for democracy to replace autocracy. In this case, as in others, the Obamans want to reassure the autocratic rulers of oil rich nations that America always stands by its boys--Karen DeYoung puts it more politely in today's Washington Post. The problem for the Obamans is that when you back the wrong pony, you lose the race. Mubarak is not Egypt, and it is Egypt and the Egyptian people the Obamans should be doing everything they can to help. The message they should give despots everywhere is that the United States supports the legitimate desire of people for democracy.

Instead, Obama dispatched an envoy to deliver the word to Mubarak that he should not run for re-election in the fall--eight or nine months from now-- David Kirkpatrick reports in today's New York Times. Maybe that has a hidden diplomatic meeting, but on its face, it is laughable--not to mention completely bonkers. Can anyone who is not delusional seriously think that Mubarak is going to last beyond the end of the week? And after Mubarak? All those billions in foreign aid will be paying some posh estates for exiled potentates while the U.S. Congress holds hearings on who is responsible for losing the Middle East and all of its oil to people who don't like us and don't want us around no matter how much we are prepared to spend on attempting to acquire influence with them;.

Burning Books

2010-09-09T09:57:00.006-04:00

Burning books of any sort is a crime against free inquiry. Burning the holy text of any religious group, no matter the reason, is in addition an act of cowardly bigotry and hypocrisy. Thus the case of the Right Righteous Reverend Terry Jones and his acolytes in Gainesville, Florida, who prepare to burn Qur'ans on September 11, presumably to show how tough they are.

From all appearances, the Right Righteous Reverend Jones is on a rather large ego trip what with virtually the whole world, including his fellow evangelicals telling him 500 ways this burning is dumb and bad, as William Barnigin and Michelle Boorstein make clear in the Washington Post.

If religious groups and churches want to make a statement beyond verbal chastisement and arm twisting, why do they not pledge to donate to schools and libraries around the country, starting in Gainesville, 100 copies of the Qur'ans for every one copy that the Right Righteous Reverend--or any one else--burns?

back to It

2010-08-28T12:01:00.002-04:00

My hiatus is temporarily over, now that one book is complete. That is Made for Each Other: How Wolf Became Dog for Overlook Press. It's been an eventful year for people interested in the origins of the dog, not least because of the battle between geneticists allied with Robert K Wayne at UCLA and those in the camp of Pier Savolainen in Sweden. Wayne favors Middle Eastern wolves as the most likely progenitor, while Savolainen argues alternately for Southeastern and Eastern China. For now, I'll just say that what I propose closes the geographic gap between them and accommodates nearly the entire range of dates proposed for the "split" between dogs and wolves. I put "split" in quotes because genetically, there is less difference between dog and wolf than between races of human. The differences that do exist are cultural and environmental. More than a few were captured by human breeders when other animals were domesticated in an effort to distinguish dog from wolf, or new domesticates from their wild cousins. Some, like the black coat for big home guard dogs, were sought in order to intimidate unwanted visitors. Still, others represent the animal's adaptation to its changed circumstances and diet--e.g., its new found sexual freedom and a more omnivorous diet. More on that later.

Why We Love Insurance Companies, or Why the Public Mandate is Bad Policy

2010-05-15T05:33:00.000-04:00

Florida has an insurance "regulator," who is about as good to the insurance industry as the the Bureau of Mines and Minerals is to the extractive industries--and we have proof of their virtue blackening the Gulf of Mexico. In Florida, home owners insurance companies have been steadily dumping people since Hurricane Andrew in 1992, forcing them into Citizens, the state program. It is less a public option than it is the insurer of last resort. It is dismal, but this short blog is devoted to Liberty Mutual. Following is a card that arrived yesterday addressed to Gina, with her handwritten commentary. She's sending it back the CEO of Liberty Mutual, once a fine company, but now.....[you may have to zoom a bit]

Health Care Passes

2010-03-22T10:48:00.000-04:00

After spending the better part of the year negotiating with absent Republicans while antediluvian senators of his own party wrote a Republican bill that should make insurers ecstatic and richer than they already are, Obama won passage of his "historic" healthcare reform. Obama himself is an historic figure; it is too bad that his policies are more in keeping with his rhetoric than with his essence. That is to say that the man who challenged history and the deep biases of American society was exceptional for his courage, his presence and drive. It turns out that whatever substance his words possess came from his being--the way they do from any solid writer or speaker--not from his policies, which are cautious, bland, and half-assed. If the man wants an historic presidency, he needs to develop policies that are based on fundamental principles that are not conveniently betrayed at every turn, so that the end product, if there is an end product, has all the appeal and value of a spam on twinkie sandwich.

Simple It Should Be

2010-03-06T06:02:00.002-05:00

Over the past year, I have talked to a fairly large range of people perched on various rungs of the socioeconomic ladder and of different ethnicity, and I must say that when it comes to health care, they are largely confused. They want absolutely to have access to medical care when they need it without worry or hassle. They want absolutely not to pay more than they now are unless it is for something demonstrably better--and that includes the people not paying now because they are young and invulnerable or can't afford insurance. They reflexively proclaim, because that's what they've been taught to say, that they don't want government more involved in their health care for fear it will limit their ability to choose their own doctors, but asked whether they can choose their own doctors now and whether they know of an insurance program that allows them to do so without paying large sums, they invariably answer, "No!" and "Medicare."

In short, the Obamans had to propose a health reform bill that would guarantee that everyone has access to the doctor and treatment they need when they need them. That's all. There are other reforms that make those two goals possible--reform of the ways doctors are paid, medical malpractice reforms, progressive tax rates to pay for the expanded Medicare program--or whatever the national health insurance program is named.

Politicians and pundits claim it is impossible to enact such a program because it is too socialistic, or liberal--many of them don't seem to know the difference--for Americans who don't want Government interfering in their lives. In making that argument, they throw out phrases that are red meat to large swatches of an American public conditioned to salivate at the mere sound of the words. But it doesn't take long to realize that the Pavlovian frothing hardly represents a deeply held or carefully thought out position, that it can be overcome with relative ease--with the proper program--and desire--a desire the Obamans never had.

Short, Not Sweet

2010-02-22T12:43:00.000-05:00

The Obama released his edited version of the Senate health reform bill and from early descriptions and a quick look through, it is the abomination his worst enemies wished he would produce. He leaves out the only thing in this whole reform drive people care about, according to all polls--a robust public option--and he leaves in the one thing that drives everyone to distraction, if not actual paroxysms of rage--a legal mandate that everyone purchase insurance from one of the private insurance companies that continue to rip them off. And it remains obscenely complicated. If this thing passes, we will all be subjected to the fruits of a monumental failure of our collective political leadership--Democratic and Republican.

X is better than W[hat]

2010-01-23T15:32:00.000-05:00

Without repeating myself, I'll call attention to the comment on my last blog from Retrieverman on the Massachusetts special senatorial election. He's right--people are pissed at the banks; they're pissed that there are no jobs or that their job is gone next week or that people are walking away from mortgages and houses with impunity or that "too-good-to-be-true" offers from big banks to lower the interest rate on their mortgage are more of a hassle than they are worth; and they're pissed because their guts tell them that Obamacare is a fiasco wrapped in a monumental giveaway to insurance companies. They are right. They know that no matter how you justify it, insurance that costs them more than $5,000 a year for a family of 4 and then covers only 60 percent of costs, which the Senate bill deems affordable, is not advantageous to them. It's amazing really, Rahm Emanuel has been so busy working to get anything passed in order to ensure the Obamacare is not Bubbacare that he has made something far worse. Now all the Obamans can do is whine that the cost of inaction on healthcare will be their ruination. Then so be it.

The Obamans decided at the start what they could not do--expand Medicare to cover everyone. Indeed, they never wanted or intended to do that. Nonetheless, many people bought the spiel called "hope," and sent the Obama to Washington. What the Obamans didn't take into a account but the Republicans sensed intuitively--and doubtless through polling--is that it is far better to keep people hopeless and despairing, than to first raise and then dash their hopes and expectations.

Health Care X Massachusetts

2010-01-20T10:01:00.000-05:00

The political classes most heard have declared that yesterday's election of Scott Brown to fill out the departed Edward M. Kennedy's seat in the Senate is, among other things, a repudiation of the health care bill now slouching toward denouement that would not pertain to Massachusetts in any event. That means as nearly as I can tell that the good citizens of a state founded by religious intolerants fleeing religious persecution have voted into office a man who voted for a health care bill in Massachusetts authored by Republicans that served as a template for the Congressional bills that same senator-elect has sworn he will vote against once he assumes his seat, even though it will not affect his own state. Right. No one will ever accuse these Republicans of consistency or intellectual integrity.

Brown's election is significant only because it cuts the Democratic majority to 59 votes, meaning they can no longer vote in a block to kill Republican filibusters. Given the sorts of vile deals the Democrats stuck to gain and hold those 60 votes, I'm not sure that losing that majority was such a bad deal. Any time you pass a bill that satisfies no one, that doesn't meet its primary objective and that is inherently punitive, simply because you've convinced yourself that anything is better than what is, you have major problems, including ignorance.

Yet that's exactly what the Democrats were. Now they might have to revert to a better strategy, which is to develop a simple, clean efficient bill that expands Medicare over time to include everyone and includes necessary tort and compensation reform and sufficient funding, much of it gained by taxation of the wealthy, especially the bonus babies of finance. The Republicans, including Brown, who have declared themselves friends and defenders of Medicare, would then have to put up or shut up. In either case, the Democrats would have something to run on that was easy to understand. The key for the Democrats and this means the Communicator in Chief would be to cast the expansion in a positive light--not hard. It would shore up Medicare; it would provide health care for all without rationing or limits; it would remove a major source of stress, financial distress and early death from Americans; it would guarantee a fundamental human right.

Taking this step would take political courage of a sort not manifest in the Obama Administration, which seems intent on riding its slouching beast of a bill into the dustbin of history.

Say It Ain't So!

2009-12-30T09:23:00.000-05:00

New York Times columnist and economics Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, who once was insistent on the need for a "public option" in any health reform bill, on Friday, December 18, 2009, urged passage of a health bill everyone knows is a giveaway to the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, on the grounds that it will be easier to fix this 2,000-page hoax than start from scratch. Krugman cited Social Security as a program that started with gaps and flaws and has been steadily improved since then. But his comparison is wrong. Social Security's counterpart in health is Medicare. The expansion of Medicare to cover everyone would be the equivalent of closing gaps and loopholes in Social Security. The Senate health 'deformation' more closely resembles a Social Security privatization scheme that would require people to put a certain percentage of their income in 401 Ks or some other mutual fund or private investment vehicle controlled by one of a small number of companies devoted to managing "pension" accounts. Once it's in place, it will be nearly impossible to change. This bill is garbage produced because Congress can't, as a lifeguard at a local pool says, manage to provide healthcare for all Americans. That's really sad, he says. Indeed. I hope Obama is being cynical when he calls this bill, which meets none of his goals, a great achievemen. It insures 30 million out of 47 million and climbing uninsured. It does nothing to curb insurance policy increases; rather it rewards insurance and drug companies with massive infusions of government funds in the forms of subsidies. It turns a fundamental human right--access to healthcare--into a legal mandate that everyone purchase insurance from a rapacious company. It cuts Medicare benefits. Iit curbs the right of women to control their own bodies.

At this point, were I a Republican, I would simply step back and let the Democrats have the Senate deformation, since it will guarantee Republican victories and resounding Democratic defeats for at least another generation , no matter whom they run.

Were I a Democrat, I would scrap the House and Senate bills and introduce an expansion of Medicare.

Senator Bernie Sanders, Vermont's erstwhile democratic socialist, told the New York Times's Sheryl Gay Stolberg, when describing his own struggle over the Senate health 'deformation,' that he was certain the "insurance companies and the drug companies will be laughing all the way to the bank the day after this is passed." It is hard to see how that can be called reform.

[revised to get out most of the gremlins, 12/30/2009.]

Health Care Obamanation

2009-12-16T05:37:00.001-05:00

-With the Senate's virtual abandonment of any "public option," even one of the most anemic sort, and its deep-sixing of the plan to allow people 55 to 64 to buy into Medicare if no private plans are available, healthcare reform has turned into a hoax disguised as fiasco with Joseph Lieberman, the putative independent from Connecticut presiding and gobbling up all the attention he can get for being the paid lackey of the insurance industry. He's ego tripping; he should be ejected from the Democratic caucus and ignored. But the sad truth is that the Democrats, for the past 60 years a party of political cowardice, has now become a party of political cowards, although just what they fear, short of exposure of their own perfidy is hard to imagine. Note that I have called them "political" cowards, not personal cowards, since I'm sure many of them are quite brave physically. But here they are preparing to pass a healthcare reform bill that no one in the public, except a few experts, perhaps, understands or supports because it does not include the one item a majority has consistently endorsed--some kind of "robust" public option or the option to buy early into Medicare.

To pander to and please Lieberman is to pass a bill only insurance companies and their paid representatives can love, but that exactly where these bills taking us. The Democrats are so eager to claim a victory that they will pass a bill that will make things far worse for patients and institutions that serve the poor.

Afghanistan

2009-12-02T20:43:00.000-05:00

My plan for Afghanistan is direct and to the point.

Call in Taliban leaders and tell them they can have their rocks under two conditions:
1. Produce Osama bin Laden's head on a pike.
2. We will airlift from Afghanistan all women and children and non-corrupt males who choose not to live under Taliban brutality.

After that, they are welcome to each other.

RIP Public Option

2009-11-29T10:56:00.001-05:00

The public option in the bill the House of Representatives passed is a joke that might cover a fraction of the people in need; the one in the bill before the Senate is worse. So why cling to them as if they will, as Obama keeps saying, level the playing field on insurance costs? It's far better I'm thinking now--if the Congress can't even muster the courage for a vote on expanding Medicare--to dump the public option. In its place, Congress should, as it is doing, mandate minimum coverage--access to the doctors of your choice, no penalty for pre-existing conditions or age or any other thing under the sun, no limitations on what is covered, implementation within one year--and it should forbid insurance companies from profiting from those policies. The rule should be, if you want to write any other kind of high-end coverage, you must also offer the basic coverage. That high end coverage can only cover frills, like private hospital rooms; it cannot offer different levels of actual medical care. Doctors cannot choose to take only the high end policies. If they take any insurance, they must take all insurance. Simpler than what's on the table now.

Health Reform Deformed: Is the Best Option Being Ignored?:

2009-11-19T11:00:00.035-05:00

Call me a pre-existing condition. Until seven years ago when I was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, I was the kind of physically fit, healthy person insurance companies love to enroll. Overnight I became someone to shun, damaged goods certain to need extra medical care and thus to erode a company's profits. I am currently covered under my wife's employer-provided insurance--these days that means that the employee picks up much to all of the extra cost of dependents, unless they have a better plan ass part of their employment agreement. Should my wife's coverage end for any reason, I am unlikely to find an affordable policy.

Given that reality and my belief that whatever its final shape, health care reform, if enacted, is going to affect us all, I have followed the current debate intently--my wife would say obsessively. I have done so with a growing sense of dismay, as it becomes clearer with each additional page that this reform will, as written to date, dump me and people like me into the backwash of Medicaid or some messy, expensive, buying combine.

Thus, I use “debate” advisedly because it is delusional for our elected officials to say they are seriously discussing health-care reform when the simplest, most practical and most comprehensive solution--a single-payer plan that provides all Americans with cradle to grave coverage--is not on the table. A bill expanding Medicare to cover all Americans has languished in a House committee years and was not even brought out for consideration this year.

Physicians for a National Health Plan, an advocacy group, estimates that a single-payer would save $350 billion a year that now goes to administrative costs of insurance companies and health-care providers. Such a plan would relieve people from worry over whether they can afford treatment. It would free employers from the continually rising cost of providing insurance for their employees, and it would give employees now working for insurance in jobs they dislike the opportunity to try something else. But we do not engage in that discussion.

Instead, what we see and hear of single payer in the media or from our fearful leaders are lame excuses: it will never fly, it is not possible in America, it is socialistic, the transition would prove too disruptive, Americans won't stand for it, with a reminder of the town hall incivilities of August.

The best the House could offer was a watered down public option, along with expansion of Medicaid, evisceration of Medicare, and a resounding declaration that women have no right to control their own bodies. The bill that Senate Majority leader Harry Reid, the worst majority leader in my memory, offers up a "public option" that never had guts in the first place. It would allow states to "opt out," which sounds more than vaguely like granting them the power to secede from the Union or decide not to abide by any civil rights legislation. The completely untested logic behind the public option is that a government run insurance program would compete with private insurers to hold prices down and, one hopes, quality up.

The aim of both House and proposed Senate bills is to create purchasing cooperatives that would provide small businesses and uninsured people an opportunity to purchase coverage at “affordable prices” whatever those are. No one could be denied insurance, and the government would help families buy plans. We are told that this approach would bring fiscal sanity to skyrocketing insurance rates.

That is hard to see in light of the fact that reform as it is shaping up would not meet Obama's fundamental goal of insuring the uninsured. Millions would remain uncovered, including illegal immigrants, who nonetheless would as a matter of law and medical ethics have to be covered should they appear at a hospital.

A month ago private insurers said that unless everyone who is uninsured is forced to purchase insurance from them or pay hefty fines, they will have to raise premiums considerably. These are the same insurance companies that stand to collect tens of billions of dollars in new policy premiums should reform pass without a public option--or with an opt-out. As I read the Senate bill it would be possible for a big company in an opt-out state to pay a relatively modest fine, compared with what coverage would cost them, and dump all their employees into the combine or buying cooperative, where they would have to buy private insurance.

The insurance industry has long declared that it would be unable to compete against a federal insurance provider in a truly free market. Because people would flock to the more economical “public option,” Private insurers argue that because consumers, given a choice, would flock to a publc option, it is little more than a stalking horse for the dread single payer. So be it, true believers in capitalism claim the market is never wrong, so they should embrace its decision the opportunity to let it decide.

Instead, the insurance industry wants to design the field, write the rules, and choose the referees. The Obama Administration meanwhile long ago negotiated away to no one in particular all its advantages.

As I have followed the debate, I have also talked to people about health care. A common incomprehension and an unexpected consensus have emerged from my conversations with trades people, mechanics, lawyers, doctors, architects, academics, business owners, shopkeepers, morning lap swimmers at the public pool, local politicians, and other writers of various ethnic, religious and political persuasions.

They find incomprehensible the convoluted, complicated bills currently or soon to be before them. That is largely because they accept that access to medical care is a fundamental right, as President Barack Obama seemed to recognize in his September 9 speech to Congress, and they agree that the government should guarantee that right through a universal, single player insurance plan, achieved, for example, through expansion of Medicare.

My informal survey participants find especially troublesome the way members of Congress and, with caveats, President Obama have managed to transform society's moral obligation to provide health care for all into a legal mandate that everyone buy health insurance or pay a fine. Absent a robust public option that means from one of the private insurers President Obama and his allies in Congress have spent months vilifying as rapacious and irresponsible.

No wonder people are alienated and disgusted. A Jamaican ironworker, who had come to install a wrought iron gate at the top of our stairs a month ago (October 31, 2009, posting), captured the attitude of most people I know when he looked at me and said, “Americans are crazy” because of our inability simply to provide health care for all.

Not long after, my internist, a rock-solid Republican, declared he would not vote for a Republican again because the party had offered not alternatives. Then, he said, "I beginning to thing that maybe there shouldn't be profit in healthcare."

I couldn't disagree. Some services like police and fire protection and health insurance are meant to protect and enhance all our lives, not to produce profits for a few and heartache for many. If that be socialism, then Call me Socialistic.

A Modest Proposal

2009-11-05T06:09:00.003-05:00

Were I a Republican strategist I would recommend to my delusional colleagues the following: Before the House and Senate take up their epic health measures, introduce a simple bill calling for the expansion of Medicare to include all Americans by the year 2020--cradle to grave coverage. This measure would seem to violate core Republican principles, but when it works, they can claim that the profit principle should never have applied to such a fundamental right and in any case, Medicare is simply the insurer. In any event, the success of this simple reform would make everyone forget the what we'll call the ideological diversion. In that sense, this bill would be the Congressional Republican equivalent of Nixon, the great Red Baiter, opening relations with China.

The Republicans benefit in all regards: If the plan works, they take credit. It it fails, they blame the Democrats. If the Democrats don't allow a vote on this measure or vote it down, the Republicans can trash them as unimaginative obstructionists to true reform.

More important, if the measure were to pass, we would all benefit. But I am not a Republican strategist.

The Gate

2009-10-31T21:53:00.001-04:00

We commissioned a simple gate from a local ironworker from one of the Caribbean islands--IW, I'll call him-- to go at the top of the stairs and prevent the intrepid kelpie Katie, now lame with spondylosis, from charging down to intercept some threat, real or imagined, like the Fed-Ex man, and taking a misstep into oblivion.

IW is not anomalous in Miami--used here in the common sense for both the city and the county. He's a craftsman who does much of his work off the books--for cash whenever possible. Who can blame them?

We are devolving into a Third World city. I know the word is in disrepute, but here it fits. The city is one of the costliest in the world and one of the richest, according to City Mayors. But increasingly here, you're rich or poor serving the rich or middle to upper middle class doing the same.

I'd like to make the gate a metaphor for all that's fucked up in the world, but I can't. If you open the door into a house of bedlam, you get bedlam. If you open a door out of a house of bedlam, you get insanity loose in the world. The gate works in terms of the opening inward and outward, but it fails because unlike a door, which provides a solid barrier between those worlds, or states, if you will, the gate is permeable, allowing much of the lunacy to cross back and forth. The solid door keeps everything out; the gate discriminates by design.

The 1990-page healthcare reform act of the House of Representatives is the same way--neither one thing nor the other, impressive for its size; lilliputian in its execution.

There, i've done it, anyway, which at the end of the day is all one can say of healthcare reform. . It promises a lot. It might make some changes. but in the ned, the world's it dividies and uites are no long our own.

Peace

2009-10-09T06:08:00.000-04:00

The Norwegian Nobel Committee says that it awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize to the singularity that is Barack Obama because of his work the past nine months to reach out to the rest of the world and emphasize diplomacy and international cooperation over unilateral declarations of war. But one can't help but think that the Norwegians, whose mythological heritage is not given to a hopeful end game--i.e., the bad guys win--have opted for "hope" that he will fulfill his promise to make the world a safer place. It is the promise of Obama that has long been his strong suit. It is his inability to deliver on that promise--or to deliver decisively programs and policies that make a difference, or at least match in ambition his soaring rhetoric--that increasingly is dragging his presidency toward mediocrity. We can only hope that this Prize will strengthen and embolden him.

"The" Demotion

2009-09-26T21:52:00.001-04:00

When Barack Obama began his improbable campaign to become president of the United States, I began referring to him as "the Obama." He was sui generis, a singularity, a figure unique in American politics, and when against all odds, the Obama became the first African American, and one of the few intellectuals, to be elected president, he sealed the case. His oratorical powers were superb. He seemed to have the temperament for the monumental tasks confronting him. I was even willing to grant that we weren't going to get much in terms of sound progressive policies, although each time I thought the moderate Democrat in him would win out, he proved me wrong--a moderate Democrat in 2009 is politically on a par with the 1968 vintage Richard Nixon--think about it. Then came healthcare, and his abject surrender of a "public option" for health insurance, coupled with his embrace of the notion that people must be made to purchase private health insurance, a proposition antithetical to the notion that access to decent healthcare is a fundamental right. What makes this surrender so cowardly are the polls, like the one the New York Times reports on today, showing that close to two-thirds of the American people support a public option. He's got the people behind him; all he has to do is rally them.

Diehard Obamans will claim that he continues to support a "public option," but there is scant proof of that. He has basically left the House of Representatives out to dry by declaring that although he personally would prefer a "public option," its absence will not trigger an automatic veto. Obama's equivocation on this one issue, which, denials to the contrary, is essential to any successful health industry reform--and then only if it involves true coverage, say through expansion of Medicare--has confused the public precisely because it is so illogical. Whether Obama really wants to beef up the private insurance industry or for all his high rhetoric does not understand healthcare or is willing to settle for anything so he can claim success, I can't say. I can say his wavering has earned him "the" demotion. He will not easily reclaim it.

There are times in the world's history when leaders emerge to meet a pressing need. The time is now; the need is present and pressing;t the leader is awol. We can only hope he returns.

Dog Bytes has moved

2009-09-21T16:44:00.001-04:00

Dog Bytes has relocated to mbdog.markderr.com--please redirect yourself.

The Story Line

2009-09-21T10:58:00.019-04:00

The most interesting and disturbing thing about the "Baucus healthcare reform" proposals is the way the main stream media has closed ranks on the story line that it is the bill with best chance of advancing. That the Baucus mark is the only one, apparently, without a public option should give them pause but does not for two reasons: 1. The Obamans have for weeks been signalling that the vaunted 'public option' was a ruse, a stalking horse to keep progressives at the table until they couldn't easily leave; and 2. The Obamans long ago declared that nothing would disrupt their drive for and ability to claim success in reform, even if they must redefine the universe in order to do so. The Obamans and press toe the line, building each story around the same checklist--cost containment, efficiency, no exclusion for pre-existing conditions, individual mandates, electronic medical records, and so on. In that way, the public option becomes just one of what Obama calls ideas or ways to get to the end of "universal coverage," a term that must henceforth be used advisedly. The cost to the federal government is weighed. Lost is any assessment of what it means to individuals beyond elaborate and frightening costs that government subsidies are to help meet. Not included is any serious investigation of these insurance coops, which appear to be largely imaginative extensions from a small scale to one never tried before and thus are more experimental, more of a grafting of an alien life form onto the American healthcare system than would be expansion of Medicare to cover everyone. Why, for example, does it make any sense to subsidize people to purchase overpriced private insurance policies when it would be cheaper to have them buy directly into Medicare--employers would pay, as well? Oh, but that would be "new" taxes!

As result, the Baucus bill is deemed to have the best chance of passage because it has dropped all of that nonsense about government programs and embraced the insurance industry. It is too big and too powerful to fight, we're told, which should be all the more reason to smash it, except the world we inhabit is one is in which giant corporations are deemed too big to fail and bailed out at huge cost to the public treasure, while individuals are allowed to suffer.

Obama's Big Surrender, or the Making of a Pop Song Presidency

2009-09-20T15:58:00.003-04:00

It appears from accounts of this morning's talk shows that Barack Obama tried to put the face of a tough, practical leader on his abject surrender on healthcare reform. Sure, he tried to spin his self-administered defeat into victory and although people may accept his argument, the reality on the ground will be much different. After dismissing single-payer national medical insurance--does he know the history of Medicare or what it is--apparently not since he's not even appointed an administrator for Medicare and Medicaid--saying he wasn't aiming "to graft" one onto America's dysfunctional healthcare system, he meekly tossed his 'public option' into the trash bin after it. He did all of that by once again embracing the notion that people should be required to buy health insurance from private insurers either directly or from insurance combines or coops, unless their employers provide it. The signal point here is that Obama--'the' is hereby formally dropped because he has proved himself nothing more than a moderate Democrat--put the lie to his soaring rhetoric about the nation having a moral obligation to provide for its citizens' health. Society's moral obligation will under Obama's medical revision become an individual's legal duty. Not only that but we will have to buy from one of the insurance companies Obama and his forces correctly identified as the culprits. Obama has bought the line that progressives will fall in line behind him as he marches into the void because the rightwingnuts have left no room for them to maneuver. That line worked during the general election, just like it worked for Bill Clinton, and it appears to be working now, but they all should think seriously before signing on to this Baucus gift to the insurance industry.

Laughable

2009-09-16T15:49:00.001-04:00

Well Max Baucus of Montana has produced a joke of a healthcare bill, a massive gift to the insurance industry. A bill at this stage is called a mark, but we are the marks if this thing slimes through the Congress. Still, the Obama endorsed combines in his speech, so let him chew on this one.

Expanding Medicare is clearly the simplest, cleanest, most noncontroversial and comprehensive approach, as George McGovern suggested in the Washington Post on Sunday. What he neglected to say is that the rightwingnuts have worked themselves into a place from which they can't oppose such an expansion. Reading the polls that say people are worried about cuts in Medicare, they position themselves as Medicare's great defenders, although they hate it. Excellent, the numbers say the way to shore up Medicare and insure everyone equitably is to bring everyone into it, as originally conceived. The rightwingnuts themselves believe that Medicare is not a government program, so they have no grounds to object to its expansion as a government take over of healthcare.

Everyone gets something; all get healthcare at an affordable price, but is anyone listening in the Obama White House?

The Single-Payer Plan

2009-09-14T05:20:00.000-04:00

It is nice to see George McGovern lay out clearly and forcefully the case for expanding Medicare to cover all Americans in Sunday's Washington Post. The Obama said he was willing to listen to all good ideas, but so far he has ignored the one that best meets the 'moral obligation,' as he calls it, to provide healthcare for all. The Obama and many of the dead white guys running the healthcare fiasco don't seem to understand or even to care enough to try to understand that forcing people to buy health insurance, especially from certifiably rapacious corporations is not equivalent to--in fact, is antithetical to--meeting that moral obligation. The rightwingnuts crying over government interference in their Medicare or their lives don't seem to have thought for even a nanosecond that the far greater intrusion of government into their lives is the dictate that they purchase health insurance from a rapacious insurance company or face a steep fine--a plan backed by many of their own rightwingnut leaders and commentators. The plans being put forth are needlessly complex because they are attempts to fix a busted system that increasingly exists to pad insurance company, not to guarantee a fundamental right or overhaul a dysfunctional system. Distilled into another example of big bad government, that confusion feeds the racism of many of the opponents of the Obama. Moreover, the Obama's failure to follow the inevitable logic of his own oratorical brilliance transforms him in the eyes even of his own supporters into an ordinary politician--bombastic, imperious, out of touch, and unntrustworthy. And why not? The Obama is basically backing an idea, insurance coops, that is on its face doomed to disaster, unless you're an insurance company. On the talk shows Sunday morning, the 'public option' in the form of a new government run health program took a beating as it should. The real point, as George McGovern says, is simply to provide Medicare for all. Ain't hard. It's what the creators of Medicare hoped to do all along.

option that public

2009-09-11T15:16:00.000-04:00

Reterieverman makes a good point in his comments on the last post to the effect that a public option were one to be included in any healthcare overhaul emerging from the current scrum would be full of holes, equipped with a trigger that can't be pulled and generally inadequate. Indeed, such an option would probably be designed to fail or at least dysfunctional enough to set the cause of true reform back a generation, and if the Republicans were smart, rather than infantile, they would work to make sure that happened.

For now, the best Republican proposal, which the Obama has ignored, is to roll back the clock and start over with a clean slate. I like that because the most economical plan stands a far better chance of being enacted than it does under current circumstances.

Surprise--Sort Of

2009-09-10T11:20:00.014-04:00

The Obama never ceases to amaze me with the power of his oratory if not the boldness of his programs. He gave the speech I had thought he should give--me and an army of others, which is to say that I have no fantasies that the Obama's web crawlers detected, retrieved, and shared anything from this blog--with that one glaring exception. He could not voice the inevitable conclusion--that a single-payer program is the only reasonable solution to this mess.... I think he knows that insurance combines, coops, or whatnots won't work because the insurance companies are not going to reform, not going to change their ways and offer simple, affordable comprehensive health insurance when they can get together and offer scores of plans with suites of options and prices longer and more complex than the great chain of being or an airline reservation system. I think the Obama has made the calculation that the system has to be given one last chance at self-reform before Congress will vote for a single-payer plan.

In any event, whether he anticipates it or not, that's likely to happen. Let's hope that it happens before the insurance industry can inflict too much more harm on people.

For now I'll just admire the speech. He turned the tables on the Republican lunatics.

ain't complicated

2009-09-06T05:09:00.003-04:00

Jackie Calmes is reporting in the New York Times that the veterans of the Clinton healthcare fiasco have convinced themselves and the Obamans that doing nothing is worse than creating something half-assed. That just goes to show why the Obamans are in the sorry state they're in. The Clintonoids made healthcare reform difficult and complex, just as the Obamans have today because they refuse to recognize how easy it is--in five easy pieces:

state the fundamental principle--everyone deserves healthcare, and it is our obligation to provide it for ourselves, our families and our fellow citizens.
review the current state of affairs--dismal, we pay too much for too little and too many of us have nothing at all. we face full system failure and bankruptcy. insurance, when available, is too expensive and inadequate to the task at hand. We are lucky if half of every dollar paid and insurance company actually goes to a doctor for providing medical care. We have rationing.
present the solution--insure everyone through expanded medicare.
demonstrate why that is good--lower costs, everyone receives quality care. present the comparative numbers.
lay down the challenge to anyone who can do the same or better for less to present their plan. They can't they won't.
the time is now. seize the time.

ain't complicated. ain't hard. just takes some cajones.

The Obama's Bomb

2009-09-03T06:05:00.000-04:00

The New York Times is reporting on-line that the Obama's vaunted public option is DOA, and that is in the context of his speech to Congress next Wednesday. That would be wonderful political theatre, for sure: The Obama, the candidate of hope and aspiration, crawls to Capitol Hill and tells a joint session of Congress, "I wasn't really serious about that public option stuff. We can leave it to the insurance companies who have driven us to this sorry state to drive us out again--as long we are nice to them and provide them with guidelines we'll let them write. In the meantime, we'll cut Medicare spending through technology. "

I've been muttering for a few weeks that the Obama is an inspiration, not a leader. Without pleasure, I can say it increasingly appears I was right. He still has the ability to surprise, to deliver a forceful, clear statement of principle: Everyone is entitled to healthcare. A bold, simple, comprehensive program: Here's how we will expand Medicare to cover all. A guarantee of treatment. A cost comparison to prove the economy of his program. And then say, if the Republicans have a better plan in all regards, let them put it forward now, knowing full well that they don't have a plan and won't.

Public Option--fear vs. hope

2009-08-23T18:03:00.005-04:00

Reading through wrap-ups of the Sunday gab shows, featuring the usual array of pontificating politicians and prognosticators, I am struck by the admission finally that they fear the "public option" because it will provide more for less than private insurers and as a result will become insurer of first resort. That is an elaborate way of saying that the "public option" is the backdoor to a single-payer national health plan. "Progressives," as Paul Krugman calls them, backed the Obama's convoluted plan only because it contained a "public option" they hoped would become a single-payer national plan. Thus, Republican fears are Progressives' hopes, and therein lies a real problem. If the Obama, who ran on hope, drops the "public option" to please reactionary Republicans, he chooses fear over hope and in a real sense betrays all he has stood for. He betrays all those who took him at his word and chose to hope.

With the debate stripped down to essentials, the House and Senate should scuttle their unnecessarily long, complex, and needlessly obfuscatory and costly legislation and write a simple expansion of Medicare into the nation's insurer. The Obamans will be able to articulate a clear principle--the right to health care--and offer a concrete solution that is comprehensive and comprehensible. They will also be in a position to challenge each Republican and insurance company lie as soon as it oozes into the light.

Right! Some days I still imagine that I live in a rational society whose leaders care enough and are intelligent and informed enough to write and pass decent legislation. Then I wake up.

An Interesting Footnote

2009-08-18T13:48:00.006-04:00

While the Obama decides what he stands for in the healthcare debate he started, here is a curious little footnote, pulled from statistics compiled by the Tax Foundation for the 2003-2004 fiscal year. For every dollar of federal tax money received from the good people of North Dakota, the federal government spent $1.73, making it the 5th ranking national welfare state. Montana received $1.58, for 9th place. New Mexico was first at $2.00. Senators Kent Conrad from North Dakota, Max Baucus from Montana and Jeff Bingaman from New Mexico are the three Democrats in the Senate Finance Committee group negotiating healthcare reform while refusing to consider a public option. The three Republicans--Charles Grassley of Iowa, Olympia Snowe of Maine, and Mike Enzi or Wyoming--also represent states that receive more than they give. A large chunk of the money for Montana and North Dakota is in the form of agricultural and insurance subsidies. You've got to love the inconsistency--or should we say 'hypocrisy'--of the 'gang of six.'

Health Reform: What'sTo Like

2009-08-16T17:57:00.010-04:00

The headlines today say it all: The New York Times--Obamans ready to ditch public option in favor of insurance cooperatives, a system the Office of Technology Assessment found in the mid-1990s would save not money, and health debate fails to ignite Obama base. Ignite? The Obama has correctly identified the insurance companies as a large part of the problem, proclaimed that they are 'holding America hostage.' But rather than take the next logical step and demand a system that does not permit that, rather than go on to articulate the basic right of everyone to health care and work to see that become real, he tells people that his reform will require them to purchase health insurance from those same companies. The only sop he threw to his base was a 'public option," which diehard Obamans hoped or persuaded themselves would, as insurance companies feared, win any cost competition. Now that is probably gone.

Commenting on my last entry, Retrieverman said he believes that Obama in his "heart of hearts" supports and wants a single payer national health insurance plan but doesn't think he can get there from here. Retrieverman also points out that the anti-reform campaign has been noteworthy for its vileness. That all true. But if the Obama had listened to what people told him he couldn't do, he wouldn't be where he is today. That he seems to have forgotten how to challenge and beat the odds is sad enough; that he has done so with the stakes so high is tragic.

Government Blues Again

2009-08-08T17:19:00.005-04:00

That a sizable number of Americans appear to believe that government is so vile that it can't even run its own programs--Medicare and Social Security in particular--can justly be called a legacy of Reaganism, which for nearly 30 years has drummed into people the notion that government is the problem even when you are the government, but more precisely it is a legacy of rabid, kneejerk anti-Communism, which while predating the Cold War reached its full flowering under MAD's mushroom cloud.

Questions of geneology aside, this rabid outpouring of right wingnut fear and loathing over a "reform" that, like the banking reform that led to the just blown financial/real-estate bubble, favors corporate medicine, including the insurance companies, bespeaks something profoundly sad about America's educational system--that it is a monumental failure, as seriously in need of reform as healthcare but less likely to undergo it. How else is one to explain citizen comments like this one: "Keep the government out of my Medicare."

The Obama and the Democrats are as caught up in the fog as the right wingnuts, which is why reform is bogged down. Rather than articulate from the start that everyone is entitled to health from conception to grave and then figuring how to best pay for the thing--and the studies that address these questions exist. The late, lamented Office of Technology Assessment studied the issue repeatedly in the 199os, including Understanding Estimates of National Health Expenditures Under Health Reform from May 1994 (Princeton has all OTA reports on line.) In that report they concluded that despite difficulty in coming up with hard figures, economists estimated savings of various significant size were the country to move to a single-payer national health plan while purchasing pools for buying private insurance could be expected to save precious little to zero. That's right, purchasing pools of the sort that seem the darling of the conservatives.

So here is the legacy of anti-communism as filtered through Reaganism for the Obama and his fellow Democrats: Unable to discuss the right of all Americans to health, much less of developing a single-payer plan that would recognize that and solve the current crisis, they are forced to forced to defend legislation that would force Americans to purchsae insurance from companies they have repeatedly condemned as rapciaous money suckers. Unable to defend their healthcare non-reform, the Obamans and Democrats are let to argue that the right wingnuts are simply trying to destroy his presidency and so to save his Presidency, we must support whatever healthcare package he accepts. Whether the Democrats win or lose, we will all lose in this great health non-reform.

Open Letter to Barack Obama

2009-08-04T18:08:00.005-04:00

I have a bunch of junk waiting to be turned into serviceable prose few will read, but rather than pursue that or try to write the President directly--he only is given to read a certain number of messages from the people a day after all--I decided to write this open letter to:

President Barack Obama--

I'll keep it short and sweet. The health care bills working their ways through Congress are overly complicated--meaning no one can understand them--expensive, give something to everyone and everything to no one exercises in special interest lobbying that are dragging your poll numbers in general and on what should be your signature initiative into the gutter. You know it, and you know the way out does not lie in negotiating even more convoluted plans doomed to failure or a compromise that will see your public option trashed. You have repeatedly stated the case for universal coverage. Now is the time to act, to tell Congress that it has labored mightily but produced bills that serve no one, that, in fact, are major leaps backward.

What I suggest is that you call on the economists who have repeatedly studied the issues and crunched the numbers, the doctors, and the people who care to stand firm with you. Then you say in your own eloquent way the following:

We need to reconceptualize the entire 'healthcare debate.' We need to go back to basics and put forward clearly that every American has the right to health, to cradle to grave medical care. That right is inviolate, yet as a nation we have failed to honor it. [Clearly, to recognize the right to healthcare is to reject the notion that individuals must be forced to buy insurance if their employers don't buy it for them.]

We intend to join the ranks of civilized nations and design a system that provides that healthcare. This system will be administered by the Federal government as an expansion of a reformed Medicare--i.e. one that serves people's needs, not the special interests of pharmaceutical companies. Rather this Medicare would operate like its legislative sponsors imagined--guanteeing that all Americans will be able to choose their own doctor, subject, of course, to their doctor's ability to see them., and that people will receive the treatment they need, as determined by their doctors, not by insurance managers who know next to nothing about medicine. In other words, if you need a doctor, you go see a doctor.

How do we pay for this. Well individuals and businesses should expect to pay an increased Medicare assessment. You will have numbers, but it is important to emphasize that the demise of private insurers will turn 30 percent to 60 percent of money currently paid to private insurers back to medical care or back to the people who paid it. That is not chump change, and it should make the bill more than manageable.

The point is that hopelessly complex bills that if enacted are bound to lead to all kinds of trickery by health insurers gaming the system and not provide either 'reform' or anything close to universal care. You must stick to the fundamental principle that healthcare is a right subsumed under 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" if nothing else, and that the government can best provide--that is unless you want to create an independent national insurer. Then send your forces out and prepare for the barrages of lies that will rain upon you.

I can imagine what your advisers will say to this plan, and all I can say is that you've listened to them and the polls too much on this one. If you had done the same when deciding to run, you wouldn't be where you are.

Best Wishes,

Mired in Muck; Mucking in Mire

2009-07-20T12:43:00.001-04:00

I've always believed that the key to climbing while running, cycling, or walking lies in allowing the hill itself, the thing I have to surmount, to pull me up, and I do that by focusing on breathing and the rhythm or cadence and, when hoofing it, my stride. But occasionally, the solidity I trust is under my feet proves to be a morass and no matter my form or effort I end up going nowhere but down--kicking and screaming against the irresistible pull of gravity. It is as if the mountain I've been climbing for hours and am about to summit turns to muck beneath my feet, pulling me downward with each additional step upward.

I find those days occurring more frequently now, and it's not just because we're charging full bore into the dog days of what has become a brutally hot dry summer after the biblical floods of June. I feel like there is a tragicomic--perhaps, it is simply cosmic or karmic, but I don't plan to go there--disconnect between the realities of the Great Depression Due and the behavior of politicians and business leaders alike, as if all that needs to be done is get people spending again thereby averting deflation. Really, wasn't a chief cause of the current meltdown people and businesses spending too much money they didn't have on overpriced goods. Now that they no longer have the cash cow of ever escalating home values to cash in on , consumers have no money to spend on overinflated goods. Prices have to come down if goods are to move, but we all know that's only part of it. As badly as the U.S. needs to bring the troops home, it needs to bring the jobs home from off-shore; otherwise, we will end up with two societies, separate and decidedly unequal--underpaid women occupying all fields and under or unemployed males. If that be protectionism bring it on, but I prefer to think of it as the result of an industrial policy intended to create a better society.

A new health care policy would make bringing those jobs home more possible than any other single act. Or it should. As I look at the plans making their ways through the Houlse and Senate I see a fiasco of monumental proportions in the making. The programs these various bills propose, if passed, will spelll disaster, based, as they are, on the notion that the profit of private insurers--the 30 to 50 percent they regularly suck out of the system for themselves. That's money that doesn't go to healthcare for anyone. Get rid of it, and the whole thing becomes affordable. Keep it and healthcare becomes the Obama's disaster.

Here are a few of the problems:

1. the way the public options are being written, they will not compete in price against private insurers, insuring that everyone will pay too much and by underwriting coverage for the poor, the government will be giving an indirect subsidies to private insurers.

2. existence of a public option means that employers will at the least dump dependents of their workers. If the penalty for not covering employees is less than the cost of covering them, they too will be dumped on the public option.

Both those outcomes would be acceptable were the public plan universal and fair to people and doctors, not insurers. Instead, in addition to the high cost, the public option would have grades, like gasoline, basic, medium, and premium. That's absurd, of course. If access to healthcare is a fundamental right--and arguably it is--then it should not come in grades, like gasoline or meat; rather, it must be equally available to all.

It gets paid for by taxing everyone, including businesses that no longer will be paying for insurance, at a truly graduated level. With that 30 to 50 percent of nonmedical cost wrung out of the system, it will be cheaper than you think.

But sanity doesn't rule. For all his high rhetoric and noble intentions, the Obama is just a moderate Democrat, and his counterparts in Congress with his blessing seem intent on passing a healthcare program notworthy for its complexity and abject surrender to the insurance industry. The dying stakeholder society will drive a stake through our hearts before it expires.

Health Care Redux

2009-06-03T19:26:00.002-04:00

I've been playing with this one too long, especially considering there is nothing complicated about the current health care "debate." The Obama presidency may come down to whether he can once again confound the forces of reaction and install an efficient, equitable, economical in the truest sense, and universal health insurance system. By now the only people who don't understand that such a program must operate under a broad public mandate--indeed, will ultimately have to take the form of a single payer plan--are, sadly, the antediluvian eejits who run the Congress and benefit largely from the largess of health insurance companies. Witness the Democratic Senator from Montana, Max Baucus, who boldly and forcefully told the advocates of a single-payer plan that he was wrong not to include them in hearings on health care reform but not to get in a huff about it because it is now to late in the legislative process to even consider such a novel idea, according the Dan Eggen in today's Washington Post.

This position is ultimately pinned to the Obama, who is said to have ruled out pushing for single-payer on the grounds that it is politically impossible. The Obama being the Obama continues to push for a public insurance plan that would compete against private insurers. They know full well that in an equal competition with a solid, well designed public health plan, they would soon go under or transform themselves into boutique additional insurers for the rich. That's why they were in Congress a month ago, when I started this blog, claiming that they needed a "level playing field." Well, you have to admire their corporate cajones, but really, does anyone other than a member of Congress or a distempered Republican believe for even a nanosecond that private insurers serve their clients and are good in any way, shape, form, or fantasy for health care?

This non-debate is being carried out against GD2 [Great Depression Due], wth thousands of people a day losing jobs and what pathetic insurance they did have. Had Congress the courage to act for the good of he nation and its citizens rather than the profit of insurers--the most significant figures are the 60 to 70 percent hhe current insurance driven health care bureaucracy keeps for itself, meaning that no more than 40 cents of every health dollar actually goes to patient care, and that is probably optimistic--it would immediately vote for a single payer plan, recognizing that currently overtaxed Medicare keeps only 2 to 3 cents of every dollar for administration. We can't afford not to go down that road, but here we are, clinging to the hope that the Obama can get a good public option on the playing field, knowing that if he does there will be no contest.

Torture for What End

2009-04-24T16:58:00.001-04:00

The floodgates appear to have opened on the torture chamber that was the Bush Administration's war on "terrior"--and not to the pleasure of the Bushies and their minions. The news reports pouring out on an hourly basis are disgraceful, disturbing, and sometimes insanely surreal, not to mention thoroughly contradictory. If waterboarding drew from case hardened "terriorists" such stellar information, why did it have to be repeated 183 times in March 2003, on Kahlid Shaikh Mohammad, and 83 times in August 2003 on Abu Zubaydah--(is there something magical in the number 83?) The number of repetitions hardly bespeaks a successful technique; rather, it suggests something deeply punitive, vengeful, and sadistic, born of fear approaching utter panic that "terriorists" might once again successfully attack the U.S., the 'homeland." Filled with guilt for failing to connect large and abundant "dots" that effectively forewarned them of an impending attack prior to September 11, 2001, the Bushies demanded complete plans and plots. They believed that among their captives were "evildoers" with full knowledge of impending attacks, who were taunting them by refusing to provide imformation through standard interrogation. The Bushies wanted the dots connected by their captives, even if they were imaginary dots. Indeed, the Bushies repeatedly say the tortures provided information that helped them thwart planned attacks, without offering details.

I accept the arguments of dozens of people, including former interrogators for the FBI, that the tortures produced nothing of merit that could not have been, and often had not already been, obtained through standard interrogation. But that argument misses the point--just for one example, by traditional intelligence methods, the feds had by the August of 2001 obtained enough information, including the partial name and cell phone number of one of the 9/11 conspirators, to know that something was coming down sooner than later. The attack succeeded not because American officials lacked information or the ability to gain more quickly through friendly governments but because those officials lacked the ability to digest and act upon what was before them. That could be considered harsh and unfair were 9/11 an aberration, but it was merely the first of a string of failures of leadership in the run-up to disasters and in response to those disasters, most notably Hurricane Katrina and the global financial meltdown. Viewed through this prism, the torture of prisoners appears motivated by guilt and fear not only of another attack but also of their failures prior to the first attack being fully disclosed.

But debates over the value of the information and the motivations of the leaders who ordered torture are irrelevant, as are moral condemnations of the acts. What trumps them all is the Law. The "rule of law" is a bedrock principle of this nation that cannot be ignored because it is temporarily inconvenient. By nearly all accounts but their own, the Bushies violated the law and their oaths of office when they ordered the torture of prisoners. They must be investigated, indicted, if that's where the evidence leads, tried and if convicted sentenced to hard time befitting their crimes.

The Bushies and their minions who claim their actions were legal and justified should welcome such an investigation as a way to clear their names and reputations. Why fear the truth?

Torture My Waterboard

2009-04-18T05:20:00.002-04:00

The New York Times posted the .pdf of the Justice Department Torture Memos from the years following the September 11, 2001, attacks, laying out chapter and verse what the CIA planned to do and did to select prisoners. What is interesting about them are the gyrations government lawyers go through to justify torture, to defend what is indefensible. The Obama's decision to release the memos is laudable, his attempt to pardon the CIA torturers before the fact of their trials lamentable. Shield torturers at home and lose the international prestige and moral authority you need to run to ground torturers from other countries.

Granted, politically, the Obama probably could not pursue a prosecution of anyone without risking violent reaction, so convinced are many people that the tortured prisoners had vital information they would have divulged no other way, and obtaining that information allowed the government to thwart new attacks on the Homeland Uber Alles...oops, that's a no-no in America. It is still acceptable to trash someone up and down as a communist, a leftist pinko coward but absolutely do not call a Nazi fruitcake a Nazi fruitcake. Call him a right leaning Republican, as if there were any other kind--or ignore the prohibitions and call him a Nazi and listen to the sound of late 20th century market capitalism deflating. Order the investigations and approve the war crimes trials of everyone through George W. Bush. That is the only way to begin to establish globally the rule of law.

The business about global terrior communications matching or exceeding pre 9/11 levels stricks me as particularly self-serving, trotted out to justify the request for and issuing of the memos. It's a bureaucratic dodge that has the added benefit of shielding the Bush from his full responsibility for the tragic fiasco of that dayl

The Obama Road Show

2009-04-08T17:15:00.003-04:00

A quick prediction, which I made months ago but am only now recording: The Arab capital the Obama plans to visit for his major speech is Damascus, and I don't think that's much of a secret. We'll see.

Bail,Bail, Bail Me Out..

2009-03-06T11:45:00.001-05:00

It should be clear to even the dimmest bulb by now that sizable chunks of corporate America are using the financial crisis to line their own pockets. From banks to insolvent car companies, executives and money managers discovered the bounty of the bailout and they want more and more and their investors want more and more; meanwhile, their institutions hurtle toward oblivion. The situation has become so deranged that the government must seize the banks--take them from current management and investors--stabilize them, break them up and sell them back to the public under strict supervision or keep them, as the case may be. As to the rest--protect the workers and grant microloans to people with ideas and drive and products that work and that people need. You can only do that if you recognize that at this juncture in the world's history what is good for General Motors is bad for the country and the world. They are going down no matter how much money is slung at them, so let them go and save the money for more useful things, like health care reform, which will help more people than any mortgage bailout. I should say it will help only if it is a properly designed single-payer health care plan.

Is there hope, someone asked me recently. A week ago I couldn't guess. Now I think it is clear that the Obama is, as I said during the election, a moderate Democrat, and thus incapable of bold moves--whether seizing banks or fixing health care. We're going to end up in an economic hole with a mountain of debt.

Incredible

2009-02-25T05:32:00.002-05:00

"This country does not torture!" The Obama and full cry and you sit there muttering, yeah, bring it, Baby, bring it on! Fight the power! But wait, he is the power, and for now he's basking the adulation of people hungry for the kind of leadership he is displaying.

I'll back up to the beginning and say that I just finished the Obama's speech to Congress, and all crusty me can say is 'fucking A." The man might not walk on water--and it's not clear that he gets health care, but he sure as hell knows how to speak and inspire, and the way he lasooed, hogtied, duct-taped and trivialized the remnants of the Republican party was masterful--beyond Muhammed Ali at his best. He neutralized the opposition becaause he conveyed to people his understanding of the situation--financial, emotional, physical, existential, you name it--and his desire to get done what needs to get done. If the Obama walks his talk then what follows in this post is rendered foolish. I run it because miracle that the Obama is, I've still not seen him master health care, which is tougher than walking on water.

Here it is: This post one has been in the works for over a month, while I've finished my book, started teaching a graduate course in scientific writing, and taught my intensive week long seminar on Dogs of the World in Santa Rosa, California, at what is now Bergin University of Canine Studies. Among the things I think I know for sure are that the interwebs are changing forever the way information and most art are created and delivered, that no one has a viable economic model for dealing with that change in such a way that the creators can earn a living---well, maybe they can declare themselves banks and request bailouts--that the current economic situation is a fiasco that is fast beccoming a disaster, and that the Obama, for all of his brilliance and genuine humanity, does not have a clue about the health care crisis in this country. If he did understand, he would move immediately to create a single-payer national health plan, with Medicare at its base, and in the processs he would repair the nearly mortal damage the Bushies did to Medicare itself. That would go a very long way to restoring American vitality.

Before my hiatus, I swore off keeping an anachronism, a blog, as just another of my wastes of time that produced no money. But rather than tweeting or flashing mirrors at the sun or twittering dithering docking digital haikus or video self-mashes about the ways of my days, I continue in large measure because I know full well that were I to make such a switch I would disappoint the dwindling band of readers of this blog. I know that continuing simply proves that I am what I keep--an eccentric anachronim wihout even the brains to take advertising to add a few pennies to my negative income. Then I thought, sheet, why not just declare myself a financial institution--the First National Bank of Me--too small too fail and get me some of that free-bail out money. That was when I started his blog in early January, before the Obama's inauguration and little has changed since in terms of the free falling economy.

Logic has never been my strong suite, but I do know that economics is called the "dismal science" because when it comes to predictive success--the chief measure for science is whether a theory accurately predicts an event or events consistently--"dismal" is too kind a descriptive --the imprimatur of the Nobel committee not withstanding; indeed, the Nobel Prize in Economics should be renamed the the Nobel Inanity. That is being demonstrated again in the current financial crisis, which has produced near unanimity among economists that massive government intervention is necessary to shore up the financial system and thereby avert a full-blown global depression that will make the Great Depression look like a period of great weallth. Well they don' go quite that far--most of them.

The US government alone has already shelled out more than one-trillion dollars to arrest the financial free fall to no avail. The financial sector is resolute in wanting to be bailed out and out and out again, riding this new bailout bubble for as long as it can, falling back when necessaryon the mantra that its major components are each too big too fail, so you better keep that money coming. But if something is too big too fail, the opposite must also be true, especially if it is failing--it is "too big to succeed." In effect the financial system is collapsing under the weight of its monstrous international, under-regulated banks, and their energetics are too screwed up for them to survive. They are evolutionary dead ends, with no where to go but extinction.

But if extinction, failure, is not an option because obsolete though they are, corrupt though they are, they are too crucial to the world economy to be allowed to fail, then sound business logic would dictate that the government of a particular nation or the governments of all nations so deciding would assume control of the megabanks, since their current leaders clearly are incapable of keeping them from failure. The last thing you do is throw money at the same gang of corporate pillagers who got us here in the first place.. That's not even sane enough to be irrational. It's simply creating a bubble of free coin from the realm. For proof consider that $18.4 billion the captains of larceny awarded themselves in early January along with the $3 or $4 billion executives of the disaster known as Merrill Lynch had previously awarded themselves or the hundreds of millions more, they've paid themselves in salaries just for the past several years. I'm not even touching for now GM and Chrysler threatening to go under and force all of these workers out of jobs unless they receive tens of billions of dollars and then using that money to fire workers. Say what? No wonder people are pissed?

But what's incredible is the faith that people have in the Obama--faith based on his rhetoric, his integrity and intelligence--and the sheer improbability that his success represents. The odds he beat to become president were deemed by most people so astronomical as to be incalculable--the odds of bookmakers not withstanding--not only because he was African-American but also because he was an intellectual and, according to one Wall Street Journal writer, too thin to be president. Now, polls are showing that 80 percent of the populace believes--and even skeptics among us hope--that the Obama is right, that the mess can be cleaned up and sanely fixed. The only way I see to do that is to recognize that late 20th century market capitalism is bankrupt in nearly all regards and then to nationalize financial institutions and all other corporations too "big to fail" and transform them into multiple, smaller, more efficient and directed corporations. Then, create civilian versions of DARPA and the Office of Naval Research, beef up NIH, NASA, and other civilian agencies , including those for domestic development, for issuing grants and micro-loans to promote promising technologies and developments in specific fields. Implement a single-payer national health plan through Medicare as envisioned in the beginning--that Medicare would be the first step toward national health care--the only thing that will cure the current crisis, brought on and exccerbated by insurance companies and the medical structure to support them that togetgher care--i.e insurance crisis--we have made the risks inherent in life so expensive to guard against that we have rendered life unaffordable. That's why deflation--the horror of horror to econonists is welcome to nonexperts as a proper corrective. This country was living a fiction clothed in cheap goods. It was the throw away culture that has now stuck itself in the garbage as well and the question now is whether it can pull itelf out before it hits the compressor.

I'll quit now and post the bloody thing, errors and all, so at least you'll know I'm still kicking and screaming--and doing lefthand double typing

Great Plunder Plunges US into Great Depression II

2009-01-05T22:07:00.001-05:00

Ever the optimist, Paul Krugman, frets in his column in today's New York Times that Congressional delay in passing the Obama stimulus package will pretty much guarantee that the economy will bottom out in Great Depression II. It's hard to argue with the man on that score. What's appalling, given that scenario, is the blundering of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who 'hopes' to have something before he and his colleagues take a break in mid-February--hopes? You don't need to be a Nobel-prize winning economist to know the economy is in free fall and gathering momentum rapidly enough that the laws of inertia will soon decree that only a direct splat at bottom will arrest it. Forget about a reversal, no matter how much money is thrown into the attempt. Given the situation, how can Congress refuse to take dramaatic action now? Perhaps, House and Senate travel and living allowances should be cut until they take care of business. Or, put another way, why is Harry Reid Senate Majority Leader, if he's not working hard on the Obama's agenda? It's past time for Congress to act.

Christmas Ruminations 2008

2008-12-25T11:36:00.003-05:00

I don't know whether the continuing economic collapse should be called the Great Despair, the Great Desperation, Great Depression 2.0 [that's Paul Krugman], the Panic of '08, or the Great Plunder. The last fits best to my mind.

It appears to me that the $700-billion bailout of financial institutions launched during the heat of the 2008 presidential campaign has become the next great bubble, indeed, the greatest bubble of all, as banks collect tens of billions of dollars without any requirement that they account for what they do with it. They appear to be hoarding it, using it to shore up their balance sheets and stock prices, to pay dividends and, I'll wager, end of year bonuses. At periodic intervals, they go back to the Treasury for more, and the Treasury happily dispenses.

Now the Treasury has certified the General Motors credit arm as a bank, thereby making it eligible for bailout handouts. That means we, including those of use who have long despised SUV, are now subsidizing the manufacture and purchase of the thing we want gone. It's a better deal than the no bid contracts the Bushies have employed in the war on terriors, which represents the first Great Plunder This second coming requires no work and no handover of securities or fines, nor does it require removal of the people who engineered the financial crisis in the first place. That signals that the bailout is simply a handout, a redistribution of future public wealth to current money managers and corporate executives. In addition to collecting all they can now, the financial wizards do nothing to improve the markets- while waiting for the Obama bailout, when they aim to receive even more. What does the public receive--a huge debt, unemployment, unplayable insurance rates, unmet retirement obligations--just what was planned, since the point all along has been to get rid of the workers--look at the automobile company bailout.

The people who are suffering are waiting for the Obama, as are the majority of us who are worried, who object to the direction we are heading but who also are powerless to change course--which is why we voted the Obama to the task. The question is whether he is up to the challenge, whether in his economic recovery program, he moves dramatically to restructure an economy skewed toward the rich, away from innovation, change, and true competition. That means lettingthe car companies go, giving workers who lose their jobs unemployment benefits, job retraining, and where appropriate loans to start new business. It means making the useless General Motors cough up plans for the Impact [EV1] or, at least, free the designing company to use or license them as it sees fit. It means creating standards or infrastructure for plug-in electric or hybrid vehicles. It means putting in place a single-payer health plan, which will free workers and businesses immediately. It means go after the people who brought us to this pass. It means placing severe limits on executive compensation to something like 20 or 30 times the lowest paid employees salary, part-time and temporary included. In short it means being bold and creative because nothing else will do.

Hell of a Christmas for lots of people and looking like a worse New Year--that's the holiday season in 2008, the final great fizzle out of late market capitalism--we hope.

Follow the Money

2008-12-03T23:40:00.003-05:00

It's nice sometimes to be right. It turns out that the insurance industry planted those stories killing single=payer health care. Proof comes from this new L..A. Times story, saying how the insurance industry will promise to insure everyone if the Federal government will help them ring 30 percent out of the health care system00that is reduce costs that much. There are two ways to do that: First, follow the insurers lead and ration medical care by squeezing doctors and people with lesser policies, which is how they insure everyone; Second, cut the insurers out of the system. That will save far more than 30 percent, while guaranteeing treatment for all. It is a no brainer. Health care is the true tests for the Obama and the Democrats.

Universal Confusion

2008-12-01T05:27:00.008-05:00

Sunday in the Washington Post and Monday in the L.A. Times articles appeared on the emerging "consensus" that health care reform is desperately needed. It's been needed for longer than my 58 years, but better late than never--or is it. The Post article doesn't mention single-payer plans at all and the LAT simply says a national single-payer insurance program, like those in Europe and Canada is "off the table," while later allowing that "liberals" and health care reform advocates will keep pushing for same. Since Europe and Canada are healthier societies than the US, despite spending considerably less per capita than the US on health care, not considering similar systems makes no sense at all. Indeed, the alternatives to single-payer are so complex, convoluted, intrusive, and wasteful as to defy comprehension in no small measure because they continue to rely on employer paid insurance, which is a joke getting older and more obscene by the annual renewal. The current system, as everyone knows except right wing ideologues benefits no one but insurance companies who currently suck 1/2 to 2/3 of every dollar out of the system, meaning it never goes to medicine.

I wondered where such one-sided, biased stories originated. Did the reporters and editors generate them in response to the Obama's campaign pledge? I think not. My suspicion, given that the Newt of Gingrich was quoted in both as an expert, is that the stories were inspired by a person or persons trying to dictate the agenda and block any serious consideration of real reform. It would be unfortunate if they succeed, but it wouldn't be the first time.

Under a single-payer plan administered through Medicare, so a new bureaucratic agency doesn't need to be created, everyone would benefit from lower costs and better care, except the bloated ticks on the current system--the insurance companies--especially if malpractice claims were sent to arbitration boards rather than court. Corporations and large institutions, like schools, colleges, and universities would benefit mightily from getting health care off the books. Workers would benefit from increased freedom of movement, since they would no longer be bound by the need for employer partial paid insurance. Doctors would benefit from not having to devote time and staff to multiple incomprehensible insurance programs.

Time to do it.

Bailout=Bubble

2008-11-28T06:10:00.000-05:00

I'm not an economist, but I think it fair at this juncture to ask everyone from the Obama on down at what point the bailout of banks and financial institutions, which have already brought us the "bubble and bust suite for whiners in zed minor" becomes the next great bubble--the great bailout bubble, "money for nothing and the chicks for free," as Mark Knopfler says. Watch the way the markets gyrate or vibrate in tune to the latest large figure bailout given one of their own without strings or consequence and then ask yourself, would i turn that down? What incentives do the financial institutions have to clean up their acts, as long as they can run to the federal government for tens to hundreds of billions more. Maybe these banks are currently "too big to fail," in which case the minimum price for bailing them out must be their break up. They must be brought back to manageable size. They also must be forced to account for all of these "toxic" loans, to prove the problems are what they claim they are. For its part, the government must withhold more handouts until the accounting is made and financial penalties are assessed against the principals involved in creating the mess. Without that accounting and those penalties, we are left feeding the great bailout bubble--the greatest of them all.

As to the auto industry. I would hate for working people to suffer for the sins of their managers, but I don't want to reward the auto companies for their decades of obstructionism, either. They have fought energy efficiency and pollution control--not only fought but also evaded those regulations that do apply. They have gleefully profited. while refusing to back reforms, like universal health care, that would help make their domestic operations more competitive. Beyond that, I don't buy American cars, so why should I want to give the company money for continuing to make the same crap that brought it here?

Far better, I think, to shore up workers' pensions and enact single payer national health care. Then the government should let the auto makers management figure it out--that is come up with a plan to reconfigure themselves and their products toward energy efficiency: economy, including price of purchase and operation; and safety. No more SUVs or light trucks, except stripped down models that each company can easily modify with plug-ins and that meet the same mileage and emissions standards as cars, The government should also make small, directed investment in new businesses, including those designing and building new vehicles.

The government also has the responsibility for establishing uniform standards for hook-ups for recharging centers and devices, so that time and money are not wasted on different protocols that will not talk to each other. The key here is to build on the already extensive and uniform gas station sysem, so that people in electric vehicles scan receive a rapid recharge or new battery pack in the time it now takes to fill a car with gas--or not much longer. As solar cells improve, there is no reason they can't be built into the car for recharging on the fly.

Finally, the government should put research and development money now being wasted on "star wars" defense systems that don't work into developing a flywheel that will work to power electric cars--into solving the flywheel problem, as it were. Simply, the flywheel would capture and store energy as the car rolls and use that energy to power the car.

The point is that we had better get a huge return for this staggering investment or we are sunk. As nearly as I can tell we are currently getting squat.

The Loaf

2008-11-24T05:14:00.005-05:00

South Florida is known as a tough place to make bread, largely, the bakers I've talked to seem to agree, because of the humidity, which makes the moisture level of flour so variable that each time out requires a different amount of water. Even if you get that right, the humidity will turn your crust to mush more often than not. This bread is an exception: The recipe is based on a "no-knead bread" recipe from the New York Times, November 8, 2oo6--Mark Bittman's adaptation of a recipe he got from Jim Lahey of Sullivan Street Bakery. This time I used King Arthur White Whole Wheat flour, which suddenly appeared in the local Publix; otherwise, here's what I do:
Mix in a big bowl 6 cups flour--white whole wheat, but whole wheat or unbleached all-purpose white works too
1/2 teaspoon yeast
3 teaspoons fine sea salt
1 steel cut oats (optional)
Add 3 to 3 1/2 cups cold, as in chilled water
Thoroughly incorporate water and flour with your hands or a paddle but do not knead more than necessary to do that, if need you must. The result is a wet, tacky blob. Cover the bowl with a dish towel and let it set in a cool part of the house overnight. When usually little bubbles bursting cover the top, knock it down, knead once or twice, cover and let sit again until the surface is covered with bubbles--size seems related to whether the flour is whole wheat or white. Sometimes, I caution, the dough at this point remains soupy--chalk it up to the humidity and proceed; it will produce something better than most of what you get in the store. Preheat over to 450 with a Dutch oven or some other heavy pot with cover in it--I find a cast iron Dutch oven the best. Knock the dough down and turn it onto a cornmeal--or oat or flour--coated dish towel; cover and let proof while oven warms. Once that is done, remove the Dutch oven or whatever--it's very hot, so be careful, dump in the dough--it's really like a slow slop off the towel--cover it up and put in the oven for a righteous 50 minutes to an hour, depending on moisture levels. Let it cool and enjoy.

It's counterintuitive because the dough is damp in a place where dampness is blamed for bad bread, but it works. The rising time for this bread, depending on temperature and humidity, is anywhere from 8 to 20 hours.

Bush and Cheney Should Resign

2008-11-22T05:17:00.003-05:00

Yesterday morning I was telling people that Bush and Cheney should resign together, thereby making Nancy Pelosi president. This morning I read Gail Collins saying that very thing in her column in the New York Times. I chalk that up not to some mystical cross-channeling of a woman I've never met, although I do enjoy her column, but to the pure logic of the suggestion. The most obvious and pressing resaons for the switch are that we need a leader in place who is not only competent but also not afraid to lead, and the Obama cannot take over until 20 January 2009. Pelosi, though, would make the ideal caretaker, with the Obamans to straighten out the farce that the Henry Paulson run bailout has become--trasnspose a couple of letters and TARP becomes TRAP, and that's what we're in for the next 2 months unless Bush-Cheney hit the road.

They can cite "grotesque incompetence that has repeatedly put the country and its citizens at risk." Specifically, in times of crisis the President has gone AWOL: down a rabbit hole immediately after 9/11--true, first he went on a plane ride that pointedly did not return him to Washington to take command; out to lunch in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, thereby letting the city sink and drown; god knows where for the financial meltdown--well, he did organize a propaganda summit so John McCain so could show himself a great leader by solving the collapse of the world's financial markets. Cheney has to go because he has been ruining the government for the duration of the Bush reign and has now apparently retired to his favorite undisclosed bunker and hunkered down.

Historians and economists seem to agree that the current vacuum is dangerous for the economy and therefor everyone. Someone needs to take charge and that someone is Pelosi, who not coincidentally would then become the first woman president, making this an historic time indeed in the quest for equality.

The only problem with this scenario is that Bush and Cheney won't do it. Their neglect of their duties and subversion of the law in order to kidnap and torture people, launch illegal wars, undercut enironmental regulations, and grant sweetheart contracts to their friends and supprters in fact have been their policies for eight years. They're not about to change when they are on the verge of creating real Chaos.

Too bad, that.

Bail Me Out

2008-11-12T05:22:00.003-05:00

The ship of late 20th century American capitalism has run ashoal and now wants the government to bail, meaning it has effectively capitulated to the Marxist dialectic. I used to think that in funding worker retirement plans with company stock and granting stock options to an expanding pool of employees corporations were creating the possibility that those employees would come to control and then own the company--and worker ownership of the means of production is key if capitalism is to be party to its own demise. But incrementalism has no real place in the current global economic meltdown. What we have is a line of international corporations begging the US Treasury for money to save them from their own antisocial greed, which has brought them to ruin, and they use the threat of tens of thousands of lost jobs to justify the bailout, while preparing to renege on retirement and health insurance obligations and to lay off those tens of thousands even if they receive government funds. Thus, General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler are begging, but what I'm not hearing is what government will require of them--and require it should because it should not loan a dime without equity in return and some major changes. Here are some suggestions:

1. The SUV is dead. The car companies are in crisis now because they put all their effort into producing the gas guzzling monsters that imperiled drivers of small, energy efficient cars, not to mention the world. The car companies spent millions of dollars to avoid meeting strict gas mileage and pollution standards. When gas prices soared, sales collapsed and the industry had few other lines to promote.

2. Bailout money is earmarked for developing and building energy efficient low polluting cars, More is available for the car companies that are willing to make solid, reliable alernative energy vehicles. In other words, it is time to solve the flywheel and battery problems in a way that will make electric vehicles viable.

3. The corporations agree to support fully a single-payer national health plan administered through Medicare. that's good business.

4. No executive's salary can exceed 30 times the salary of the corporation's lowest paid employee. If that is $20,000 a year, the CEO earns no more than $600,000 a year, This applies to financial institutions, hedge funds--all businesses that do business beyond their state boundaries.

5. Companies failing to meet their retirement obligations must boost their social security contributions; they will not run retirement funds again; rather they will pay that share into social security. There is no need to privatize social security by the way because it will already own controlling interest in the company.

Those are starters. I'll think of more later.

The Obama

2008-11-04T23:16:00.002-05:00

Aa reader asked me a few weeks ago why I called him "the Obama?" I said because he is sui generis, unique. Here is this man who undertook this highly implausible, dark horse campaign for the presidency against the woman who fancied the nomination of the Democratic Party hers, against the party establishment she and her husband controlled, against the weight of centuries of the vilest forms of racism, this darkest of horses who stayed on course and on stride despite being batterred from all sides by racists and bigots, who refused to sink to their level, and for all of that won a resounding victory. In so doing he rocketed America once more to the center of the world's dreams. He is prooff to my mind that miracles can happen!

Their Campaign

2008-10-29T05:39:00.006-04:00

Here is Keith Olbermann of MSNBC by way of the Huffington Post on Sarah Palin, the self-confessed Socialist.

Here is the last ad, the Obamans should run:

Shots of John McCain saying, "Blah. Blah. Blah...." for 30 seconds. Nothing more.

Race (revised)

2008-10-26T09:35:00.007-04:00

I voted the other day, two days after Colin Powell endorsed the Obama. Now I'm waiting with considerable trepidation and continued amazement that despite having one of the vilest campaigns in recent history thrown at him by the McCain't Republicans, the Obama has a good chance of becoming president. But first, he must continue to deal with the xenophobic racism, the pure fascistic hatred of the other that McCain and his running mate have unloosed and fed--I should say gorged--over the past few weeks. I won't recount chapter and verse because everyone reading this blog has, I'm sure, a gallery of infamy, but they all come back to the attempt to demonize the Obama, to make him exotic, the other, not a real American--with the emphasis on demon.

At least I'm fairly certain that Governor Lipstick views him that way after reading Laurie Goodstein's article in today's New York Times on Palin the "spiritual warrior." To paraphrase the late Hunter S. Thompson, who surely would be adding heavy armaments to arsenal, this is weird and disturbing shit. These Christian subversives know that demons gather in certain zip codes, and they are mapping them house by house around the world. The Reverend Thomas Muthee, the witch hunting, python slayer from Kenya who called on the lord to make Sarah Palin governor and more, is a hero in these circles. Gina Maranto investigated yesterday and provided this report [links should work, but if not, click on words in the text]:

This is the epicenter of spiritual warfare--global harvest ministries. Read this, and you'll hear Sarah Palin's language echoed again and again--and also see why she feels righteous about ditching McCain--he's standing in the way of her ascension.

In case you want to learn about how to wield a sword to mow down demons in your own zip code, here are some (very reasonably priced) books you can order:

http://www.arsenalbooks.com/product/1168/73
http://www.arsenalbooks.com/product/Devil_Demons_and_Spiritual_Warfare_Tom_Brown/New_Release

You have to navigate pretty far into the site to get to the pages on pages of the REALLY good shit:
http://www.arsenalbooks.com/category/73

Also, in case you want to really understand Islam and what's going on in the Middle East, get this:
http://www.arsenalbooks.com/product/448/61

Note for wusses who think Jesus slept with a nightlight:
"In The Prophetic Fall of the Islamic Regime, Glenn Miller shows that while Jesus came to demonstrate God's loving, merciful character, it did not change His nature as the Mighty Man of War, who is involved in the fight between good and evil."

Form Europe, here's a site on mapping those demons. For historians, here is a 1999 Christian Science Monitor article: http://www.csmonitor.com/1999/0923/p15s1.html

Palin's rant Las Vegas yesterday about the Obama turning America into a Communist state that stirred more fear and loathing among disciples is more explicable and more troubling in light of her spiritual warfare. Sam Stein in the Huffington Post has a transcript and video clip: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/25/palin-obamas-tax-plans-co_n_137851.html.

There is more, but I want to get this posted, with a final note that John McCain is the man responsible for this situation. He clearly has no shame, surely no honor.

Rolling Stone Does John McCain

2008-10-05T17:16:00.002-04:00

This Rolling Stone profile of Commander Slime, Senator John McCain is a must read.

Palin on the Attack: Hypocrisy in Action

2008-10-04T17:52:00.001-04:00

I was reading about Governor Lipstick's speech in Colorado today, attacking the Obama for knowing and serving with William Ayers, a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, on public bodies devoted to education reform in Chicago. Ayers was a founder of the Weather Underground, or the Weathermen, a revolutionary splinter group from the Students for a Democratic Society back in the day when the federal government was engaged in slaughter in Vietnam using napalm and agent orange and every other weapon except nuclear ones against civilians and combatants, was forcing young American men into involuntary servitude to prosecute that war, was spying on its own citizenry and using agents to provoke violence, and finally was turning its military's guns against peaceful protesters with deadly results. Those are just a few of the big items. The Weathermen delusionally believed they could jump start a revolution. Prossecutorial misconduct and illegal wiretaps guaranteed that Ayers would never face trial, aand so he moved on. The New York Times has a thorough look today and determines that "the two men have never been close. Nor has Mr. Obama ever expressed sympathy for the radical views and actions of Mr. Ayers...."

In Palin's view, Obama is "paling around with terrorists" who want to tear the country apart. Governor Palin is married to a man who belonged to the Alaska Indpendence Party--still might--devoted to destroying the United States by making Alaska independent. That they would secede by referendum matters not a bit; they are advocating the break-up of the Union. The last time that was done, hundreds of thousands died, and the Republican Party ever after has been known as the Party of Lincoln, the man who preserved the union.

Whether Palin belonged along with her husband remains unclear, but the the party and its goals on their face are antithetical to the spirit, purpose and meaning of the oath she would have to take upon assuming office to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Spinninng out of Control

2008-10-04T05:03:00.006-04:00

I had planned to say little about the Biden-Palin joint appearance, mostly I am deep into something approaching denial at the mere chance that she and McCain could be elected anything--well, not denial so much as fear for the republic. It's not so great, after all, that it could survive a McHate/Wink-wrinkle-nose administration, but this morning bright by early, I recalled that the forces of Enlightenment, Reason, Humanism lost long ago, that anti-intellecltualaism in America is so deeply ingrained that it even passes itself as "scientific," as witness this analysis of the language of Biden and Palin by an Austin-based company, Global Language Monitor. The claim is made that Palin spoke at a 10thh grade level, Biden at 8th. The difference appears due to the GLM computer deciding that 'passive voice' is advanced because it 'obscures the doer of the actioin,' Paul Payack, president of Global Language Monitor, told CNN. "Doer," indeed. "Obscures?" As in: The analysis was done by a computer? Or The final word was uttered on his way out the door by her mother who said, 'but the cat was run over by the car not me, and it had been chased by the dog into the street in the first place." But I digress. Payack's analysis declares the following Palinism at grade level 18.3--graduate school--presumably because it uses a lot of words: "What I would do, also, if that were ever to happen, though, is to continue the good work he is so committed to of putting government back on the side of the people and get rid of the greed and corruption on Wall Street and in Washington." At least now I see why students take a pile of words between the initial cap and final punctuation for high-quality advanced academic writing--they're taught it by people who don't themselves understand that the essence of good, intelligent writing is not sentence length or number of syllables in a word or the lame-ass use of passive voice; rather, it is lucidity.

First McCain-Obama Debate

2008-09-27T16:55:00.001-04:00

I had intended to say nothing about the debate, figuring whoever read this blog had seen it and made up their minds, but then I became intrrigued by the disconnect between the pundits and the people, as represented in the instamatic polls--not enough to write anything, mind you, just intrigued. The polls lined up pretty decisively for the Obama, for instance, while with the exception of the ever sane and insightful Gail Collin s at The New York Times, most of the pundits were droning on about advantage McCain, although as the day wears on that might be changing. The worst of that lot proves to be the putative 'dean' of Washington political columnists, who calls McCain the "alpha male" on the stage, proclaiming that the Obama's deference was manifest in his several statements of agreement with McCain and his looking at McCain. Meanwhile, McCain's "alpha" status was manifest in his refusal to look the Obama in the eye and barely to call him by name, in his disdainful dismissive tone, and in his diatribe on the 'surge.'

I suppose that it is good that Broder is no wolf, because he doesn't know the lingo--and I'm talking here the mythic "alpha." Subservient wolves refuse to look the "alpha" male or female in the eye; rather, they avert their gaze, for fear that if they lock eyes, the "alpha" will slap them down. That sounds like people, does it not--avert you eyes before the great man! The Obama used a rhetorical device known to all good teachers of praising what is good in a statement or paper before commenting more fully. That sort of "deference" is known to wolves too and it is the opposite of subservience. Broder does not note that the Obama repeatedly called McCain, John, hardly a sign of deference. Moreover, the moderator Jim Lerher was begging them to engage and the Obama was attempting to do so. McCain was afraid to face the Obama or debate real substance becausee he has none.

I suppose Broder was basing his "alpha" argument on the myth that as ruler of the house, you need to exercise alphahood over your dog by rolling it on its back staring at it so that it averts its eyes, as all subservient creatures do. Or the shibboleth that you should never let your dog stare you in the eyes because that will embolden it to challenge your alphahood. In any event the notion is that McCain put Obama in his place.

Bunk, as I said, the "slpha"male on the stage, if you must, was the Obama. He was gracious in the face of rudeness. He stood his ground. He commanded himself and exuded calm, as he always does, and power---I always get the impression of remarkable power lurking just under the surface of the Obama. He keeps it controlled, the way he keeps the crowds he draws from becoming too exuberant. He exercised it when he summoned McCain to Oxford. He was tall, fit, commanding. McCain was small and shrinking, a shrill whiner, a fear biter. Or see what James Fallows has to say in the Atlantic.com

As to the "surge"--if it worked so well, why the pause in the draw down? If we are victorious, why are we still there,. The answer is that the surge is a pr success for Petraeus and its backers in the U.S. Baghdad had been ethnically cleansed before the troop buildup of the surge began, meaning violence there was already reduced. The same goes for provinces where the Sunni Awakening was present. Maqtada al-Sadr's decision to keep his Mehdi Army out of combat despite considerable provocation was crucial to the surge's "success"; indeed, a good argument can be made that Maqtada made the "surge" a "success".

Far from the re-emergence of John McCail, we are seeing thee dissolution of John McCain, the myth.

More significantly, I hope, we are seeing the Obama near that final bar in his improbable quest, gaining power and confidence as he goes.

Clintons at It Again

2008-09-23T22:05:00.005-04:00

First, let me admit that I have never been a fan of William Jefferson Clinton. I voted for him reluctantly the first time to get the warmonger elder Bush out of the White House, but I always felt that Clinton, more than most politicians lacked the courage of his non-convictions and was the perpetual student council president alwayys running to please someone. Indeed, as president, he signed welfare reform--giving poor people less--and banking reform--giving rich people more. Then there was Monica--he never let her swallow--not that hoot counts, anyway--and thus, no affair. The guy can't take responsibility for his actions or his apetitites. Then there were the 2008 primaries--read back through this blog--where he and Hills consciously and viciously played to sexual and racial rejudice. Now there is this interview with the View television program, which can only be see as an endorsement of McCain. As to Hills--I had long thought she could be president, but then she voted for the Iraq War, without reading the intelligent assessment, and authorized Bush to war with Iran, whenever he pleases. Those are irresponsible acts. Now while pretending to support the Obama wholeheartedly, the Clintons are making nice nice toward McCain and Palin. Why because they want Hills running again in 2012, which ain't possible if the Obama wins. So on a day when George Will says McCain is unfit to be President, Bubba --that's Clinton--does everything but endorse him, while damning the Obama with faint praise. He says he's going to campaign for the Obama in selected state, and so we'll see what form that takes. This sort of triangulation is typical of the Clintonoids, both of whom should take a long vacation from public life at one of McCain's 10 houses. He can even loan them a car or two or 13.

End of the Imperium

2008-09-23T12:42:00.002-04:00

There is a story from Reuters today on a leading Chinese academic economist calling for an end to the primacy of the dollar in the world financial order. Thus, the process Nixon put in train some 40 years ago when he floated the dollar and opened diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China comes full circle under the presidency of the son of the first U.S. ambassador to China. That former ambassador became the president presiding over the fall of the Wall and breakup of the Soviet Empire, and now his son has nearly succeeded in killing what remains of the American Imperium. Meanwhile, Nixon's Dr. Strangelove has now become tutor in chief for Governor Lipstick.

Who's the Most Conservative

2008-09-23T12:40:00.001-04:00

Sports and political junkies take note, especially if you are still attempting to convert the" heathern." Call the racists out with this true observation. The most socially and morally conservative candidate in this race is Barack Obama. By all accounts, he doesn't screw around, he dotes on his two girls and his wife, he believes parents should be involved in their childrens' lives and make sure, especially, that they work hard in school. He believes that it is through hard work that you get ahead--totally American. Compare that to the legacy, John McCain. Without being the son and grandson of admirals, he would never have graduated--he would never have been admitted to--the Naval Academy.

Fiction of Surge and Splurge

2008-09-20T17:08:00.002-04:00

The mainstream American media remain willingly captive to the government's fictional narrative of the Iraq war. I have to think it is because despite their knowledge that they were deceived by the weapons of mass destruction justification--and their anger over that--they remain reliant on the U.S.. military for their safety and access to the information they need to report any stories. They are also congenitally inclined to trust authority, especially authority, like General David Petraeus, who assiduously cultivates them. So great is the American media's devotion to Petraeus that it is more adamant about the "surge" damping downn violence in Baghdad than he is. The media is so adamant that it pillories Barack Obama for not hewing to the fictional narrative.

Obama was right. We know that Maqtada Al-Sadr's decision to keep his Mahdi armies on the sidelines and the rise of the Sunni Awakening against insurgents contributed probably more than the surge--the Sunni Awakening predated the surge; the Maqtada's decision was coincident. Now in the journal Environment and Planning A appears a paper by John Agnew at UCLA and two colleagues, called "Baghdad nights: evaluating the U.S. miliary "surge" using nighttime light signatures." Between spring 2006 and the beginning of the surge in February 2007, the largest Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad were emptied, ethnically cleansed, as manifest in satellite photo showing a 57 percent to 80 percent drop in nighttime light levels in Baghdad's Sunni enclaves. The American media couldn't ignore this story, although this link is from the Times Online [London], but for now it is buried under the financial meltdown.

I don't see in the Bush any guarantees that the greedy bastards behind this disaster will pay any penalty. If they don't, the bailout is just a continuation of the shell game. These people knew what they were doing. They must forfeit profit and pay gained from the bubble and be kept from profiting in any way from future sales. Simultaneously working people must be protected, but we have no obligation to safeguard mortgages on 2nd or 3rd or whatever homes.

Anti-Obama Wingnuts

2008-09-20T05:55:00.002-04:00

The truths of Miami are that its climate is such that in the winter it collects just about every kind of organism there is that finds the cold and low light levels of northern hemisphere winters unacceptable and that, once here, those same organisms have their brains baked until they no longer function. In other words, Miami collects wingnuts, one of whom appeared today at the University of Miami to harass the Obama. The media herd following the Obama had a protest happily to report, and they did so without putting the event in context. They were around 10 to 15 in number in a crowd of more than 10,000, aiming for media to portray them as blacks protesting the black. So here's a freebe for whatever media wants to use it, with attribution to Dog Bytes, of course.

Yesterday, Gina Maranto did some checking of stills from the scene at http://www.themiamihurricane.com/2008/09/19/slideshow-barack-obama-campaign-rally/, the student newspaper site, and read the fine print on the signs--www.michaelwarns.com.

He''s changed his Home Page since Gina checked it yesterday. Now you are prominently directed to www.Michaeldefeatssatan.com "for information on Oprah and Obamas destruction of the black race and rest of the world." There is a photograph from the 'demonstration' along with his graphic novel detailing Michael's' defeat of Satan. If you click on and scroll through that, you end up with a link to the Michaeldefeatssatan home page--www.michaeldefeatssatan.com/index2.html --and there you see Michael himself on camera. He seems to have some relationship to Yahweh Ben Yahweh, who as YHWH was God to the Nation of Yahweh, headquartered in Liberty City, south of Miami. He was also a convicted felon--racketeering, conspiracy to commit murder--who died in May 2007.

The Obama by the way was good. The women providing the warm up--local politicians leading up to local Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri--were terrific. In debate, any one of them would demolish Governor Lipstick....

Financial Insanity

2008-09-19T05:16:00.002-04:00

So here is what I understand [with spelling corrected from last night].

GREED: Various 'banks' were taking subprime mortgages and bundling them with other more and less solid securities to sell to investors at a more or less guaranteed return on investment, all made safe by what everyone, including buyer and seller, knew was a real estate bubble. But everyone was making loads of money and their ethos was 'buy low, sell high.' They were kings and queens of the world

DOUBT: Home prices started to sag in certain high growth markets. I saw someone wanted to blame Miami and South Florida again, but it was more Central Florida and Las Vegas. A rise in adjustable rate mortgages and weakening economy caused more erosion. People who had bought these packages began to worry, and neither they nor the packager knew how much debt was bad, how much good.

FEAR: Rather than figure their exposure, the institutions that understood this absurdity early on began to dump those packages. When that word got out, more and more people panicked, and that fear has by now, a year later turned to screams for a government assumption of all that bad debt.

SANITY: If a bailout is necessary make it hurt those responsible for this mess. Here's what we should demand. All assets go to the government, that is the taxpayer to hold and to run. If they are sold, all profit goes to the taxpayer, that is the government for paying off debt. People in policy making positions in those institutions will sacrifice all of their assets to the public, in return for modest pensions and health care--and that's more than they deserve. Investors in those companies will have to pay a surcharge on whatever of the assets they buy on sale from the government, say up to 200 percent, for obvious reasons. Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, and company are wrapped in orange jump suits, manacled wrist to ankle, bagged, and shipped to The Hague for war crimes.

We;re going to hear the Obama tomorrow at the University of Miami, but I've said before, and I say again: the sole and singular question of this campaign is whether America will elect a black man--a mixed race man president. "True that," as Omar, The Wire, says--said before he got offed.

Eejitry [revised]

2008-09-12T05:01:00.000-04:00

I'll put this as bluntly as I can--the bounce for McCain't/Palinites in the polls represents the signal sad undiscussed reality that Sarah Palin provides cover for every closet racist in America not to vote for a black man. Making the campaign about race rather than issues is old hat, too. It's what broke apart the early 20th Century coalescence of poor whites and blacks. It's what has driven politics in the South since Reconstruction and, yes, even in the North. With Palin on the McCain't ticket, people who wouldn't have pulled the lever for the Obama suddenly find themselves with a person to vote for while saying, "I voted for a minority. Ii voted for a woman." Nothing else matters to them or him. If I'm right, and Plain flushed the unacknowledged racists, then the Obama is in pretty good shape at dead even. He's got nowhere to go but up, while McCain't can crash again.

Republican Identity Politics

2008-09-11T04:51:00.003-04:00

Why is it that Republicans automatically identify the word 'pig' with Sarah Palin and by extension every woman?

Could it be that these antediluvian McCain'ts think of women that way? Of course they do.

Now, that's the issue that should be discussed.

Putting Family First

2008-09-05T15:12:00.000-04:00

In full hypocritical fury, Republican operatives have spent the past week accusing the press of having a sexist and class vendetta against Sarah Palin, aka Ms. Lipstick 2008, and beating up on her pregnant daughter. The McCain'ts and Palinists brought up the issue of daughter Bristol's pregnancy and impending shotgun wedding to refute a rumor bounding around the Internet that the Sarah was really her son's grandmother, that the real mother was Bristol--they say. I was arguing the other day that dragging the daughter in was the last thing a protective mother and father would do. Reading that, my mother observed that all Ms. Lipstick had to do was produce an official statement from her doctor to the the effect that she had delivered the child on such and such a date, etc. A birth certificate might help as well. End of story.

Is that unfair? The Obama produced a birth certificate in response to vile rumors about his birth. See it here [scroll through these negative rumors].

That the McCain'ts and Palinists threw the children at the press as human shields and then blamed the press and Obamans for doing so is callously cynical, especially sense they know the Obama has declared the children off limits. But these are the same people who accused a black man of playing the race card. Time for the media to stop cleaning up for these poilticians. See if McCain's candidacy will survive honest accounts of his temper, his gambling, and his womanizing. See if Ms. Lipstick can do more than behave like a high school student council president programmed to lie about her opponents.

Republican Inversion

2008-09-04T05:00:00.005-04:00

We're watching Ike bull across the Atlantic not Pitbull Hockey Mom. Our Kate never has liked pit bulls with or without lipstick. She finds them sneaky and unreliable, prone to unprovoked attack. Ike, on the other hand, is a tightly wound category 4 0r 5 storm, exactly the kind we in South Florida remember all to well. [Andrew, 1992, was a tightly wound 5 when it devastated this area.]

That said: The Republicans are attempting to invert their ticket, to pit the pitbull against the Obama, as if Sarah Palin were the Presidential nominee and McCain the after thought. The ultimate goal is to keep the focus on personalities--Obama and Palin--and trust in the long habit of American racism. McCain is happy to hide behind her and her family. Note that Bristol pointedly was not baby sitting during the speech.

What To Say

2008-09-03T18:13:00.001-04:00

I am rarely is dumbfounded by the lunacy and callous cynicism of politicians, especially Republican politicians--while sporting a healthy ego, the Obama manifests a refreshing lack of guile, not to be confused with naivete--but John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin to be his running mate, has once again reminded me that Buffon, not Darwin, was right about the direction of evolution. After a species comes into existence, it begins to devolve, that is to degenerate. That Sarah Palin is a featherweight goes without saying. That the politicians tripping over themselves to prove that Alaska is close to Russia are callously cynical and contemptuous of the American public is, likewise, a given. What John McCain means by calling her is "soulmate" is worth considering. The list goes on and on to reveal a petty, calculating, cynical, ambitious young politician who fits snugly into the anti-intellectual, hypocritical Republican party and is willing to put her family out front, as shields against criticism and sharp questioning.

But I think the question now is: What does it say about the courage, decency, and moral integrity of John McCain and Sarah Palin that they should hide behind a pregnant, unwed 17-year-old [apparent] high school drop-out and her "powermower," as they say in Bal-T-more, also an apparent high school drop-out? We're told that the child's pregnancy was announced to put the lie to nasty rumors spread by liberal bloggers that Sarah Palin's new son is really her grandson, that a planned private adoption was cancelled when it was suggested he had Down's Syndrome. Why was turning the daughter into a sacrificial lamb, into a human shield, the only way to do that? Put another way, if the soulmates, Sarah and John, really cared about protecting the child, they would never have brought her into the campaign.

Given McCain and his operatives are smart enough to have known what would happen when they did, the only explanation I can come up with is that Bristol Palin was exposed on purpose to shield her mother and McCain from more substantive charges of incompetence. The Obama stated clearly and forcefully that the children of candidates should be off limits--and everyone claims to agree. But the McCain'ts keep sticking Bristol Palin stage center, most recently by bringing her 'powermower' to St. Paul for Sarah's nomination, after several publications declared him 'sexy' and he became an asset. He and Bristol will be wearing signs that say: 'Here we are, but if you try to talk to us or criticize Sarah Palin or John McCain for anything, including using us to their own ends, you will be invading our privacy. If you do that, you're lower than slime mold." Thus guarded, Palin-McCain will strut and fret, casting aspersions wherever they go.

On the other hand, they will be showing that the Republicans and their born-again "base" really do approve, admire, and respect teenage girls who become pregnant out of wedlock and the boys who impregnate them. They will be remaking the Republican party into the party of sex, drugs, rock-n-roll.

Big Night

2008-08-31T06:11:00.001-04:00

To my jaded ears the signal moment in the Obama's masterful speech on Thursday came when he nearly shouted one word after a litany of horrors that is our current economic, social, and political circumstance: "Enough!" It struck straight to the heart, a cry of negation and affirmation, as clear a statement of principle as anyone could ask for. In his acceptance speech, the Obama delivered red meat to the troops, who needed it, slicing and dicing John McCain with surgical precision to reveal him ; he laid out programs for the policy wonks; and he raised the stakes with his peroration. Beginning with a subtle but unmistakable allusion to Martin Luther King--just the right note for a man who wouldn't want to be accused of exploiting a happy historical coincidence--that the Obama was accepting the nomination 45 years to the day after King's majestic "I Have a Dream" speech (everyone knows that by now)--he soared out of the stadium, bringing his audience along for the ride.

It was a gigantic audience, to be sure--84,000 in Denver's Mile High Stadium [I know, it's a commercial field), and another 40 million live, according to the New York Times. Early polls show a considerable bounce that McCain's publicity stunt on Friday, August 29, might actually have bumped up more.

The stunt was his announcement that his vice-presidential nominee would be Alaska's governor Sarah Palin. I say reckless not only because she is untried but also because she has some major deficits that were never checked or, worse, ignored as irrelevant. In effect she wasn't vetted to the extent that a clerical worker is. Here's an Editor and Publisher summary of editorials and stories from Alaska on Palin. Alaska has a human population 670,00 plus or minus, most of whom live in Anchorage or Fairbanks. Wasilla, where Palin began her meteoric rise, lies about an hour north of Anchorage and is best known as home of the Iditarod International Sled Dog Race, although Palin herself seems to prefer snow machines to dogs. I've been to Wasilla; it has a population of 7,000 to 9,000, depending on the season.

An ardent anti-abortionists, who makes no allowance even for rape or incest, Palin nonetheless does not extend her belief in the "right to life" to other species: She disapproves of listing polar bears as an endangered species, approves aerial gunning of wolves, lifting wolf cubs from their dens and killing them, and hunting in general. She's a rabid "evangelical" Christian who believes in Creationsim, we're told, as if we need another anti-intellectual in the presidency--and make no mistake, the odds are not long that McCain with his history of melanoma, his heavy smoking, and god knows what else will live through his term, if he is elected. It appears that McCain chose her as eye candy for the hook and bullet crowd, fashion adviser to their wives, and who knows what to John McCain--at the least a statement of contempt toward the office, the Republic, and anything that doesn't celebrate him. She's also a doll thrown to the media covering the McCain campaign, who drooled all over Palin, and twittered over their boy's recklessness.

I've been to Alaska twice and tracked the Iditarod from Anchorage to Nome, with a side trip across the Nome peninsula to Shishmaref in a Cessna Super Cub flown by a pilot whose mother was Yupik and father was Irish. Like most Alaskans, he'd learned to fly in high school. Absent roads, you fly or snow machine. I love the place, but being a young inexperienced woman politician from Alaska, who won the governorship in November 2006 with something on the order of 120,000 votes--the Obama spoke to 84,000 people live, remember, in Denver and 200,000 in Berlin--and has served without distinction for less than two years, does not qualify you for he presidency.

In fact, Palin's chief accomplishment seems to be the use of her office to pursue a a family vendetta against her former brother-in-law, a state trooper. The Washington Post has taken the lead on this story--bless it--and has a front page story today. Essentially, she is accused of pressuring the public safety commissioner, Walter Monegan, in person and through her husband and aides, to fire the ex-brother-in-law and then firing Monegan in July 2008 when he refused. The Alaska state legislature has appointed an independent prosecutor to look into the matter, and he is due to report in October. Apparently the Republicans feel they can tough out this small family affair, given the bigger things they've covered up in Washington for the past 7 years, and they might. But I think they are wrong. I won't even bet on Palin being the nominee.

History Made: Part I

2008-08-28T11:11:00.002-04:00

I finally caught up with a video of Bubba's speech to the Democratic Convention last night, and he brought a tear or two to my eyes, not least because he rose above all the shit from the battle for the nomination and gave a presidential endorsement of the man who should be the next president. Hills did the same on Tuesday night, and again last night when she called for the nomination of the Obama acclamation. The Clintons understand better than anyone, that they can't lose by putting all of their considerable influence behind getting the Obama elected. But by sulking and not helping, they can destroy their party and Bubba's legacy, not to mention the Hills's opportunity to lead the Senate, which I think is where she is headed, much less gain a future nomination herself.

But the tears didn't fall over political tactics. They fell because a considerable bit of history was made last night--a national political party that has counted among its members in years past some of the most noxious racists this country has produced put forward as its nominee for president an African-American, a black man. It is true that the Obama is, according to these racial definitions, half black and half white, but in America's racist tradition any bit of "black" blood has by tradition and, in some places law, been enough to define a person. That has always been absurd, of course, but it's not stopped people from being discriminated against, raped, castrated, lynched, and falsely imprisoned--and that was after emancipation. That 40 years after the assassination of Martin Luther King, we could come to this pass, is nothing short of astonishing. That the Obama delivers his acceptance speech, 45 years to the day after King delivered his majestic "dream" to the several hundred thousand marchers from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, is even more fitting. Here's a link to text, audio, and video of "I Have a Dream," introduced as the "moral leader of our nation." ['Meet physical force with soul force."]

If the Obama is elected president, there should be dancing in the streets, because in a fundamental sense the world will have turned. Bubba and the Hills have I believe helped launch the final phase of the Obama's improbable journey. Now, they have to help bring it home, for different reasons--he to restore a reputation as the 'first black president' that he so recklessly imperiled with his blatantly racist appeals in the primaries; she to advance her power and influence. "Time has come today."

Thoughts on Celebrity Candidates

2008-08-27T16:17:00.001-04:00

The German pope draws several hunded thousand to an outdoor mass and that's grand because he's the holy bloody padre--grand inquisitor, too. The Obama draws several hundred thousand to a major speech, and he, the man who might become leader of the most powerful nation on the planet and far more significant than the current pope, is dubbed a 'celebrity' by his enfeebled opponent, who appears stuck in his prisoner of war cell--understandable, but we don't want that for president. The 'celebrity' designation is seized upon by the media, who should viscerally hate the pope, as they should hate anyway who would tell them collectively or individually what to believe, think and write, but would rather it appears crawl into that cell with McCain.

It's fair to ask why?

The media and assorted pundits from other fields who sneer at celebrity like fame and fortune just fine--thus their collective fixation on circulation, viewership, and book sales, not to mention public opinion polls--so it's a little hard to swallow the argument that there is something inherently wrong with 'celebrity.' Nor is it the case that Americans somehow have a cultural aversion to popular leaders; rather, Americans tend to surrender too much to them--think George Bush after the megaphone stunt.

But to call the Obama a 'celebrity' is to deny him status as a charismatic, galvanizing leader, which he has the potential to be. He can be a rabble rouser, a joke, or a 'celebrity,' but he can't make the leap that the lesser Hollywood celebrity made to 'leader.' The primary reasons for this perceived--I should say, 'fabricated'-- failure on the Obama's part are intimated to be intellectual, racial, and temperamental. In short: he's too much a soft -boiled brown egghead. Didn't the Obama allow the Clintonoids to highjack his convention, after all? And that gets recycled through the media again and again, making it dificult for the counter voices to be heard.

I say, let them sneer. The Obama who set out on this mad quest seemed to understand that were he to win, he needed numbers, and to get those numbers, he needed an organization. To build such an organizaton in such a short time, he needs to galavanize people who haven't voted and don't vote. He needs to appeal to the vast majority of Americans who embrace the mixing zone that country is rapidly become, who recognize that this country will only reclaim the greatness squandered by the Bushites by welcoming people from all over the world who come here to build their dreams. It's hard to deny, 40 years later, that the Obama can carry the promise of '68--or some of it to power--something the last two, full Baby Boomers, failed so miserably to do.

Unasked Questions

2008-08-23T16:19:00.004-04:00

I wonder when the Obama is going to start asking directly about McCain's fitness for office. He can use surrogates, if necessary, but he needs to start now in order to spur the self-complacent media to action. I'm talking about the media members who happily broadcast or print the scurrilous, ad hominem attacks on the Obama by McCain's spokesmen and cutouts. The rule in place appears to be: If someone with an official sounding title says something, we can use it. That kind of system allows candidates to disavow comments that go beyond the pale, even while they continue to throw them. McCain and his negative ops team are masters of this approach, and they have benefited directly from Hillary Clinton's scorched earth tactics, particularly the constant questioning of the Obama's ability, his capacity, his patriotism, and his experience--all without even an ironic wink at the fact that when he ran for president, her Mr. Bill was a two-term governor of one of the poorest states in the country, who, to prove he was tough, approved the execution of a retarded black man...., and who couldn't keep his fly closed. Those were his qualifications.

It would behoove the Obamans to remember that they can't refute these charges by stating that in fact the opposite is true. That gives them credence. Nor can you say the Obama's lapses are less than McCain's. Rather, you have to stick to your program, which should be simple and straightforward, and directly attack McCain's supposed strengths. Thus, McCain talks about judgment and experience, Obama counters with ads and comments about McCain's vicious temper and how that clouds and has clouded his judgment. McCain boasts about refusing early release from POW camp in Hanoi because he didn't want special privilege as son of an important admiral. The Obamans counter by presenting the record of how McCain benefited every step of his Navy career because he was the son and grandson of admirals and every step of his political career because of the wealth of his second wife and his own slippery relations with lobbyists. McCain talks about reform; Obama talks about lobbyists, the Keating 5, and Cindy McCain's corporate jet. McCain talks about the importance of family; the Obamans talk about his purported lovers, his divorce, his and his wife's lying about their adoption of Indian children. McCain talks about elitism; the Obamans talk about a man who doesn't know how many houses he owns and ask what else he doesn't know about his own life and marriage. Then, they ask who pays his gambling--craps--debts, or are they forgiven by the casinos? The Obama should also point out daily that McCain and Bush have castigated him for wanting a timetable for bringing all troops out of Iraq. Yet Bush just went and agreed to a timetable.

Obama could also help himself by presenting good, crisp programs, simply explained. Thus, a single-payer health-care program--not something he endorses, although he should--would cost X dollars and would improve medical care X amount. Back the envelope calculations I've done show that only about 30 cents on the dollar spent on health care currently goes for actual patient care--for doctoring. The rest goes for insurance company executives and share holders and other third and fourth parties, as well as to office expenses for the doctors who must maintain full-time staff just to handle insurance. He could also document how this program would actually liberate American workers and make them competitive with the rest of the world. But the Obama doesn't have bold plans; he's a moderate Democrat at best. That's not much, but it's a heap better than what Bush/McCain can manage.

The Tangled Web

2008-08-20T05:19:00.004-04:00

Time is short, so I will be too. Today's New York Times carries two op-eds of note. The first by Mikhail Gorbachev places responsibility for the mess in Georgia squarely on the shoulders of its president, the Western, re US, stooge, Mikheil Saakashvili, who launched an attack on the civilian, population of South Ossetia, using his US trained troops and weapons. Gorbachev says he was encouraged in this aggression by the US, mucking around in the Caucasus again--proof that we never learn. He puts the lie to all the high-blown US chest thumping. The second comes from Maureen Dowd, channeling a late night shot-glass punctuated meeting between John McCain and Hillary Clinton to congratulate each other on the destruction of the Obama camapaign and MCCain's agreement to run for only one term and thereby clear the way for Hills in 2012. Unfortunately, this gruesome scenario has the ring of truth, even down to the suggestion that Mr. Bill asked his buddy Putin to invade Georgia in order to help McCain's campaign. Gorbachev makes clear that thae Russians have their own reasons for doing so, and given their anger over Kosovo, they are unlikely to want to help a Clinton do anything, but that is a consequence over which they have no control.

The McCain Campaign: What Is It Good For?

2008-08-19T11:09:00.006-04:00

We're watching the wind blow as the rain machine known as Tropical Storm Fay sloshes up the peninsula, having made a lot of local disaster managers look silly and insuring that next time, no one will listen to their drum beats of doom.

Here, to fill the void is a guest posting from an old friend, writer and editor Bruce Stutz:

So John McCain was going to send Joe Lieberman to straighten things out in Georgia? What will he do, threaten to bring in the Hadassah? My thought for the day, though, is that McCain’s candidacy should give hope to those held at Guantanamo that someday, despite years of captivity and torture that left their bodies wracked and their minds addled, they too, could find themselves running for President.

McCain's Confusion

2008-08-17T11:51:00.003-04:00

John McCain's mental lapses have long been apparent and sometimes reported, like when he confuses Shia and Sunni Muslims or rearranges the borders and even the geographic location of various Middle Eastern countries or shows that ethics are for the masses, not for the privileged like John McCain, who did almost as well at the Naval Academy as George W. Bush did at Yale. Both were legacies--Bush to the manor born, McCain to the admiral's suite--but whereas the Bushy cruised through on the 'gentleman's C,' McCain worked disdainfully--he has said he had a "chip" on his shoulder--to graduate 894th out of a class of 899. His current forgetfulness, referenced by Frank Rich in today's New York Times column, could reflect McCain's mental lassitude, but it could also be due to dementia that is being deliberately concealed. Similarly, McCain's entanglements with lobbyists should receive more scrutiny than the New York Times and Washington Post have provided, good tough that has been. We've had quite enough of Bush's intellectual slothfulness and hardly need another one like him, no matter the cause. Beyond that, it's long past time for political correspondents to stop making candidates sound like people they are not. In some cases, the reporting may be worse than that--mistatements corrected in service to a bigger falsehood that the candidate or office holder puts out as truth and is presented as such by media outlets.

Free Advice

2008-08-05T11:06:00.000-04:00

Free advice is the best advice because having cost nothing and being unsolicited, it's easy to ignore. So here's my completely free advice to the Obama:

Responding directly to every bit of eejitry emanating from the McCain't campaign is not only impossible, because there is so much of it, but also counterproductive, because it is petty and juvenile. The McCain'ts are spoiled children on the school playground, trying to provoke a fight, so they can run, crying foul, to their parents who are blocking the school door to keep 'them' out.

It would be better to change the name of the McCain't campaign bus from "Straight Talk Express" to "Gutter Talk Unlimited." Every time a McCain't rant is aired, have someone, preferrably a John McCain't look alike, from your 'gutter talk' team take a nice graphical representation of the most appropriate McCain't virtue or value--the ones he wears on his chest: TRUTH, DIGNITY, HONOR, COURAGE, INTEGRITY, PROBITY, GOOD JUDGEMENT, EQUALITY, FREEDOM--crumple it up, throw it in the gutter, and stomp on it. Then have a child walking by pick it up and drop it in the garbage, while the McCain't continue fuming nearby. The voice over: "John McCain says, [fill in the blank, according to context]. But John McCain makes a mockery of what he says. Will the real John McCain reveal himself?"

Go Figure

2008-08-02T15:44:00.002-04:00

It is axiomatic that American voters usually will chose their economic self-interest over their inherited--culturally inherited, I would have said--biases and prejudices, with a footnote that directs the reader to a lengthy digression on race, the great unbridgeable divide, in America. One can't live in this country and not be aware of race--yes, exceptions abound--but you basically have to live in a hermetically sealed bubble to escape it. Experience tells us that a black candidate may have significant leads in the polls running up to election day, only to lose decisively. Pollmeisters call it the Bradley Effect, after L.A. Mayor Tom Bradley, who 1982 took a large lead into the gubernatorial election in California only to lose. Surprised pollsters suspected that people were deliberately concealing their true inclination or choice, perhaps for fear of having their bigotry and inane biases exposed to the light. Nonetheless, the opposition spends time and money to make sure those prejudices and biases are at fever pitch on election, while the black candidates do not run from but do not call attention to their race. They would rather discuss policies and programs.

Given that, here is my question for every journalist and editor who has mindlessly repeated the charges of John McCain and his hatchet men not only that the Obama "played the race card" against them but dealt it from the bottom of the deck as well--in other words, he cheated and he lied: Why would any black candidate call attention to his race, knowing that the bias against him because of his race is precisely what he must overcome in order to win election? The Obama himself has more often been criticized by African-Americans as not being black enough--here reporters need a crash course in the complexity of the black community in many American cities, like Miami, where native born African-Americans and blacks from the Caribbean, South America, and Africa hardly form a community of shared cultures, histories, and dreams, then do the same thing for the 'white' community. The Obama wants race out of the picture. Many in the mainstream media has fallen for the same ugly tactics used to turn Max Cleland and John Kerry from war heroes into fakes and cowards, in part because of their addiction to "he-said, she-said, gottcha journalism" and in larger measure because journalism schools don't 'do' history, The McCain'ts have done everything they can to turn the Obama from a man into a 'boy,' and in the context of American history that is racism--plain, pure, as simply as it comes. To pretend otherwise is inane.

Of course, McCain's charges can't bear honest scrutiny, which is exactly what they deserve, as does his own less than stellar record as a legislator. 'Then, too, one can question why the main stream media refuses to investigate thoroughly McCain't's prisoner of war days, his entire military career, and, as the Washington Post and New York Times have periodically, his life in public service, his temper, his intellectual sloth, his purported affairs, and his moral cowardice in attacking the Obama in such a low down,vile manner and then denying he has done so.

Michael Powell and Bob Herbet sort through the race card issue in today's New York Times. Maybe others of their colleagues will take heed. Unless they do, they will continue to give credence to lies, and they will show how it is that Americans will follow their prejudice and fear rather than their own good sense.

What Does John McCain Know?

2008-07-31T15:00:00.008-04:00

It is increasingly clear that John McCain is fixing to run the most nasty, negative, racist campaign seen for decades; indeed, he's already started. I've commented before on the language used to describe the Obama as different [from us], out of touch [with us], arrogant; uppity; unpatriotic; untested; presumptuous; and on ad nauseam. The McCain'ts ran an ad earlier in the week about the Obama going to the gym rather than visiting wounded troops in Germany, an ad which bore not even a passing relationship to the truth and followed that up with one calling him a megacelebrity in the mold of Brittany Spears and Paris HIlton, two stereotypical ego- and perhaps nympho-maniacal blonds. I won't even count the number of ways this ad is insulting, racist, misogynistic, and dumb. But when called on the ad by the Obama and his campaign, McCain't and his crew charged the Obama with "playing the race card." I kid not. In making that charge, McCain has shown himself dumber and more vicious than George Bush--that's if he doesn't know what he's saying. If he does know what he is saying and is doing so in order to be elected, then he is too callous, arrogant, venal, vicious, condescending, hateful, and, yes, racist to even be considered for the presidency.

Surge and Splurge

2008-07-26T20:52:00.007-04:00

"The surge is working," sayeth John McCain't at every turning of the campaign trail, and that's the reason "we" can even talk now about troop withdrawals and timelines, which I, John the Bold, oppose. McCain goes on to imply that the Obama is a coward and traitor and sellout for opposing "surge and splurge," our road map to victory, compliments of the brilliant David Petraeus. 'He doesn't understand what's at stake here," sayeth McCain't. He's being 'political,' as if the bloody fiasco in Iraq were ever anything but political. It's last in his class McCain't who, like George Bush, can't wrap his mind around realilty, who's playing politics of the basest sort here--that is, personal, racist politics. He speech is full of words intended to prove that the Obama is not one of us and never will be.

The mainstream media fall right along in stride, seizing an opportunity to bring down the Obama. That's the only explanation for the same kind of lemming think that led most of the mainstream media to tag along on the war in the first place, the kind of uncritical thinking that accepts a lie as real simply because it comes from the seat of power and vaguely matches the observed (as opposed to observable) facts. James Rainey reports in the Los Angeles Times on a study out of the Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University, showing that network news journalists might have devoted more minutes to the Obama, but they were far more negative than the minutes devoted to McCain't.

He appears adled, McCain't does, dazed and confused, unable to do anything but continue the negative, personal, racist campaign of his pal the Hills.. It would be intriguing were the HIlls to switch parties and run as V.P. with McCain--it's her most direct route, given his age and aura of bad health, despite his doctors, to the White House--and Chuck Hagel, stepping down Nevada Republican war hero and stout foe of the Iraq war crime--were to cross over and run with the Obama. There's a ticket.

Meanwhile, probably the best thing the Obama can do at this point in the campaign is ignore John McCain't. To engage him is to dive into his cesspool of insanity and rage and pain, to get sucked into the void that underlies his blind ambition.

And here is more or less where things stand. No firm evidence has beeen presented that "surge and splurge" has succeeded. At their joint Congressional testimony in the spring Petraeus and Crocker requested more time. Indeed, most evidence points to the surge as, at best, a pyrrhic victory. On July 23, former Iraqi Prime Minister, Ayad Allawi, testified in the House of Representatives, that the 'surge' had been moderately successful short term militarily in damping down violence, but politically, it was a failure. Others have said much the same--that Baghdad is quieter in large measure because the Mahdi Army of Moqtada al Sadr has abided by a cease fire it declared, even while the Maliki government has repeatedly violated it to attack Sadrites, their implacable foes. Baghdad is also quieter now because increased American presence in the capital provided a cover for expulsion of Sunnis from their own and mixed neighborhoods. American commanders seem to recognize that the situation could blow again at any time and probaby will once they leave.

Provisional elections scheduled for October and long considered a serious threat to Maliki's rule are likely to be postponed until the new year in part because of the continued drive by the Kurds to annex and ethnically cleanse Kirkuk, a major oil producing center, and Maliki's fear of Sadr's popularity. Iraqi security forces are widely perceived as corrupt partisans, Shiite militias. primarily the Badr Brigade--Badr and Sadr are enemies--in national uniforms. In effect, the Bushies, including Patraeus and McCain' have, in supporting the Maliki government, chosen to make common cause with Iran--that's right, the same country they keep threatening to attack next. Who lacks judgment here?

But then, McCain't tell Iran from Iraq from Afghanistan. Still, let's give McCain't what the Obama gets--the opportunity to justify his existence, to explain his religion, to prove his partrioitism, his courage, his devotion, and finally and forever to convince us that he is not a Communist mole put in place all those years ago to destroy Amerika. That would even the coverage out a good bit.

Election 2008, or the Permanent Campaign

2008-07-25T11:31:00.002-04:00

Well, I've been silent for a few months, trying to work while watching the lunacy of a presidential campaign that has already gone on far too long. I would like to say that, thanks to the Clintons, the campaign has already sunk to new depths of negativitiy, but that would be unfair. Nasty campaigns are an American artform, reviled by the same people who revel in them. The Clintons simply managed to throw open the outhouse door on this one, opening race as a line of attack, and combining it with charges of incompetence. I half think that the Obama should select the Hills as his running mate, so that every time the McCain'ts reproduce one of the more noxious Clinton charges--the 3 a.m. ad, as in the upstart black man ain't qualified to lead at any time, or that he is "elitest' whereas I, the HIlls, or John the McCain't, am/is--she is trotted out publicly to eat her own vile words. Problem is that the venom flowing from the Republican camp and from Democrats, especially self-professed liberal, pro-Civil Rights white Democrats--and judging from the Reverend Jesse Jackson's expressed desire to castrate the Obama, from blacks, as well--will be so thick and noxious that not even the Hills will be able to absorb it. The New Yorker provided a taste with its by now nearly forgotten cover for July 21--

David Remnick, editor of the magazine, as well as the illustrator and various other staff and defenders have called this "homage to bigotry and ignorance " a "satire" of the noxious attitudes many bigots have toward the Obamas, husband and wife. Putting the kindest face on this propagandistic, anti-Obama campaign poster, we might accept that Remnick, his colleagues and supporters do believe it is satire. It is not. You don't send up someone else's ideas about X and Y by portraying without a trace of irony X and Y as the embodiments of those ideas. This drawing simply says, "Everything you feared about us was, in fact. true--and then some. " A poll released by the AP on July 24, shows that 7 in 10 Democrats feel the cover is a biased, bigotted piece of work that can't be called satire, while 7 in 10 Republicans find it fine--surprise, surprise.

As any number of pundits has observed, there surely are "more" important things to worry about than what a magazine sliding past its glory years into dotage puts on its cover--surging oil prices, a housing market dragging the economy into a black hole, bank failures, American war crimes, not to mention the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan--the "Global War on Terriorism." But the sad truth is that this election is about whether America can in 2008 elect a black man president, whether enough people can determine to throw off the weight of America's racist history--the legacy of slavery, the reality of racism in a society that likes to inarcerate its black men--and vote for the Obama. The New Yorker cover and the pieces inside, including a long article on the Obama as a young Chicago politician--I should say ambitious young Chicago politician--are just more evidence of how hard that will be. If not precisely a hack job, theNew Yorker profile by Ryan Lizza is at best a weed whack job, negative in pitch, tone, and direction, perfectly in tune with the cover art.

In discusssing the Obama, many reporters annd commentators in the main stream media and in the blogosphere add those extra, freighted modifiers at every naming--"arrogant," "elitist," "weak," "unproven," "opportunistic," "indecisive.""aloof," "perceived as lacking gravitas," and "lucky." I even heard one talking head--a dead white male--call the Obama an Oreo cookie! The Obama said to be a brilliant speaker, but that is dismissed as little more than play acting. Words don't mean anything, the Hills liked to say, and, indeed, they mean nothing to people who's definition of truth is highly fungible. George W. Bush was less prepared for the presidency than the Obama, and, although he certainly was accused of many things, including arrogance and ignorance, he came in for far less flack--indeed, he did well in the debates precisely because he persuaded the media to give him a "gentleman's C<" plus extra points for every partial al answer. Applied to the Obama, thse words and phrases--whether consciously or not on the part of the writer, and I suspect that in many cases they are unconscious--serve the Obama is an uppity black man, and Michelle Obama is an even more uppity black woman. It's no wonder polls say he doesn't connect with most voters or share their values. My point is that when all of these comments are put in context of race, they spell defeat for Obama and Democrats to a man who is probably less qualified than George Bush to be president and nastier than Bob Dole ever dreamed of being. Add to that constant background, the media's blind allegiance to the general narrative line it has embraced--in this case that the surge and splurge in Iraq has been a glorious success. Juan Cole thoroughly dismantles that argument in his blog, but few journalists bother with specialists when they can talk to each other. In this case they use John McCain't as their authority and so regularly pound the Obama with a lie for refusing to accept that lie. But that's another blog.

Even my skeptical friends think the Obama can win if he mobilizes a huge vote. I don't think the Obama is anything more than a moderate in terms of policy, but he has charisma to spare, and that might carry him through. I'd rather see him be as bold in terms of policy as he was in undertaking this run for the presidency.

Whose Religion

2008-04-29T16:25:00.002-04:00

The news pages and air waves are full once again of verbal hand-wringing and head wagging over Jeremiah Wright, the preacher the Obama chose to repudiate after some of his sermons were uncovered by the Hills's campaign hit team—her "swift boaters," as it were. The chief complaint seems to be that Wright argued that America might have brought the attacks of September 11, 2001 on itself, through its hubris, its mistreatment of other people, and its moral decadence. Much of that sounds like the Reverends Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and other evangelical prophets of self-righteousness.

The brief against Wright seems, as well, to include his embrace of 'black liberation theology,' based on the much admired and heartily despised—depends on which side you're on--"liberation theology.” Developed in Latin America in the 1960s and '70s by Father Juan Luis Segundo and others, “liberation theology” says the Church should turn its attention to improving the lives of everyone, especially the poor and downtrodden. The gospel should help liberate people from injustice, suffering and bondage here and now. It should not be the servant of the power structure. The late Pope John Paul II and then Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, threw the weight of the papacy behind smashing it.

In the U.S., the Reverend James H. Cone of the AME church and Union Theological Seminary developed a “black theology of liberation” to bring the movement for equal rights for all Americans into the global flow. What the hell is wrong with that? Oh, Wright has also said in a play on "God Bless America," "God damn America." All I can do is point to the scriptures and say let those who have never done the same cast the first stone, and let them swear that were they downtrodden in America, they would never say the same. That's granting for the sake of argument only that saying, "god damn America" is a "crime"--I don't believe it myself. I know I frequently say worse when I view the horror show of Iraq or the repressive oligarchies we back or the torture of prisoners or the singling out for prosecution for one half-assed crime or another young men whose only real crime is having a different skin color--phenotype, as it were.

Today, the fuss focuses on more inane comments Wright has made on his ego-trip tour of national media outlets eager to give him a stage. The media than sling his one-liners at the Obama or wield them like clubs to bash him. 'Repudiate this man,' they demand. Here's a link to the New York Times transcript of the latest Obama dash through the media gauntlet. I wonder why each candidate is not required to repudiate torture and pledge to send the Bushies to The Hague to face war crimes charges. The current frenzy is beyond guilt by association.

What's driving the frenzy in the mainstream media is that these are black preachers and a black man making a serious run at the presidency. I say that because, truth be told, no one has made half the fuss about the white candidates who solicit and lap up the endorsements of white evangelical preachers, nor has anyone—to my knowledge—dug through every utterance of every preacher whose church those candidates have attended. I haven't seen a big deal made of the reactionary Congressional prayer group, commonly known as the Family. that the Hills religiously attends. The Family provides a religious, American cover for the very groups that stand in staunch opposition to "liberation theology"--that is, oligarchs from the worlds of business and politics. For that matter I have seen no major questions raised about the influence the Catholic cult of self-mortifiers, Opus Dei, has on Antonin Scalia.

The reason is that most people understand that parishioners don't agree with every word out of their pastors' mouths, even if the pastor is the priest. A fundamental principle of protestantism, of course, is that a person talks directly to god, without the intercession of the priest. Except in cults and in hierarchical religious bodies presided over by inquisitors, lockstep thinking is frowned upon. (To be fair, the German pope, the former grand inquisitor, could rigorously enforce church discipline only by losing millions of "pick-and-choose followers.")

The Obama's "critics" seem to forget that large numbers of American believers choose a church or shul or mosque or temple for a host of reasons—familial, social, convenience, politics, necessity, as in, it's the only show in town or because they are banned from the church of choice by virtue of their skin color or sexual predilections. Catholic politicians, like John F. Kennedy and Mario Cuomo, to mention only two Americans, have taken positions opposite that of the Catholic Church and proven time and again that a politician is not beholden to a theology, unless he chooses to be.

It's long past time for the media to bury this dead dog, and make no mistake, it is long dead--arguably still born--and make no mistake, the media is keeping it on expensive life support, with more than a little prompting from the Clintons and their paid mudslingers. Were the hand-wringing head waggers to look honestly at what they were nattering about, they would probably not only learn a few things but also decide that there are a lot more important stories to pursue--having to do with war, hunger, health, and justice.

The Obama + Marx, Karl

2008-04-12T22:14:00.009-04:00

Pity the Obama--the man correctly points out that working class Americans have seen the life they were taught was the best on earth eroded, degraded, trashed, devalued, moved first South then offshore to Asia to the point where they have almost nothing left and so, in order to prove that they still rule the world, they flex their considerable political clout for gun wingnuts or 9/11 paranoics or representatives of the one true faith, hoping to ride the World Trade Centers through at least one more election cycle, rather than face the real truth that they are being fucked by the same corporate capitalism that has fucked them throughout their lives.

Meanwhile the servants of that coporate capitalism, this time made manifest in Hillary Clinton, John McCain and people who still trudge through the Drudge Report [couldn't resist], have pulled a clever reverses on the usual condemnation as a class warrior anyone who dares to challenge them.This time Clinton and McCain accused the Obama of being insensitive to the working class because he said that many of them have turned bitter over economic losses and so have clung to what they have left--guns [for revolution: my gloss] or to religion or to fear of immigrants, people not like us. They are afraid some alien will come and take the little they have left.

That sounds right, but apparerntly referencing the reinforcer, if not the cause, of nararow-mindedness, bigotry, and fear is not acceptable to certain keepers of the American myth. They couldn't claim the Obama was using class warfare, for fear of waking people up--the rise off the 'race card' early in the last century was related to the white power structures need to keep blacks and poor and working class whites from joining forces politically to make real changes. Better to discredit the Harvard educated Obama, as "elitest." Suddenly John McCain and HIllary Clinton are allowed to be the voices of the working class--only in America do the captains of industry and their lackeys succeed in pulling off this transference so easily.

The McCain-Clinton blather is enough to make a cockroach vomit. It is like the flap over the Obama's pastor's comments--a made up controversy. The reductio ad absurdum of the Clinton-McCain theory--that the Obama somehow endorsed or embraced all the mutterings of his pastor because he continued attending the church--transferred to Hillary Clinton would posit that she somehow endorsed or condoned her husband's philandering because she remained married to him; applied to John McCain the same line of reasoning would portray him as a masochist of overwhelming ambition, hypocrisy and shamelessness. But wait: Those are true statements. Don't they make the first true?

So accept that the Obama is "elitest" and that whether that is good or bad depends on the nature of the elite to which he belongs. Is it an educated "elite" that values basic principles of democracy, justice, fairness, peace over war, equality, and reason? Or is it the self-serving elie of the Bush-McCain_Clinton crew? I think the Obama is the best sort of 'elitist,' who has landed in the soup because he has begun more forcefully to speak truth, and he needs to continue doing so. But instead on Saturday he apologized for speaking in a way that might have discomfitted people. Apologizing when you are not wrong in order to avoid hurting someone's tender feelings is a proper thing to do, but having done it, the Obama needs to move on, recognizing that the people who are going to be offended by his comments on any issue aren't going to vote for him anyway. He seems to be trying to do so.The Obama put the whole matter in perspective in this Terra Haute, Indiana, appearance, picked up in Tallking Points Memo.

That was, I thought, the end of a short blog--silly me. The press, along with McCain-Clinton, and other officials, who can't be bothered to address the important issuues we face--the stinking bloody fiasco in Iraq where the military is now serving as a mercenary force (paid by us) for the Maliki government; a ruined economy; a dysfunctional health care system; and the need to remove war ciminals from the highest levels of government and ship them to the Hague for trial--have seized on the Obama's comments and the charge of elitism in an effort to beat his campaign senseless. If they succeed, and they might, this country will get what it deserves. But it could be that enough people recognize the essential truth of the Obama's comments--could be, maybe--for the twisters of truth to fail.

The Phrase No One Will Utter

2008-04-08T13:11:00.004-04:00

Judging from the appearance of General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, the sole and singular lesson from Vietnam for Senators and bureaucrats caught in a military quagmire is never utter the words "light at the end of the tunnel." The rule is that you can say anything you want that means the same, but not "that." Yet that is precisely the argument of Petraeus and Crocker-conditions are getting better, a wee better, but we have to pause now because it all could turn to crap. The rest is lies and more lies, as Crocker lied to the Armed Services Committee in trying to spin Maliki's licking in Basra into a victory because some made-up group called for an end to outside interference in Iraq, which he defines as Iran--not the U.S. Too many senators on the Armed Services Committee, in part because of time limitations, simply nod along. To her credit, Hillary Clinton was positively presidential.

Well, it's nice to know that our men in "theatre" can spin a whopper as well of the old Vietnam crew. Now, why doesn't someone ask why Iran is "outside" and the U.S. is not, especially since Iran's Ahmadinejad has visited Iraq, like Bush, only unlike Bush, he went where he wished. He was also the first Persian leader to visit Baghdad in more than a millennium, meaning, as my friend, Jeff, observes, this whole extravaganza has made Iraq safe for Iran.

The Foreign Affairs Committee is much tougher this afternoon, wanting specific reasons for continuing what is clearly a failed policy. The only answers they get are vague to the point of absurdity, except for the attempts to blame everything on al-Qaeda in Iraq and Iran. They are all playing to form in their "theatre."

Oncce again this afternoon, Crocker claims the fiasco in Basra last week was proof that Maliki is really a nationalist. The calculus behind this statement--and I predicted this argument last week--is that the Senate in particular and American public in general are too stupid to know the difference.

Defining Moments

2008-03-31T17:55:00.001-04:00

Odd Ends to catch up with myself.

Someone who goes by the nom de web "Purdue Matt" has twice sought to post the same comment about my condemnation of torture--"If torturing one person prevents the deaths of thousands of Americans by a potential terrorist attack, then it was worth it [my emphasis]." I ignored this twisted piece of ratiocination the first time it came through, but the second time, with the U.S. pounding Sadr City in Baghdad and Sadrist positions in Basra and elsewhere after attacks by the U.S. trained Iraqi security forces on Moqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army faltered, I decided to post the thing with a short gloss.

The easy response is to dismiss the comment as hopelessly illogical. There is no way to know in advance that torturing someone will save anyone, and arguably if interrogators know that much, they already have enough knowledge to proceed without torture. But on a practical level, an interrogator is more likely to gain information through skilled questioning, even 'befriending' his or her prisoner, than through torture, as study after study has shown. Indeed, torture usually produces bad information. Moreover, in most moral systems, each life is precious, and the taking of one or the abuse of a person for any reason, with the possible exception of self-defense is unacceptable. Possibly warding off a potential attack that might kill one or more people of a particular group does not constitute self defense. Unfortunately, Purdue Matt is not alone in his adherence to this specious argument, a favorite of the Bushies.

Of course, no one can accuse the Emperor Boy George of clear headed thinking--of any kind of higher order thinking! Certainly, the latest maneuver ranks with the most cynically inane of the occupation. David "Counter Insurgency" Petraeus and Ambassador Rryan "Sugar Coat It" Crocker, due in Washington next month to testify about the results of the surge and splurge, have over the past few weeks made clear that the Maliki government had squandered the relative pause in violence following the splurge, utterly failing to make any political progress toward stabililzing the political situatiion. Much of the reduction in violence, we are told, derives less from American force than from Sadr's decisioin to declare unilaterally a ceasefire and to renew it for six months. That didn't stop the Mehdi Army from making mischief, especially in Basra, where it was one of the militia's dividing the city after the British left, but the mischief was slight compared with the constant harassment of Sadrists by Maliki, Petraeus and company. Despite those continuing lowlife attacks, Sadr held firm, and Petraeus has gladly worn the aura of success Sadr's ceasefire has given him. That success, as I said, served ultimately to focus attention on the Maliki government's dismal political failure.

We now know that the answer to the dilemma--it has the odor of something cooked up in Washington and delivered in person by Dickie Cheney in such a way as to make the US appear out of the Maliki loop, except for those special forces targeting sites in Basra and so on--was to send 30,000 or more of those newly trained Iraqi troops against the Sadrists in Basra. To insure that Americans and Brits understand that Sadr is the devil, the English speaking press always calls him the "radical cleric," meaning he's a badass because he represents the poor and disgruntled and because he considers America an occupying power and because he is a threat to gain power through the ballot box, if the elections in October are fair, according to most knowledgeable observers. Imagine if that happened. To forestall it, Maliki attacked. The assault also was designed so that the Bushies could testify in Congress that Maliki had taken a bold step forward militarily and politically. Jauntily, the Bushbucker in Chief, announced last week that the Maliki attack on Sadr and his followers represented a 'defining moment' in the new Iraq's history.

The moment it defined is not the sort of glorious victory the Emperor Boy George had in mind. Abject failure is more the case--from the Bushies' perspective, anyway. More than anything, the events of last week underscore the absolute absurdity of the American position in Iraq. Unfortunately, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, John McCain, seems clueless to the Bush degree, and he is not alone among the members of Congress, who have failed to bring this surreal absurdity to a halt. McCain alone, except perhaps for the Emperor Boy and his immediate court, believes that Malikii acted without consulting or informing his American handlers and that Sadr's ordering of a ceasefire was a sign of weakness.

Maliki is allied--albeit, sometimes shakily--with another militia, the Badr Organization of the Islamic Supreme Council in Iraq, heavily in thrall to Iran, which also has a stake in not seeing Sadr succeed. Of course, Iran faces the difficult task of trying to keep the Bushies so busy in Iraq that they don't refocus on it while also keeping Iraq calm so the US. will leave. The Iranians might arm the Mehdi Army and harbor Sadr in order to make mischief against their old enemies, the Sunnis and Americans, but they don't want him to prevail over their old friends in the Islamic Supreme Council in Iraq, under Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, an enemy of Sadr. That's right, the Emperor Boy George is on the side of his nemesis Iran's president, Mahoud Admadinejad in his support of Maliki and Hakim.

Patraeus proclaims that the Iranians are arming the Mehdi Army while neglecting to add that they also support Maliki and Hakim against the same Mehdi Army. More to the point, the U.S. has now declared itself a full partisan in a civil war and turned its military into a mercenary force, serving a known ally of Iran, adding one more degradation to a long list of despicable acts.