Kucinich: “Why I voted No”

This came as email, so anyone who isn’t a friend of Rep. Kucinich might not see it. It would be difficult to post a clearer, more reasoned, accurate summary of the situation. One can support his position wholeheartedly and still take some comfort in the defeat of the GOP Chicken Littles, blind obstructionists and outright scoundrels on health care reform. ‘Tis just a shame there are so many of them; it’s the scariest fact of all.

Congressman Dennis Kucinich after voting against H.R. 3962 addresses why he voted NO, stating:

“We have been led to believe that we must make our health care choices only within the current structure of a predatory, for-profit insurance system which makes money not providing health care. We cannot fault the insurance companies for being what they are. But we can fault legislation in which the government incentivizes the perpetuation, indeed the strengthening, of the for-profit health insurance industry, the very source of the problem. When health insurance companies deny care or raise premiums, co-pays and deductibles they are simply trying to make a profit. That is our system.”

“Clearly, the insurance companies are the problem, not the solution. They are driving up the cost of health care. Because their massive bureaucracy avoids paying bills so effectively, they force hospitals and doctors to hire their own bureaucracy to fight the insurance companies to avoid getting stuck with an unfair share of the bills. The result is that since 1970, the number of physicians has increased by less than 200% while the number of administrators has increased by 3000%. It is no wonder that 31 cents of every health care dollar goes to administrative costs, not toward providing care. Even those with insurance are at risk. The single biggest cause of bankruptcies in the U.S. is health insurance policies that do not cover you when you get sick.”

“But instead of working toward the elimination of for-profit insurance, H.R. 3962 would put the government in the role of accelerating the privatization of health care. In H.R. 3962, the government is requiring at least 21 million Americans to buy private health insurance from the very industry that causes costs to be so high, which will result in at least $70 billion in new annual revenue, much of which is coming from taxpayers. This inevitably will lead to even more costs, more subsidies, and higher profits for insurance companies – a bailout under a blue cross.”

“By incurring only a new requirement to cover pre-existing conditions, a weakened public option, and a few other important but limited concessions, the health insurance companies are getting quite a deal. The Center for American Progress’ blog, Think Progress, states, ’since the President signaled that he is backing away from the public option, health insurance stocks have been on the rise.’ Similarly, healthcare stocks rallied when Senator Max Baucus introduced a bill without a public option. Bloomberg reports that Curtis Lane, a prominent health industry investor, predicted a few weeks ago that ‘money will start flowing in again’ to health insurance stocks after passage of the legislation. Investors.com last month reported that pharmacy benefit managers share prices are hitting all-time highs, with the only industry worry that the Administration would reverse its decision not to negotiate Medicare Part D drug prices, leaving in place a Bush Administration policy.”

“During the debate, when the interests of insurance companies would have been effectively challenged, that challenge was turned back. The ‘robust public option’ which would have offered a modicum of competition to a monopolistic industry was whittled down from an initial potential enrollment of 129 million Americans to 6 million. An amendment which would have protected the rights of states to pursue single-payer health care was stripped from the bill at the request of the Administration. Looking ahead, we cringe at the prospect of even greater favors for insurance companies.”

“Recent rises in unemployment indicate a widening separation between the finance economy and the real economy. The finance economy considers the health of Wall Street, rising corporate profits, and banks’ hoarding of cash, much of it from taxpayers, as sign of an economic recovery. However in the real economy – in which most Americans live – the recession is not over. Rising unemployment, business failures, bankruptcies and foreclosures are still hammering Main Street.”

“This health care bill continues the redistribution of wealth to Wall Street at the expense of America’s manufacturing and service economies which suffer from costs other countries do not have to bear, especially the cost of health care. America continues to stand out among all industrialized nations for its privatized health care system. As a result, we are less competitive in steel, automotive, aerospace and shipping while other countries subsidize their exports in these areas through socializing the cost of health care.”

“Notwithstanding the fate of H.R. 3962, America will someday come to recognize the broad social and economic benefits of a not-for-profit, single-payer health care system, which is good for the American people and good for America’s businesses, with of course the notable exceptions being insurance and pharmaceuticals.”

Korean Opportunity of a Lifetime

Lee Myung-bak and Kim Jong-il probably won’t move fast enough to take advantage of the greatest opportunity they and their respective Koreas may ever have. When they’re gone, sooner and not later, it will be more difficult for the leaders who follow them, to accomplish the project I describe here.

In North Korea, a less effective and connected mover and shaker will take the reins when JI’s remains slide off the deck, and it has been suggested that will happen sooner rather than later due to failing health. In South Korea, the next president(s) are most unlikely to have MB’s well-deserved engineering and business cred for a scenario like this one to succeed.

It is a personal fantasy old enough to vote. I drive from Fukuoka to London, outfitted with distance-travel items: sleeping bag, dried foods, camp cooking kit, first aide, basic mechanic’s tools, maps and compass, camera, field manuals and toothbrush. The way I look at it, if you’re going to fantasize or rob banks, modest aspirations transform mere dummies into damnable fools.

At my age, the fantasy may have already lost Japan; there is no sign that a bridge or tunnel will be built in time to drive across to Korea. It doesn’t matter. I’ll take the ferry, or just skip Japan and leave from Seoul. But first, their excellencies Kim and Lee need to gather together their most serious ducks, line them up and point them at Sinuiju.

Dear Leader Kim’s first move is to form a landholding company with all the stock owned by the Worker’s Party, or whatever the Owner of It All calls itself in English. The land in question has to form an unbroken right-of-way corridor  connecting a point on S-N border near Panmunjom to the North’s border with China.

President Lee’s part is already a clear image in that fertile technocrat mind of his: build a great portal-to-portal passageway. Open the road to wheeled land transportation between the greatest economies of East Asia. North Korea will, overnight, be inundated with material and financial resources necessary for a crash course of catch-up economic and infrastructure development the scope of which is guaranteed to match the scope and scale of need, if reunification of the south is ever to be reached without major social, political and economic upheaval.

Machines and personnel would pour into the zone, and it should be agreed that everything the North Koreans can do, they should be contracted to do for this project. The value of all heavy machinery and other technology imported for the purpose should be considered fully amortized upon completion of the project, and become the property of North Korea.

Nations and companies invested early should receive preferential rates or waivers of fees for use of the corridor. Everyone else should pay, except me. It’s my idea, I, and my descendants, should get free passes.
China, Japan, USA and Russia (build an off-ramp to Primorye and reap the Far East!) would be vested early, with central and southern Asians and Europe close behind.

Let the Dear Leader line the damn route with chainlink and barbwire if he must, but insist he let his people go. Their work in the construction zone, as labor, engineers, amenities entrepreneurs, fuel and lubricant suppliers, equipment sales, maintenance and repair, medical and other necessary services, and whatever else they can dream up to do, they should be encouraged and helped to do.

Let these other countries and their corporations bid to provide the necessaries to pull off the construction of 4 lanes of firstrate tollway enabling me and millions of others the opportunity to drive off this island that is South Korea. It’s what everyone wants, and everything exists to get it done. Make it happen. Establish a task force to articulate the necessary terms of agreement, outlining the responsibilities of all parties.

Or not, and instead, launch the gas and the missiles and the troop transports and the artillery, and then sit back and daydream about what might have been until the combined effect of the assault, and the military countermeasures taken from this side transform most of this splendid peninsula yet again into a shattered, smoking ruin. If that happens, I feel like this proposal should entitle me to advance notice. I just need need enough time to tell as many bigshots, ideologues and militarists as I can contact to kiss my ass goodbye.

No Adult Left Behind

Growing up in the Fifties was an exercise in out-of-body experience. One unforgettable first-time encounter was with the term “brainwashing“, as applied to citizens of the former Soviet Union and their indoctrination with the tenets of Marxism-Leninism. Distorted, mutated, warped and terminally twisted by Stalin and other totalitarian apparatchiks, they were the subject of great derision by the American pundits of the day. The idea that propaganda and indoctrination via repetitive training and education practices could result in mass acceptance of principles so obviously false to us more discerning citizens of Freedom and its enterprises, had Uncle Sam’s collected heads shaking for over two decades.

The Soviets were spectacularly successful at brainwashing, if we accept as given a complete surrender to and subjugation of the citizens’ free will and thought to the prerogatives of the Soviet State. The accomplishment is all the more remarkable given the comparatively primitive state of delivery mechanisms then (blackboard, reel-to-reel audio, hypnotism, etc.) and those of today. The influences on public thought and discourse are nothing if not numerous, diverse and undifferentiated by the usual constraints of cultural respectability at one extreme, and cultural tabu at the other.

We have hundreds of cable channels, the Internet, designer drugs, free porn, mass marketing, commercials, haute couture, Play Station, peer pressure, competitive consumption, Word of God, NeoCon men and women, poor physical health born of self-destructive habits, -its a lengthy list getting longer. It takes little time in the presence of these pervasive influences to develop the kind of serious mental and emotional dependency on them that produces withdrawal discomfort in withdrawal. A slang word for such withdrawal from heroin is “jones”, noun or verb. “Keeping up with the Joneses” thus produces the tastiest double entendre we’re likely to discover for awhile.

We are beginning to glimpse a future when the human proponents of unbridled material consumption and behaviours associated with it, are called to the streets by their dealers in the name of “grassroots organizing”. Wiser heads have tagged this an “astroturf” movement, marshalled and bankrolled by those whose obscene affluence came from producing, promoting and dispensing the products, e.g. the information, disseminated by such choice purveyors as Fox Broadcasting (no, make that anything possessed by Rupert Murdock), big insurance, big pharma, big for-profit health care, big banking, big chemical, big petro, big mining, and big a-hole (as in the vote-for-hire GOP/Dem hacks who live in their pockets).

Our disdain for the Soviets turns out to have been spot-on, for at their most influential, given that their people didn’t have the facts at their disposal when they swallowed the Big Red Lies. On the other hand, US citizens today have more facts at our disposal than at any time in human history. Virtually nothing stands between us and comprehension of our current precarious national condition but our own apathy, disinterest, arrogance and the self-assuredness that we already know all we need to know to fight Obama on any and every issue.

There are, roughly estimated, maybe 100  million adult US citizens who are free to operate vehicles, buy and use firearms, range across public lands unhindered, or to disrupt public meetings on healthcare reform, but are incapable of naming more than a handful of government officials in agencies as obscure as the Cabinet, the Supreme Court or the House and Senate. They can name 10 brands of beer, every sports franchise in every city that has one in the NBA, NFL, two major baseball leagues, and pro golf and tennis, but they can’t identify the Group of 8 advanced nations on an outline map of the globe.

This is our big problem. It’s big enough to warrant special attention in the media, and study by Congress and thinking people everywhere, to look for remedies that will de-program these citizens and get them learning to think for themselves again, instead of for those whose entire business it is to maximize profits on discretionary goods and services to which their business practices have addicted so many of us.

As long as the minds of so many of our countrymen are abandoned to the forces of greed and consumption, our collective future is mortgaged to them. Until the problem is acknowledged, quantified and addressed by policy and programs, it mightn’t be a bad idea for those of our “friends” who have accepted US military presence in their countries to wonder out loud in their national press, and between diplomatic communicants, exactly when such efforts might get underway.

When other nations have, or aspire to get, weapons of mass destruction, we speculate about the outcome should a country succumb to widespread civil disruption of the sort that might create conditions where control of the weapons should end up in the hands of less than rational forces. The recent Bush Administration was such that this very situation might have come about in the US. It wasn’t someone else’s country. It was an administration of The United States of America that showed itself willing to torture and invade and snoop and lie and steal and terrorize and break any law if it would serve the prevailing neo-con ideology to do so.

We elected President Obama intending that his administration would divert (one wants to say arrest, but)  this dismal current. They have barely slowed it down, but already many of us show signs of subsiding into the lethargy and inattention necessary for matters to get as bad as they did in the past. If the election result had turned out their way, our lives would already be immeasurably worse, for the people who are sending these mobs of brainwashed citizen tea-baggers, birthers and America uber alles mokes spawned in the hundreds by the ideological centers of vested interest, would be running the show instead of screaming from the astroturf outside  the doors and windows of public meetings. These, our fellow citizens, are not the root cause of the problem. They are but one of many symptoms. They are the cannon fodder placed in the path of refoms by those of the deep pockets and the kind of cynicism about notions like the social contract that these have characterized these force historically.

Something must be done to deprogram  and educate fools and true believers, and for no better reason than to save them from their own folly. They have been left behind, accidentally or by their own option. We who are their kin should accept the responsibility to point out for them the full extent to which they have been duped into the embrace of lunacy, to serve as simple tools for shaving policy and intimidating policy-makers in the decreasingly United State of America.

Jeepney Magazine and Micro-relief in Quezon City

A lot more on this story is coming, but for now, here’s part one of the video movies depicting the mission we joined to bring drinking water and clothing to these “unauthorized” residents among Manila’s 3-million-plus, who lost all their small possessions in a fire that started in the aftermath of a domestic quarrel. WordPress tells me the *wmv file “doesn’t meet security guidelines”, whatever that means, so  it’s here on Tailcast.com.

Quezon City fire victims

In the future, this blog will be exploring options, opportunities and examples of what will be called “micro-relief”. The term is inspired by the sterling example of Dr. Mohammed Yunus and his brainchild, “micro-credit” as exercised by the Grameen Bank. I’m not comfortable making negative expressions about any form of poverty or disaster relief, or indeed about relief for any form of hardship or stress-of-status. It does strike me, though (and has for many years) that the largest aid organizations are burdened by an extraordinary level of administrative overhead that significantly draws down the net amount of resources directly available to the end user.

The basis of micro-credit is two-fold: building trust and sharing a goal of financial stability for beleaguered families, often those where women head single-parent households. Small sums of “seed money” are given as loans to start up enterprises which produce a modest, steady margin of profit sufficient to pay off the loan (enabling further borrowing), to provide the means to meet the families basic needs, and to maintain a basic  or slight but steadily increasing production, i.e. to grow the business.

The concept of micro-relief doesn’t rely on a central source of support or relief, but encourages any and all persons who have it within their means and are inclined to do so, to lend material assistance to the same category of recipients as those who avail themselves of Grameen transactions. It’s a form I explored in relation to the Christmas Day Tsunami of ‘94, which ultimately resulted in the distribution of the equivalent of a month’s salary to 20 Acehnese English teachers and their families, many of whom had lost family members and seen all their worldly possessions washed away in an instant.

I encountered another example of micro-relief in Manila recently, where the Jeepney Magazine, a “street paper” focused on the problems and lives of the 3-million-plus dwellers in the unauthorized block-and-corrugate cubicle communities of Quezon City and other locales, including some as far away as Mindanao, still wracked by the violent struggle between the national army and the Moro (MILF) rebels.

Jeepney “Partners”, usually homeless, and always poor, receive consignments of the magazine that they then sell on the streets of the city. They keep half the proceeds from the cover price, returning half for more magazines. The sale of a single magazine is enough to provide a substantial meal to a family of four, and represents the dignity of employment, almost impossible to come by any other way.

In addition to its policy of selecting vendors on the basis of helping those whose family need makes them most worthy, Jeepney is also a sponsor of the team representing The Philippines in the Homeless World Cup, that will be held in Milan in September. The team is coached by a couple of men from Cameroon who found themselves stranded in Asia by unscrupulous travel agents. They are eminently worthy recipients of Jeepney Magazine micro-relief.

Another source of micro-relief in Manila is the Kids International Ministries, operated by Jeff and Colene Long and their splendid children, all of whom have grown up in Manila and are themselves devoted to the kindly art of helping others, in the spirit of Christian charity. I will be devoting more blogspace to an exploration of the many different ways the Long family have provided relief to thousands of their neighbors and other deserving (and profoundly grateful) Filipino people.

I’m grateful to the Longs for the extraordinary welcome and hospitality they extended to us in June. Confronted by the utter contrast between our personal ideologies of spirit, still we quickly reached agreement that such differences are insignificance in the presence of such great need by which we are there surrounded. Meeting people’s material needs must precede the treatment of their spiritual need if humanity is to have a healthy and rewarding future. The Longs are wise Samaritans who recognize that, since hungry children must not be subjected to any litmus test of belief to qualify for nourishment, then neither should those who join them in offering it. Meeting them and watching them operate has been one of the more inspiring experiences in recent memory.

In the spirit of micr0-relief, three veterans of the form, namely Missus, Mom and my sister Jane, made generous donations of shoes, clothing, school supplies, vitamins and sundry items, and we filled every ounce of our luggage allotment to transport them from the US to Manila, with no clear sense of how or to whom they would be distributed. Now that we’ve been there and done that, we can only wish it were easier and less costly to do so, for if it was, we wouldn’t stop until time and slow oxidation rendered us physically incapable of it, so great is the satisfaction from witnessing the result. The items are useful and helpful to those who receive them, but the rewards of giving are immeasurably greater.

Now, the challenge is to construct a global network of trust and partnership to effect the transfer of ever greater quantities of items plentiful in the developed world, to areas of great need and short supply, and to do it with a minimum of cost overhead. Ideas are sought. Allies are invited. No yardsticks to be applied to the source of the impulse to join and help and give. If you’re a believer, this is God’s path for you. If you’re not, it is the humane thing to do. Let’s be about it.

Cheerleader Tryouts for Death Squads

I selected the title for this post to highlight the cause and effect relationship I see between the collective message of the raucous talking heads of rightwing radio and TV in the US, and recent events and atrocities occurred in the name of political opposition to the leftward course of US political economy and administrative policy. The global economic collapse that started with the policies of the Reagan Government and finished by that of W. Bush, culminated in the election of Barack Obama to the US Presidency, and the scattering of the forces of Republicanism into a richly-deserved disarray of evangelicals, demagogues, bankers and the media flacks and others amorally predisposed to suck sustenance from the oceans of wealth produced by maintaining oligarchs at the top of the economic heap, and at public expense.

These voices from the extreme right, and the mindless internalization of all they espouse by true believers in American exceptionalism, have a similar position in American life as did media supporters of the power elites in the Third World who were responsible for dispatching death squads,  often on the American dime, to brutalize and kill  citizens attempting to change their societies for the better, in the same ways America is trying today. They are cheerleaders for a way of governance that is selfish, corrupt, inhumane, and to the extent that it encourages zealots to think they are on a mission from God if they go out and take the life of anyone detested and vilified by  the mouthpieces of the ugly right, they are criminal inciters to hate crimes and they deserve to be muzzled as such. It doesn’t seem farfetched at all that, allowed to continue their venomous oral ejaculations, life in the US could subside into a monstrous version of the last century’s epic national abortion that was US involvement in El Salvador.

When George Lakoff writes about “frames”, in terms of the way people choose to present arguments or ideological positions, and likewise the way we interpret and understand the postions presented to us, he generally can be counted on to instruct us in the ways of progressive thinking, and how we fail to frame our ideas as effectively as does right-wing opposition to it. Writing for Truthout about the spurious arguments driving opposition to President Obama’s pick of Sonia Sotomayor to replace David Souter on the US Supreme Court, he concludes: “Above all, Democrats should be aware that the attack on Sotomayor is not just about Sotomayor. It is an attack on the basis of our democracy and must be answered.” The premise is that the definition of empathy depends on who is invoking the concept to frame their presentation. The right has done it more effectively, and Sotomayor’s “empathy” is the latest example.

This touches a raw nerve for me, already smarting from multiple exposure to some of the vilest events and blather about them coming from the right that I can remember in my lifetime. The odious, utterly surreal spectacle of the likes of Pat and Bay Buchanan braying about anti-white racism as if the examples they think they see of it, are equivalent to the monstrous crime against humanity represented by the history of black slavery in America simply leave one speechless before it. Likewise the endless litany of canards spewed by Bill O’Reilly, in defense of his inciteful diatribes against Dr. George Tiller, the abortion doctor murdered in his church recently, gives one an inkling of how the caffeine-addicted clinic rats feel just before they bite themselves in the discomfort of withdrawal. The difference is that this is a withdrawal from humanity.

A thought had been nagging at the base of my consciousness, growing as weeks passed and I continue to inflict doses of Hannity, Coulter, Malkin, Rove, Beck, Cavuto, ad nauseam, much like the SNL sketch where the character spluts out successive sips from a carton of spoiled milk, as if trying to believe the next taste will be somehow less foul than the last. Reading Lakoff’s piece, it finally came to me what I have been trying to put my finger on, i.e. the death squad connection to rightwing media mouths. I can explain it now, but it requires  some history review to get there.

I was too young to be paying attention when America started to get really serious about globalizing the so-called American Way, pursuing an economic form of geopolitics that, anything but new, has its roots in slavery, opium, gold and the empires that grew fat on trade in them. When the Shah was imposed on Iran, Somoza on Nicaragua, Pinochet on Chile, Montt on Guatemala, and others, it was US policy to back them strongly with pronouncements of support and admiration, with money, and most importantly, with CIA connections to facilitate the flow of weapons, funds and personnel, tasked to terrorize and destroy any efforts to oppose these dictators friendly to US efforts to control the economic, social and political fortunes of the countries they ruled. These people are still around; we just don’t hear as much about them because they know we have them under much tighter surveilance in this technology-rapt modern day.

These things, these…people, are a matter of history, and the chauvinistic howling, braying, and bloodthirsty voices from the right today, are of an ideological piece with those responsible for the atrocities committed in the bad old days of US unilateralist interference in the internal politics of other nations, often directed against democratically elected governments of the sort that, when they fawn on America, the US administrations lavish aid and support on them. If, however, a Hugo Chavez, a Salvador Allende, or a Mohammed Mossadegh (and this list just hints at the extent of the problem) should come to power through elections, US administrations have become everyone’s worst enemy, and done so secretly, without the approval of Congress, and certainly without the approval of right-thinking citizenry.

Everybody Eats!

I take a nap almost every day. I become torpid from eating a full meal at midday. Before and after my nap, whether I am at home or at work (Yes, America, you too can nap at work!) I am likely to spend an hour or two reading news on the Internet, which is lately about the impending demise of newspapers. Today, I’m watching Arianna Huffington’s presentation on the subject to Sen. John Kerry’s committee. Fortunately, La Huffington delivers more stimulating product at the Post than she does at the podium. Most of what HuffPost delivers is essential for an informed progressive-minded person to know, but not all.

I can let the C-Span video run and surf on, this time arriving at a post so outrageous that it almost causes me to stop breathing as I read, so entirely am I offended by it. Growing up in agricultural regions of the United States, and reading about the hunger experienced in much of the Third World, and in war-torn regions of more developed and developing parts, I have ever been conscious of a vague guilty unease, knowing that only greed and politics stand between a well-nourished humanity, and that very different one of our experience. At least, I consoled myself, I was fortunate enough to be born into a country where babies didn’t have to go to bed hungry.

So today, as I perambulate the pages full of stories about the trillions going to so-called “defense”, and mega-billions to bailout banks and insurance companies, and millions being skimmed into the pockets of government contractors and office-holders and bagmen and bosses in every big industry, I must also read that millions of American children will, indeed, go to bed hungry tonight, and tomorrow night and every uncounted night that selfish, greedy, arrogant xenophobes in high places continue cockroaching about in the utterly self-absorbed orgy in pursuit of authority and material gain.

There is a criminal conspiracy between corporatists, authoritarians, social conservatives, anti-intellectuals and religious obscurantists that together are the cause of these pestilential practices that have brought our once-robust country to the brink of total dysfunction. If almost one in five American children is experiencing even one day without adequate food, then exactly what makes the United States of America so special after all? I encountered former US Secretary of Agriculture Cecil Andrus outside the offices of the Snake River Alliance in Boise a few years back, and I asked him if he was happy to be back in Idaho. He replied that, Yes, he was, because he ran into a lot fewer people in Idaho that needed to be watered daily. Looking back on the moment, it occurs to me that we should have stopped watering them long ago, in the hope that the most noxious would simply dry up and blow away. Replace them with varieties of human cultivars that bear more heavily, so that when outsiders inquire how things are back in the USA, we can say at the very least that “Things are still all fucked up by politics and greed, but at least everybody eats!”

Torture is Crime

It is not legal for agents of the US Government to torture those in its custody. Torture is therefore considered a crime. When more than one person set out to torture, or when one person tortures and another knows about it, or has authorized it from an administrative position, or has knowledge of it being, or having been underway but sits silent and fails to act to end the torture in whatever way or ways may be available, the person or persons are complicit in the crime. Complicity in a crime, committed and/or covered-up, is conspiracy. Conspiracy is therefore also a crime.

Today we have a vast and shallow sea of people on the right in the United States, drumming out this dark mantra that by committing this crime of torture, the United States is made safer from terrorism, even though torture is a crime (of terror?) and everyone knows it is a crime.

Are these right-wing torturers not co-conspirators in the crime, then? Is it a part of the right of free speech in America to advocate and condone the crime of torture as an instrument of state policy before and after the fact?

What is the point of laws against torture if so many can conspire openly to break the law, and to be exonerated by the co-conspirators? This is Cheneyism gone berserk. It is an open conspiracy, and the attorney general is derelict in his duty if he fails to act against it.

Torture is a crime. Enforce the law.

Your Honor, the State Rests….

What a spiritually painful profession to be in, lawyering. It must be, when the practitioners stand back and face the handiwork of their most public, and therefore prominent fellows,  namely prosecutors mishandling cases against government figures, and defense counselors who then cry “Foul” as they rub their sweaty mental palms gleefully,  knowing that the outcome of their opponents’ malfeasance must be the abandonment of charges against their client. Wherever crimes against people and property are occurring, the legal scavengers will be found making a feast of the piles of carrion produced by the apprehension of those perpetrating them. The relative seriousness of an offense, once it enters the system of “due process”, is of no account.

Examples today include that against former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, and that of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman. Both cases were brought by the Justice Department under the W. Bush administration, and both demonstrate the sorry truth that, to the extent it is possible for ideologues in the political system to subvert the workings of our legal system, no help for America’s mounting social and economic problems is on the way.

The two cases are most interesting in their juxtaposition to each other, because of the political affiliations that come attached to each. Stevens, a powerful and long-serving Republican, of the state where Sarah Palin can be elected governor running as the candidate of ethical probity, is an influential supporter and friend to arguably the most hogwild powerful administration-without-impunity the Republicans have yet produced, thanks to their record of diligence at trying harder and harder and getting it wronger and wronger for such a very long time.

The other case is the one pursued as a pet project of Karl Rove against a popular Democratic governor in the South, where it would be rightly feared that the days of knee-jerk response of super-patriotic Bible-believers and taxation-loathers to Republican candidates plastering of the “Liberal” label over everyone and everything not in their kit, may be coming at last to a welcome end. Rove broke so many laws against the politicization of the US justice system, from the loyalty-based vetting of US Attorney appointments and the firing of those who withstood it, to the use of the system to attack officials like Siegelman who threatened, by his popularity in a traditional GOP stronghold dating back to Nixon, the “permanent Republican majority” that, in their self-absorbed lunacy he and his ilk see it as a good thing.

There is a conundrum in all this that bears some thought. We Americans have long let ourselves be directed by slogans and soundbites, and one of the older ones has stood the test of time because it well describes the workings of a government system that, for all its faults and failures, has worked reasonably well until recently. It is said that “the wheels of government grind exceedingly slow, but exceedingly fine”. Unfortunately, when the legal machinery of government is hijacked, the result is coarse and unpalatable.

Sen. Ted Stevens took the money and got caught. Compared with him, Rep. George Hansen (Republican, Idaho), the first sitting member of Congress to be jailed for taking the money and getting caught, was a real lightweight. It should have been a slam-dunk, open-and-shut, game-over-zip-up-your-pants (we love you for phrases like this, Stephen King!) prosecution. How could it possibly have been turned around so that this W Bush ally could actually be released back into the wild, to quack “Fowl, fowl” loudly, knowing that only the few thousand of us who are really paying attention would see it for what it is.

I feel, and I believe (though I nor others probably will never be able to prove) that the prosecutors of Ted Stevens blew his prosecution because their political minders expected and demanded it, and this was the only way to bring it off. In other words, The prosecution and the defense were on the same side. In fact, being on the same side, and therefore possibly not the bulbs of most penetrating brilliance on the Republican Tree of Christmas, one imagines there must have been some awkward moments as the prosecutors had to point out to the distaff that, since rules governing evidentiary procedures had been broken, defense would have no choice but to….. (nudge, wink).

The Siegelman Case stinks far worse, because real crimes were committed to bring him down, and he spent a long time (which means something very different to the incarcerated than it does to you, if you haven’t been) behind bars as a result. But don’t take my word for it. As the farmer’s daughter is said to have uttered, “Google it!”

Facebook Fuddlement

When I realize how long it’s been since I posted here, and look at the content of my last post, and calculate the quantity of time spent at my workstation coupled with the nature of my activity here, a few things become clear to me.

First, I have spent an inordinate amount of time deleting email announcements of Facebook group announcements, and that must end. Most of the announcements are about events I can’t possibly attend, publications I won’t purchase, awards and deadlines that either don’t apply to me, or I don’t care about them, and friends’ comments about other friends’ comments , posts and whatnot, that have nothing to do with me, and other drawbacks. Conversely, if I were to make a list describing in detail the various ways in which I might actually feel I was getting benefit from Facebook, it would turn out to resemble earlier permutations of the site, which seems to become less for me and more for somebody I don’t know every time changes are made.
I don’t want to be mistaken for a total crank here, because I’ve gotten a few benefits from dipping my toes in the FB pool, entirely related to making connections with people I had lost touch with, or people I know in common with my closest and dearest friends, and family, extended family and those with whom I share some sense of spiritual propinquity, especially those who write compulsively, to whatever end.
So look for me less in Facebook in the future. Twitter me not. I’m coming back to the blog. Almost nobody reads it, but I don’t mind. The day may be coming when I unplug completely.

The last time I was in Yakima, an extraordinary gentleman poet, Jim Bodeen, walked me around his premises. Outside, near the corner where sidewalks intersect, he spent some time pawing through the papers attached to the cedar post he’d planted there for the purpose a couple years previous. He calls it the Poetry Pole, and it collects the writings of his friends and neighbors, his former students and colleagues, and the occasional itinerant poet vagrant on a pilgrimage. I hope I’ll make it back there in the latter category before I drop off the twig myself.

Jim publishes books under the Blue Begonia imprimatur, and one of his titles consists of some of the harvest from his poetry pole. He and his wife Karen, and the poetry pole, and Blue Begonia, and everything he’s every written and/or published, are a thing of such surpassing beauty that it makes me feel a little arrogant trying to characterize it. The point is that neither Facebook nor any other online endeavor can ever bring the same exalted sense of one’s shared humanity with others. They can only reference it.

World’s Biggest Breasts-and they Speak Five Languages!

I’m determined to get back to this blog more, and more often. I’ve been sidetracked by Facebook (did I tell you this?) and am looking for ways the two can achieve synergy. Here’s a start. I found this item at HuffPo today, and shared it on Facebook. It triggered an email exchange with a young mother whose visceral reaction (no pun intended) to the post prompted her to request in the most reasonable possible terms, would I please take it down, as it was simply too offensive? I responded as best I could, and she accepted my response.

Her request, and my reply, and our subsequent ripostes, are recorded here for posterity:

Jennifer: any chance you’d consider taking that blog post down? It’s really offensive — I’m not really like that, but looking at it over and over on my news feed is kind of bumming me out. Mostly I don’t know you but enjoy your posts and your updates — especially loved the one about your mother…

Familographer: Hi Jennifer, I am utterly sincere in apologizing for this offensive post. Let me explain why I put it up, and if you still want it gone, well I’d much rather it were gone, than you, as a reader of other posts, were gone, and I’ll delete it.

It offends me too. I think it will offend most people, and that’s why I put it up. I’m trying to highlight what Barbara Ehrenreich, in the most recent of her vids I watched last night, this process of the dumbing down of America, this fascination with the trivial, the superficial, the sensational, and how the inevitable end of that process, men’s fascination with mammaries, for one example, and its signal of the objectification of women, is a part of that utter dumbness. Hence my comment about them speaking five languages fluently! Does anyone really believe that, even in today’s multi-cultural, polyglot world, that a twenty-three year old “model, singer, actress” et.al who will undergo the surgery necessary to top her breasts up with a gallon of silicone, actually has the mental wherewithal to become fluent in more than a couple of languages at most?! I’m a language teacher, and I have seen some extraordinarily gifted learners in 40 years of it. The claim is just bullshit, and yet there will be those silly enough to accept it at face value.

I posted the item as a reminder to all who see it just how monumental is the task we face if we are to survive as a species. When a young person concludes that the best measure of her personal worth is something so utterly grotesque, it does give me the same unpleasant sensation in the pit of my stomach as it does you. By that rationale, I hope you will post it on, for it is every bit as disgusting and freakish as you and one other woman have said, and for that reason it needs to be broadcast as a warning of coming extremes of vacuity. The image is its own antidote.

Now tell me if you still want it to disappear.

Your friend,
(father of a lovely, brilliant 18-yr-old daughter who DOES speak 5 languages, and who is just as repulsed by it as you are).

Jennifer: Thanks for this — it makes much more sense. The problem is just the image — looking at it and what it means for women. Her too — compassion. Women and what they connect to their bodies — what the feel the need to do or be –
sometimes you can choose a second photo for a post –

anyway — thanks for the consideration and the explanation.

Have a good day.
Jennifer
(mother of an 8 year-old who is too into Hannah Montana.)

Familographer: You’re completely welcome, and I share your compassionate slant toward this young woman; even though we know its already too late to help her, if other young women and girls can get more reminders that there are very respectable people who value them for far better qualities, it may encourage them to develop those qualities instead. For some reason Warren Zevon’s “Mr Bad Example” popped into my head.

About that thumbnail, it actually didn’t appear in the original article as displayed in the Huffington Post. I have no idea where it came from, but I’ll definitely investigate the possibility of choosing less flashy ones in the future, though I hope it won’t be too soon that a store of this particular type appears (though I fear the worst).

Good luck with your daughter. I don’t know anything about Hannah Montana, maybe because we got rid of our TV when our daughter started adopting certain behavioral quirks of cartoon characters. We’ve never been sorry, but we’re culturally impaired by it, at least in the pop sense. We screen DVDs on the living room wall with a beam projector when we crave big A/V.

Jennifer: I got rid of my TV too — unfortunately, I can’t get rid of my x-husband…
it’s been lovely talking to you.
smiles.

Familographer: The pleasure is entirely mine, and my ex-wife knows exactly what you mean.