The Liberal's Lament

No Recruit Left Behind

2005-06-26T19:39:00.000-07:00

In a bizarre twist of the “No Child Left Behind” concept, the Army is using every possible tactic to meet its recruiting needs as it falls ever shorter of each month’s goal. And, it is that very act that is giving the Army a helping hand. A provision of President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act requires school districts to provide military recruiters with student phone numbers and addresses or risk losing millions in federal education funding. So it would appear that George W. Bush does not want your child left behind when the 1st Cavalry Division ships out for Iraq.

Parents or students 18 and over can "opt out" by submitting a written request to keep the information private. But critics say schools do not always convey that message. In New Mexico, the American Civil Liberties Union chapter sued the Albuquerque Public School District last month, charging it does not adequately inform parents of the opt-out provision.

You will notice that none of the Bush – Cheney children is volunteering for duty in Iraq, even though it would be so easy for the military to ensure that they had a cushy job behind the lines in Qatar. But lots of minority kids are getting those friendly phone calls from Army recruiters who, in the face of stiff competition from the evening news about the real facts in Iraq, often lie to potential recruits in order to get them to sign up.

If the war in Iraq had anything to do with our national security as, say, the war in Afghanistan does, I think you would see a lot more kids enlisting. Think of Pat Tillman, for example. However, it is becoming increasingly obvious that the Iraq war is just a misadventure on the part of a president who was misled by neocon advisors, leftovers from his father’s administration who always felt they had been denied the opportunity to finish off Saddam in 1991. Now they are using other people’s kids as cannon fodder for a stupid mistake.

When All Else Fails, Call Your Opponent a Coward

2005-06-24T22:40:00.000-07:00

Well, the White House reverted to form this week. With the president’s poll numbers in the dumpster, the war in Iraq going south, Republicans in Congress beginning to abandon ship, they turned to their standard line – “we’re stronger on terror than the Democrats.”

Karl Rove – popularly known as Bush’s brain – was addressing the New York Conservative Party this week when he said, “Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war. Liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.”

Not only is this remark stupid, vapid and untrue, but it also ignores another aphorism that could be thrown out about 9/11. To wit, the Bush administration used it as an excuse to launch and illegal war on Iraq. One that has not only made us less safe from terrorism (remember Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s remark that we are creating terrorists in Iraq faster than we can kill them?), but it also has diverted most of our military effort away from the actual war on terror, the one in Afghanistan and it has kept us from finding and killing Osama bin Laden.

It just goes to show the truth of the old adage, “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”

Bush Goes to War - Sort of

2005-06-23T22:33:00.000-07:00

Heard the latest? Bush is going to Vietnam – finally. I guess he must have broken down, violated his policy and read a newspaper. That would have told him that the war was over and it was safe to go now.

Or maybe his handlers explained to him that he’d be O.K. with all of his bodyguards.

Anyway, the little old draft dodger is finally going to be “in country”.

Resolute or Stubborn?

2005-06-20T19:38:00.000-07:00

A headline in today’s San Francisco Chronicle states that George W. Bush is refusing to relinquish his idea of private accounts for Social Security. During the last campaign, Bush scored high in terms of resoluteness, his firm stand on his positions. However, where is the point where resoluteness turns to stubbornness, and stubbornness turns to stupidity? Not only are the Democrats firmly against Bush’s idea, not only is the public against it by a two to one margin, quite a few members of his own party are opposed to the idea – some of them because they are fiscally responsible and see the folly of it and others because they simply don’t want to jeopardize their reelection chances by backing an unpopular idea.

Part of the problem for Bush is his disconnect with the real world. When he went on his 60-city tour to promote this idea, his handlers made sure that he was always speaking in front of adoring and supportive crowds. You had to pass a loyalty test just to get into the auditorium to hear him speak. Consequently, it must have been easy for him to come away with the misconception that the public overwhelmingly supported his idea.

But a bigger part of his problem is that the mantra of this administration is: never admit that you were wrong, never take the blame, never say that the future of your plans isn’t one of rose petals and honey. Case in point – Iraq.

When Bush first met Vladimir Putin he came away saying that he looked into Putin’s soul and saw an honest man that he could deal with. Now that Putin’s Russia is sliding into a new totalitarian state, Bush is concerned but is boxed in by his previous statements and his pathological refusal to admit he could have been wrong.

A lot of this stems from Bush’s religious fervor. He has that smug self-assurance that comes from someone who has a direct line to God’s ear. Bush says that his life became totally new – say, born again – when he dedicated himself to Jesus Christ. In other words, I don’t need to think. God is directing my thoughts and actions. Therefore, anything I do is, ipso facto, the right thing.

Those Liberal Activist Judges: Where Do They Come From?

2005-06-18T17:15:00.000-07:00

The far right continues to whine about how they are being mistreated by the judicial branch of our government. They wail about liberal activist judges who use their own personal views to create new laws from the bench. Focus on the Family founder, the so-called Rev. James Dobson, rants regularly about “judicial tyranny” and likens the Supreme Court to the KKK, “I heard a minister the other day talking about the great injustice and evil of the men in white robes, the Ku Klux Klan, that roamed the country in the South, and they did great wrong to civil rights and to morality. And now we have black-robed men, and that's what you're talking about.” Earlier this year, the Rev. Pat Robertson said that Federal judges were a greater threat to this country than the 9/11 terrorists.

Let’s just look dispassionately at some of the facts. Richard Nixon was elected in 1968. George W. Bush will leave office in 2008. That’s a 40-year stretch. In that period we have had five Republican presidents (Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush pops and the Bush baby) who served (or will serve) for a total of 28 years. We had two Democrats (Carter and Clinton) who served for a total of 12 years. So for nearly three-fourths of the 40 years, Republicans have been nominating the judges to sit on the Federal bench.

But wait, it gets even better. For 6 of the 8 years that Bill Clinton was in office, the Republicans controlled the Senate. Many of his nominees (65) did not even get out of committee for a vote on the floor. So for just 6 years of the 40-year span from 1968 to 2008 (four years under Carter and two under Clinton), the Democrats controlled both the White House and the Senate simultaneously and could appoint whomever they chose to the Federal bench. During the remaining 34 years, the Republicans controlled either the nominating process (the presidency) or the confirmation process (the Senate). Yet, to hear the conservatives whine, we are to believe that the Federal judiciary is inundated with liberal judges. How could the Democrats have pulled this off when Mark Shields, a liberal columnist, is always saying they are so confused with different interest groups pulling in different directions that they couldn’t organize a 3-car funeral?

Some additional numbers might be further enlightening. That Supreme Court that Dobson likens to the KKK consists of 7 justices appointed by Republicans and 2 appointed by Democrats. Of those two, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was confirmed by the Senate by a 97 – 3 vote and Steven Breyer was confirmed by a vote of 87 – 9.

On the state and local level, many judges are elected as in Texas and here in California. Therefore the claim that judges are freewheeling and unaccountable holds no water.

Indeed there are activist judges of both liberal and conservative stripes. Twenty-five years ago, when I first moved to California, the Chief Justice of the state supreme court was Rose Bird. Rose Bird was opposed to the death penalty. She made it clear that any death penalty appeal that reached the court would be overturned, and she lived up to that promise. Now I am somewhat ambivalent about the death penalty. But I am not ambivalent about a judge saying that she will ignore the law and apply her own bias to any case that comes before her. I, like millions of other Californians, voted for her recall, and she was thrown off the court. So much for the claim that judges are unaccountable.

Memo to conservatives: stop whining. They’re your judges.

The Downing Street Memos

2005-06-16T17:17:00.000-07:00

A gradual drumbeat is building over the Downing St. memos. For those of you who live in a political cave, these are British documents detailing the Bush push to start a war with Iraq. The thing is, you see, the memos clearly show that the Bush administration had made up their minds to invade and overthrow Saddam Hussein well over a year before they publicly said so. They were developing the military plans and twisting the intelligence on weapons of mass destruction long before they came out publicly and gave Saddam an ultimatum. It is now clear that there was nothing that Saddam could have done, short of abdicating and going into exile, which would have prevented the Bush administration from attacking him. They demanded inspections; he let in inspectors. The inspectors found long-range missiles (not allowed under the 1991 cease fire); Saddam had them destroyed. They found no biological or chemical weapons; the Bush administration said he was hiding them. There was no way for him to win.

In March of 2003, George W. Bush was almost apoplectic when the U.N. balked at letting him invade Iraq. Not since 1939 had the world seen a head of state who was so adamant about starting a war. The reason why Bush was pushing hard for a start date in the spring of 2003 is simple to understand. The administration wasn’t sure if Saddam possessed biological weapons, but they were sure that he’d use them if he had them. It would have been almost impossible for our soldiers to fight in the heat of the Iraqi summer wearing chemical/biological protective suits on top of everything else they have to carry. If the war wasn’t started in the spring of 2003, that would mean Bush would have to wait until the winter and run the risk of waging a war and a reelection campaign simultaneously. He didn’t want to do that. He wanted the war over, all neat and tied up and delivered to the U.S. public with a big yellow ribbon when he started to campaign in 2004. Hence the tantrums and vehemence with which he pushed to launch his illegal attack on another country.

It was the illegality of the war, as shown in the Downing Street memos, that concerned the British as well. Richard Perle, the self-described Prince of Darkness, and one of the major architects of the Bush foreign policy, conceded in November 2003 that the war had been illegal but justified it by saying, “I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing.” According to an article in the British newspaper The Guardian, “But Mr Perle, a key member of the defence policy board, which advises the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said that ‘international law ... would have required us to leave Saddam Hussein alone’, and this would have been morally unacceptable.”

The death toll of young Americans in Iraq has now surpassed 1700. At the current rate, sometime during the Bush presidency, it will exceed the number of those killed in the terrorist attacks of 9/11. This will leave George W. Bush with the dilemma of explaining to the American public why he started an illegal war against a country that was not involved in terrorist activities against the U.S.; why he refused to provide the resources to defeat the enemy and allowed that enemy to pick off our young GIs at will; why Osama bin Laden is still at large in Pakistan; and why the U.S. is now in greater danger from terrorist attacks than before he stumbled into office.

Weak Knees in the Republican Party

2005-06-14T15:54:00.000-07:00

The AP ran a wire story yesterday headlined, “Republican Lawmakers Urge Shift in Iraq Plans”. The gist is that Republican members of Congress are getting nervous. No they are not nervous about our boys and girls in Iraq being killed; they are nervous about their own jobs. They see the president’s job approval rating on a down escalator, and, like rats leaving a sinking ship, they don’t want to be dragged under. It’s not that they have had a sudden epiphany concerning Iraq. After all they were big boosters of the president’s plan to go in and sprinkle democracy fairy dust in the Iraqi desert. They can’t come back now and say it was wrong headed; that would be flip-flopping. And, we all know what happens to flip-floppers when they run for office. You see the problem is that next year is an election year, and things just aren’t working out the way they planned.

"I voted for the resolution to commit the troops, and I feel that we've done about as much as we can do," said [Walter] Jones, who coined the phrase "freedom fries" to lash out at the French for opposing the Iraq invasion. Jones, a South Carolina Republican, is getting week kneed and will offer legislation this week proposing a timetable for American withdrawal.

You know things have to be pretty bad for the president’s colleagues to go so starkly against the party line. It was, if you recall, the president who was so adamant against a timetable. He said, if we give the Iraqis a date for our withdrawal, the insurgents only need to hold out for one day longer.

From another Republican stalwart come this, "The insurgency is alive and well. We underestimated the viability of the insurgency," Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, said on CBS' Face the Nation. He said the administration has "been slow to adjust when it comes to troop strength and supporting our troops."

Slow to adjust! Who’s he kidding? The administration has been obstinate to fault that we had just the right number of troops in Iraq to do the job. This administration is so cowardly and so fearful of admitting an error, that they will let the insurgents pick off our soldiers one at a time rather than admit that there are just too few of them there to handle the situation.

During the election, Bush and Cheney sneered that John Kerry had voted against a bill funding additional body armor for the troops in Iraq. They just never made the connection that it was they who sent those troops into harm’s way without sufficient body armor in the first place. Poor George, he was so certain that he understood the situation. He was so sure of his advisors. Now his approval rating is going down the toilet. And, oh yeah, there's those 1700 dead boys and girls.

Exactly How Smart Are Conservatives?

2005-06-12T23:01:00.000-07:00

An ongoing debate rages in the circles that I travel in. It basically can be summed up in a single question: are conservatives stupid? This is not simple name calling – although there is plenty of that in our nation’s current political discourse. This is a serious debate that cannot be simply sloughed off as partisan rhetoric. And, this goes far beyond the frequent criticisms of George W. Bush (many in this very blog) for his fractured syntax and poor grasp of world history. No, this goes to some basic issues that can have a profound impact on our culture and our quality of life.

There is no doubt that there are many on the conservative side of political issues who have substantial intellectual horsepower. The problem then becomes, how do you reconcile their obvious intellect with their stand on such things as global warming? When the entire scientific community is in virtual agreement that human activities are contributing to global climate change and conservatives maintain an entrenched, hard headed, obstinate refusal to see the light, it leaves one with only two possible explanations: stupidity or evil.

Why would conservatives be considered “evil” for opposing efforts to reduce the human effects on the environment? Because, by using their political power to block needed reforms, they condemn the rest of the world to suffer ills unnecessarily. This is particularly noxious when you consider that their main argument for their stand is that it will cost us money. Considering that they have no problems blowing about $100 billion dollars of our tax money on a senseless war in Iraq every few months, this seems to be a hollow argument. Besides, studies have indicated that, were we to adopt efforts to limit our carbon dioxide emissions, the initial effect on the economy would be positive because of the new technologies that would be needed – something that this country excels at.

So, if we choose not to think of them as evil, the alternative is stupid. To support this argument, I offer you the following proposition. What kind of person would intentionally teach his children bogus knowledge? Religious conservatives, that’s who. The new Museum of Earth History opened in Eureka Springs, Arkansas last month. Among other things it teaches visitors that the entire history of the earth spans only 6,000 years, that dinosaurs and humans coexisted in the past, and, of course, that there is no such thing as evolution. I rest my case for stupid.

A Stunning Bush Victory Against Terror

2005-06-08T16:56:00.000-07:00

The FBI arrested two men in Lodi, California yesterday in another stunning victory in George W. Bush’s war on terror. They were a father and son, which the FBI claims were an al Qaeda terror cell right here in the U.S. They were trained at a terrorist facility in Pakistan with the purported goal of killing Americans.

It seems that the father was an ice cream truck driver. Their sinister plot was to get Americans to eat too much ice cream. This would exacerbate the already legendary obesity crisis in the U.S. leading to more diabetes and heart disease.

There is no doubt that al Qaeda has once again demonstrated the extreme evil and sinister nature of their organization. Thank god the Bush administration is hot on the heels of these evildoers. I, for one, am sleeping a lot easier tonight.

Payback Time for a True Friend

2005-06-07T17:06:00.000-07:00

Tony Blair is often referred to in the British press and George W. Bush’s lapdog. It infuriates the British the way Blair sucks up to Bush. It especially incenses them the way he participated in the twisting of intelligence data to justify an invasion of Iraq in search of non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

Now Blair has come to Washington and is ready to cash in some of the I.O.U.s that he feels are his due for kissing W’s cowboy boots (or whatever part of Bush’s anatomy he was kissing). Not so fast, Limey! That’s a one-way street you’re on. And it runs away from you and Britain.

Blair wants to make global warming a signature theme of his third and final term as British prime minister. He wants to make this a major thrust of the G8 meeting he will be hosting in Scotland later this summer. He was hoping Georgie-boy would be on board. No way, bud. This president doesn’t believe the “science” is there to support global warming. Translation: it’s not mentioned in the Bible, therefore it can’t be real. Funny how a guy who could buy into the flimsiest intelligence on weapons of mass destruction needs a Ph.D. thesis to convince him of what the rest of the world has come to understand, i.e., that human activity is heating up the atmosphere.

Blair was also looking for W’s support on more international aid for Africa. Again, the cold shoulder. Should’ve played these bargaining chips before the Iraq war, Tony. Too late now. Bush doesn’t have time to repay loyalty. Not in this year’s game plan.

The Lessons of Deep Throat

2005-06-01T14:47:00.000-07:00

The revelation of the identity of the Watergate era anonymous source to the Washington Post, “Deep Throat,” should serve as a reminder to those in office about the arrogance of absolute power. The last thing that Richard Nixon needed during his 1972 reelection bid was the Watergate break-in. He was virtually assured of defeating George McGovern, who was considered too liberal and too dovish by the general electorate. However, that did not matter to Nixon. Driven by his legendary paranoia, he wanted to use every means at his disposal – both legal and illegal – to assure his victory. Well, he got what he wanted, a landslide reelection, and, in the process, destroyed his presidency as well as his historical legacy. He has gone down in history as the first, and only, president to resign from office, and he will always be remembered as a small time crook and petty tyrant.

Those in office today would do well to remember this historical lesson. The power you have may grant you the right to do as you choose. But, be careful what you wish for; you may just get it. George W. Bush, who knew that he was not legally elected in 2000, pledged at his inaugural to be a uniter not a divider. He then promptly proceeded to be a divider because he lived in fear of making the same mistake that his father made, not being true to the far right of the party, and consequently loosing their support in his reelection campaign. After the 2004 election, which Bush won by the narrowest margin of any sitting president in history, he strutted around and spoke of cashing in the political capital he had earned. He acted like he was Ronald Reagan after his landslide defeat of Walter Mondale or Lyndon Johnson after his landslide over Barry Goldwater. He promptly forgot that nearly 60 million people had voted for his opponent. He didn’t care. They didn’t matter. After all, they weren’t true Americans; they only voted for the war hero instead of the draft dodger.

Now he can’t understand why his Social Security “rescue” plan has a 2:1 unfavorable rating in public opinion polls. He can’t understand why over 60% of the public think the war in Iraq was a big mistake and is going badly. He can’t understand why 60 members of his own party in the House of Representatives abandoned him on the stem cell research bill. None of this makes sense to him. He has all that political capital. Where did it all go?

Maybe it was like his budgets that have huge deficits for future generations to pay. Maybe he spent all his political capital in his first term ginning up his phony intelligence to support the war in Iraq and nominating Neanderthals to the Federal judiciary. Now there is no political capital left to spend in this term.

Bush Blames Everyone Else

2005-05-31T13:28:00.000-07:00

I was greeted this morning by an on-line news report that George W. Bush is attacking Amnesty International for its report on prisoner abuse at Guantanamo Bay. According to the Bush baby, the report is “absurd” and just represents the views of people who hate America. That’s right, George, stick to your policy of never admitting a mistake. Never take responsibility for the despicable results of your policies. Remember, it’s always the “Blame America First” crowd who are the problem. It is never you or your minions.

To Bush it is just silly. How can freedom loving Americans be charged with abusing someone else’s freedom? Just doesn’t make sense. Anyone can see that.

Bush then went on to say how well we were achieving our goals in Iraq. “With the death toll climbing daily in Iraq, he said that nation's fledging government is ‘plenty capable’ of defeating insurgents whose attacks on Iraqi civilians and U.S. soldiers have intensified.” Yeah, right. I’d sure like to get some of what Bush is smoking these days.

Memo to George W. Bush: there is an all out civil war taking place in Iraq. We don’t have enough troops on the ground to get the job done. We are not achieving any of our goals. Yeah, we staged an election – to do which we had to shut down the country for 48 hours. Now members of the government created by that election cannot set foot outside of the heavily fortified green zone in Baghdad without being assassinated. What we have created is a city council for the green zone. The insurgents strike with impunity anywhere outside of that enclave.

Mr. Bush, I suggest that you study the Vietnam War, a war that you so assiduously avoided participating in. The military rule of thumb is that you have to outnumber insurgents by roughly 6 to 1 in order to win a guerilla war. The civilians in your Defense Department have steadfastly knocked down any general who says we need more troops. First they make it clear to the generals that anyone who says more troops are required for this mission will see his career end. Then Rumsfeld gets in front of the cameras and says, “Who, me? The commanders on the ground get all the troops they have asked for.” Yeah, right. After you’ve told them what the consequences are for asking for more.

Sam Walton Meet Henry Ford

2005-05-26T17:14:00.000-07:00

To paraphrase Winston Churchill, capitalism is the worst economic system possible, until you consider the alternatives. There is no question that capitalism has enabled the democracies of the West to achieve unrivaled wealth, a broadly shared, high standard of living and excellent health with a long life expectancy and very low infant mortality. The dynamism of market driven economics knows no equal for finding the best and most efficient way to bring a given product to market at the best price for the consumer.

But, left unregulated, capitalism quickly degenerates into a vicious system that grinds down workers in the never-ending quest for the highest profits. Some degree of regulation and control of capitalism (by both government and unions) is necessary to rein in these unhealthy tendencies. This not only protects workers, but it protects the capitalist system. Right wing Republicans are always cheering on “the market”. “Let the market do its thing,” they cry. “Market forces always find the most efficient solution.” They forget that the Bolshevik revolution was a result of market forces. The stock market crash in 1929 that lead to the Great Depression was brought about by “market forces.” An unrestrained free market inevitably overshoots and undershoots as it barrels along trying to find an equilibrium that can never be achieved without some form of outside control.

Market forces dictate that you offer the lowest wages at which you can still get people to apply for your jobs. Any capitalist worth his salt knows that paying people more than you need to is a recipe for financial ruin. Labor is a commodity to be purchased just like electricity and steel. As long as there are people lined up to apply for your jobs, your wages are high enough. You buy steel at the lowest possible price, why not labor?

No one would ever accuse old Henry Ford of being a communist. The unapologetic anti-Semite was as ruthless a capitalist as ever came down the pike. But in 1914 he had a problem. Annual turnover in his plants was 380%. He had to hire a thousand men in order to keep one hundred working. He came up with the idea of offering a wage of $5 a day, double the prevailing wage and unheard of at the time. The Wall Street Journal called him a traitor to his class. (He would later share that distinction with Franklin Roosevelt after Roosevelt saved capitalism from its self-defeating excesses during the Great Depression.) But Ford’s idea worked. He got a stable and reliable workforce of the best men available. Production went up. Quality went up. Sales went up. And, he spent less on advertising because of all the free publicity he got from the idea.

So Ford gave his workers more and got a lot more in return. A decade later, his personal net worth was $1 billion (this at a time when a college graduate could expect to make about $2,000 a year in a starting salary). But even Ford acknowledged that the true greatness of his $5 a day wage was what it did for his workers. It lifted them into a real middle class. With their additional buying power, they could afford things such as radios, refrigerators, and, of course, Fords. By creating a consumer class, everyone benefited from capitalists to workers. This may have been the first true example of a win-win scenario.

Compare this to the Wal-Mart way of doing business. They pay their workers low wages and minimal benefits. They shut down stores where the workers vote to unionize. They grind down their suppliers trying to get every last cent of price reduction. They openly encourage their suppliers to shut down their American factories and send the jobs overseas just so Wal-Mart can get a lower price. In the process, they are destroying the very consumers they need as customers. Can anything be stupider? How can people who have lost their jobs continue to shop at Wal-Mart? Wal-Mart also shifts their health benefits burden to the state. It is estimated, for example, that the taxpayers of California pay $86 million each year in benefits (subsidized rents, welfare and MediCal) to Wal-Mart employees.

When Wal-Mart moves into a community, not only do the small, local, Mom and Pop stores go out of business, their bigger competitors like Safeway are forced into a race to the bottom. The competitors have to cut their wages and benefits in order to compete with Wal-Mart. In the end, everyone suffers when the middle class of blue-collar workers can no longer afford to go to the doctor or buy the basics. But the dyed in the wool capitalists will praise Wal-Mart to the end as an example of a well-run company.

Lenin said that a capitalist would sell you the rope you use to hang him. Wal-Mart will squeeze the last dollar out of the last consumer and then wonder where their customers went.

By the way, I’d like to thank a fellow blogger for the favorable nod and reciprocate. Take a look at the following: http://sitka.blogspot.com/.

Stem Cell Debate Heats Up

2005-05-25T10:41:00.000-07:00

Well, it looks as though the House of Representatives is going to give George W. Bush and the religious right their first piece of red meat in a while. The House passed a bill yesterday authorizing the use of Federal funds for embryonic stem cell research when the embryos in question are fertility clinic leftovers. In order to understand why this is significant, you need to know a little science – not a lot – so there’s always a possibility that the president just might get it, but don’t hold your breath.

When couples want to try in vitro fertilization, the husband donates sperm and the wife donates eggs. Now, sperm can be frozen and kept almost indefinitely, but a woman’s eggs cannot. However, fertilized human eggs can be frozen and kept for long periods of time. Also, the harvesting of a woman’s eggs is not a simple or pleasant procedure. So, what these clinics do is they extract a couple of dozen of a woman’s eggs, fertilize them with the husband’s sperm and freeze them. They then take a few of those fertilized eggs and implant them in the woman’s womb. If one or more of them takes, she becomes pregnant and, hopefully, delivers a healthy baby in nine months. The remaining fertilized eggs are kept in case the couple decides in a year or two that they would like to have another child or if a pregnancy did not occur and another one is to be attempted.

Now here’s the tough part for the president to grasp. If the couple decides that they don’t want any more children, those fertilized eggs are, to put it politely, discarded. They are thrown out with the trash; they are flushed down the tube. Get the picture? These fertilized eggs are usually referred to as embryos because, after fertilization, a few cell divisions are allowed to occur before they are frozen. So, instead of just being a single fertilized egg, we have what is technically called a blastocyst – a collection of less than 100 cells that is smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. It has no face, no hands, no fingers, no brain – and no beating heart. Like the organs from a fatally injured child, however, the blastocyst has the power to transform the lives of others. If, rather than discarding them with yesterday’s newspaper, the couple (with informed consent) allows them to be used to produce stem cells, they can contribute to our understanding of disease, lead to cures and generally advance the welfare of our culture.

The religious right (and their trained monkey in the White House) is caught on the horns of an ethical dilemma here. No one is talking about creating embryos for the purpose of stem cell research. They are proposing using already created embryos that will be flushed into the sewer otherwise. You will note that you will not hear anything from the far right about saving these embryos and implanting them into infertile women and bringing them to full term. It is impractical. There are way too many of them (tens of thousands).

George W. Bush says that stem cell research is OK as long as the stem cell line was in existence prior to him becoming president. So we know that he is not opposed to Federal funding for stem cell research in principle. He is only opposed to destroying embryos to create new stem cell lines. But apparently, he and his ilk are not opposed to destroying embryos that no one wants. It has got to be real interesting to watch him try to explain his way out of this one.

John Bolton and Saddam's Underwear

2005-05-24T16:06:00.000-07:00

The recent publication of photos alleged to be of Saddam Hussein in his underwear while in American custody is just the latest example of the cultural divide that separates Middle Eastern Muslims from Western Christians. Arabs were outraged while people in the west pretty much shrugged their shoulders and said he deserved it. [From my perspective, I don’t think the pictures were genuine. All the photos of Sadam that I have seen show him a lot paunchier than these latest photos. I’ll bet they are fakes.] However, their authenticity is beside the point. What is more crucial is the fact that we in the west keep thinking up new ways to rub salt into Arab wounds. This inability to understand, relate to and respect others cultures has been a hallmark of the Bush administration. Although the Bush baby pays lip service to respecting other cultures, he doesn’t really and it shows.

This is dangerous. The Middle Eastern Muslims live for revenge. If some Jew defiled a mosque in 950 A.D. you can bet that some young Arabs in a madrasa somewhere in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia is being taught to hate them and to plot revenge on all Jews while you are reading this blog. They never forget an insult or a slight.

The Bush administration doesn’t confine its cultural insults to Muslims. Think back to the insults of the French and the Germans in the days and months leading up to the Iraq war. Even while both countries had troops supporting ours in Afghanistan, the Bushies couldn’t stop mocking them for their insistence that we not conduct an illegal invasion of Iraq based on weak intelligence.

Now that the nuclear option is off the table for the confirmation of Federal judges, I expect the nomination of John Bolton to be our ambassador to the U.N. to come up for a vote in the Senate. I am hoping, and am reasonably sure, that the Democrats will not try to filibuster Bolton’s nomination. I say, if the president wants to make a fool of himself on the international stage, by all means let him. Bolton is the least diplomatic person to be nominated for such a delicate position that requires the ultimate in diplomacy. The Bushies like him for his outspoken nature. I.e., he insults anyone with whom he disagrees. He is in keeping with their testosterone-driven foreign policy: invade, attack, insult and sneer. Anything that causes the rest of the world to view them as a bunch of out of control cowboys is just fine with them. That’s the way they like it.

This attitude is engendered by the belief that, since we are the world’s last superpower, we can do what we like. And, what we like is anything that advances our interests. The problem is that there have been lots of the world’s last superpower: Greece, Rome, Britain. There is no doubt that China will one day be a superpower. And, Russia could easily make a comeback. When that occurs, we’re going to need friends again.

The Government Blames the Media

2005-05-18T22:13:00.000-07:00

The White House and Pentagon have jumped on Newsweek’s “retraction” of their Koran desecration story like a chicken on a June bug. They’ve assumed a haughty tone and condemned Newsweek for poor journalism, for using only one source and an anonymous one at that.

Not so fast. If you read the fine print of Newsweek’s revised position, it isn’t really that much of a retraction. Newsweek first printed the story using information from a “reliable, high government official”, in other words, someone they’ve used before and whose information has always panned out, and someone who, if you saw his/her name, you’d recognize it. They also passed the full story by two Pentagon officials, neither of whom questioned the accuracy of the allegation that the Koran had been desecrated.

Now, the “source” says that he may not be so sure that the government report he saw contained the story of the Koran desecration. I.e., he thinks he could be wrong. That’s not exactly a foursquare denial of the accuracy of the story. It’s more of a, “well, since my story sparked riots that have killed 17 people, perhaps I was mistaken” kind of correction. Nevertheless, the government, happy that the Islamic radicals have someone else in their sights for a change, has seized upon the amended version and put all the blame on Newsweek and “loose journalistic practices”.

It is obvious, from the various reports coming out of the Guantanamo Bay prison (some by the FBI) as reported on “60 Minutes” a couple of weeks ago, that our Army interrogators will use any technique available to them including desecrating a Koran to try to break the prisoners in their custody. “60 Minutes” reported female interrogators smearing of menstrual blood (actually red ink) on prisoners who were then denied soap and water to clean up. The purpose of this little charade was to prohibit the prisoner from making his evening prayer ritual because he cannot do it in an “unclean” state. Would interrogators who did that refrain from desecrating a Koran? I doubt it.

No Compromise

2005-05-17T10:35:00.000-07:00

Ever buy a car? When you’re negotiating with the dealer, a popular tactic on their part is to offer a compromise. Let’s say they want $32,000 and you’re offering $28,000. They’ll try to get you to say, “Let’s split the difference.” Now your offer is up to $30,000. Again they dig in their heels and after an additional round of discussions, they say, “Gee, we’re only $2,000 apart. Why don’t we split the difference?” Now they close the deal at $31,000. You’ve moved up $3,000 from your original offer and they’ve moved down just $1,000.

The Republicans are using this tactic right now in the Senate to try to get George W. Bush’s most extreme judicial nominees through. In Bush’s first term, the Democrats blocked just 7 out of Bush’s 210 nominees for being too extreme. That means that 203 judges were approved by the Senate and are now serving lifetime appointments. That is a 97% success rate of judicial nominations.

Not satisfied with that, Bush went ahead and appointed several of the blocked nominees to the Federal bench while Congress was recessed for the summer. These are called recess appointments and are not permanent, but must be approved when Congress resumes. Those seven nominees are back for Senate confirmation now. If they don’t get approved, i.e., if the Democrats attempt to filibuster, the Republicans are threatening what they have called the nuclear option. They will change the Senate rules to prohibit filibusters of judicial nominations. The Democrats have offered a compromise. They’ll allow a floor vote on two of the judges – presumably the least objectionable. The Republicans have refused.

I say that the Democrats have compromised enough already. Ninety-seven percent is a pretty good compromise. One hundred percent is not a compromise. It is capitulation. Why are the Republicans being so greedy? For the same reason that dogs lick their balls – because they can. They have the majority and they see no reason to allow a party that represents just 49% of the voters (that was John Kerry’s share in the last election) to have any say in the running of the country.

Some Republicans are wary about using the nuclear option. They know that a day will come when they will not control the Senate and when a Democrat sits in the White House. They worry that a rash of liberal judges will be appointed. This is one reason why, although the Republicans have threatened the nuclear option, they have not employed it. They may not have enough votes from their own members to push it through.

It will be a sad day for this country when political parties engage in tit-for-tat politics rather than reasoned compromise.

Extreme Family Values

2005-05-16T23:32:00.000-07:00

The Bush re-election was driven (according to the mainstream media) by two major factors: a strong emphasis on national security and a commitment to family values. On the national security front, it seems that the terror alert was adjusted from yellow to orange or orange to red any time the Kerry-Edwards ticket seemed to be gaining traction with the voters. Now that the election is over, none other than Tom Ridge, the former Secretary of Homeland Security, has come out publicly stating that he often objected to the raised security ratings because the data just did not support it. But he was always overruled by the politicos who ran the administration. With the election in the bag, heightened states of alert would only draw attention to Bush’s inability to roll up al Qaeda, so there have been no more terror alerts. Isn’t it interesting that we are to suppose bin Laden has lost interest in us now that his old nemesis has been re-elected?

On the family values front, the Republicans worked hard to get anti gay marriage initiatives on the ballot in many crucial states like Ohio. This ensured that their most bigoted supporters would be sure to go to polls and pull the level for the Bush team while they were also there to express their disdain for equal rights for a suppressed minority. The Bushies always are quick to point out how the Republican Party is so supportive of family values. Take Dr. W. David Hager whom Bush appointed to the Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Dr. Hager is an Ob-Gyn by training and it would be supposed that he is knowledgeable in this field. Dr. Hager is also a born again Christian who has been known to prescribe prayer as an antidote to PMS.

It seems now in an interview with his ex-wife of 30 years, published in The Nation, that Dr. Hager may need some follow-up training in his specialty. According to the interview, “Hager has been an aggressive advocate for the political agenda of the Christian right. A member of Focus on the Family's Physician Resource Council and the Christian Medical and Dental Society, Hager assisted the Concerned Women for America in submitting a ‘Citizen's Petition’ to the FDA in August 2002 to halt distribution and marketing of the abortion pill, RU-486.”

The interview goes on to list a series of allegations by Hager’s ex-wife including the fact that he demanded that she allow him to video tape them having sex (to which she assented), that he paid her to have oral and anal sex with him and that he sodomized her in her sleep at least once a month. When his wife complained, he explained that he couldn’t tell the difference between her anus and her vagina. This from an Ob-gyn!! You gotta love these people, if only for the excuses they come up with. So much for family values. I guess if you do it to your wife, its OK.

Kind of makes Bill Clinton look like a pussycat (no pun intended), doesn’t it?

Bush's Social Security Dodge

2005-05-10T18:36:00.000-07:00

George W. Bush’s plan for the overhaul of the Social Security system is a classic example of political flim-flam. First, you run around crying that there is a crisis at hand. (The so-called “crisis” is that in 2042, at current rates, the system will only be able to fund about 70% of its obligations.) Bush, if you buy into his rhetoric, would have us believe that the entire system is going to collapse next year. Bush’s solution is to accelerate the crisis. That’s right, to move forward the date by which Social Security becomes insolvent. His method of doing this is to take money out of the system. Right, he doesn’t plan to put more into Social Security; he plans to take more out. He wants to take money out for the purpose of creating private accounts (he calls them “personal accounts” because that term polled better in focus groups – remember when he promised in the 2000 campaign that his administration would not be run by focus groups, yeah right). George W. Bush wants to let everybody take one third of the total amount they and their employer currently pay into the system and put it in a separate account to be invested in the stock market.

There are, of course, a number of lies, false assumptions and rhetorical flourishes here. But, coming from the man who sold us on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and Iraq’s connection to 9/11, is anyone surprised? Firstly, Bush says that you will get a better return on your money in the stock market. Lie number one. It’s not your money. There is no account at the Social Security Administration with your name on it and a dollar figure associated with it. Social Security has been a pay as it goes system since its inception. What this means is that money collected today from current workers pays for the benefits to current retirees. Today’s retirees are not collecting on money they paid into the system years ago. Therefore, to talk of a “return on investment” is specious.

Secondly, Social Security was never meant to be a pension plan. It is a safety net. It is an income of last resort for the elderly poor. At this, it has been remarkably successful for decades. Is it any wonder that Bush’s “reform” plan is being met with a cold shoulder? People realize that it is not a get rich quick scheme, but they like the idea that it will be there when they retire as an income of last resort.

Thirdly, there are no guarantees in the stock market. Although, on average, the market goes up, there have been many long periods (up to a decade in some cases) where the market has gone down or sideways with no net gain. The average American is not sufficiently sophisticated when it comes to investing to handle this. Bush says, not to worry, we’ll have just six plans for you to invest in, all very conservative. If that’s the case, why not just invest the Social Security Trust Fund right now in conservative market plans? Why involve the individual and create another Federal bureaucracy to handle all those investment accounts?

The answer to that last question is the biggest Bush flim-flam of them all. There is no Social Security Trust Fund. It’s gone. It disappeared with the first Bush tax cuts as soon as he took office. Remember that budget surplus? It wasn’t a tax surplus; it was a surplus of revenues from excess Social Security payments. It was supposed to go into a “lock box” – at least that was Al Gore’s plan. Instead, Bush gave it back to his wealthy supporters in the form of tax reductions. Now he is scrambling to repair the damage. His solution? Let the little guy invest his money and, if he doesn’t do too well, well that’s his problem.

I might add that all this financial advice Bush is giving us is coming from a guy who failed in every business venture he got into until some well-connected friends of daddy’s got him a sweetheart deal as part owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team. Don’t you wish you had a daddy like that?

Robertson Attacks Liberal Judges

2005-05-08T22:32:00.000-07:00

The right wing of the Republican Party continues to incite its base in the hopes of producing another Timothy McVeigh or Eric Rudolph. Not satisfied with working through a legal system that was so carefully constructed 216 years ago and refined by a two-party system over the decades that acknowledges compromise and give-and-take, the extreme right wants it all and wants it now.

This past week, the so-called "reverend" Pat Roberston, founder of the Christian Coalition, appeared on national television and told an astounded George Stephanopoulos that liberal judges were the greatest threat faced by this country since the original colonies were formed nearly 400 years ago – greater than the cataclysm of the Civil War, greater than the threat of WWII, greater even than the 9/11 attacks by al Qaeda. In other words, anyone who disagrees with the religious views of the far right is un-American, a threat to this country or, in the words of Ann Coulter, a traitor.

There is a serious threat facing this country. But it is not from liberal judges. It is the ignorance and fear of the far right. They feel that not only has their chance arrived – their chance to establish a genuine theocracy in this country like the one in Iran – but also that this chance may never come again. If it slips from their fingers this time, they’ll never have another opportunity to take over. That is why they are so hysterical in their pronouncements and so desperate to overthrow the rules of the Senate to force through their extremist nominees. I only hope that reason can prevail and the true moderate tradition of this country’s history comes to the fore.

Judges are lifetime appointments. Judges cannot be removed from the bench except for malfeasance. It is very important that only the best, most honorable and most sober of men and women be appointed to the judiciary. It is not sufficient for someone to squeak through the Senate with a bare majority. For generations it was an unwritten rule that judicial nominations should have broad support. The Right wants to throw out that tradition in order to pack the court with stooges of the religious extremists in this country. I dread the day they are successful.

Re-Writing History

2005-05-08T00:05:00.000-07:00

George W. Bush has once again demonstrated his ignorance as he prances around Europe as part of the festivities surrounding the 60th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany. He – or probably more correctly, his handlers, because Bush is incapable of forming a coherent thought that they have not previously placed in his brain for him – says that the U.S. (i.e., Franklin Roosevelt, the scourge of the right) is partly to blame for the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe after WWII. It is impossible for Bush to have arrived at this conclusion on his own because, by his own admission, he doesn’t read newspapers, and as near as anyone can tell, he’s never read a book.

The fact is that, at the end of WWII, Roosevelt and Churchill were faced with, what the neocons who now run the U.S. executive branch would call “facts on the ground”, in other words, the Red Army. The Soviets occupied all of Eastern Europe. The Allies had fought Hitler from 1939 to 1945. They were exhausted. The British were nearly bankrupt. The U.S. still had a war to finish off in the Pacific. We were still supporting the Nationalists against the Communists in China (which effort would continue until 1949). Yeah, the Allies had carved out spheres of influence in the world at the Yalta conference. It was the best deal we could get at the time. Yeah, it left Eastern Europe under the sway of Russia, but we did our best to save Austria, Germany (most of it), Italy, Holland, Belgium, France, Britain, Scandinavia, Spain and Portugal. Not bad when you consider the alternatives.

In fact, it was not unlike what W’s dad did at the end of the first Gulf War. He saved that pipsqueak Kuwait and restored a feudalistic monarchy there while leaving the Iraqis to fend for themselves under Saddam Hussein. Of course, he did promise to support them if they chose to rise up and overthrow Saddam. But then, when they did, he stood by with his arms folded while Saddam gassed the rebels.

Religious Freedom

2005-05-05T23:37:00.000-07:00

It is easy to believe that this country was founded on the concept of religious freedom. After all, it is enshrined in the First Amendment of our constitution. However, that may actually be a misconception. Many of the early settlers of our country were indeed looking for a place where they could practice their religion free of prejudice and persecution. The Puritans, the Quakers, the Huguenots and many others came to this continent to escape religious persecution in their home countries in Europe. That does not mean, however, that they were opposed to religious persecution. They were just opposed to being the target of it themselves. Once they had established their colonies, they turned the tables. Now theirs was the religion of the land, and others better comply. Within their own little community or colony, people who worshiped the same god differently were as unwelcome as the colonists themselves had been in their home countries. So it would be more accurate to say that the founders of our country were opposed to religious freedom, pluralism in worship and the right to worship as one chose.

It, therefore, should come as little surprise that a strong conservative religious fundamentalism continues to exist in this country. And, the members of this movement seek political power for the purpose of imposing their particular religious views on the rest of the population. Now religion and politics have always gone hand in hand in this country. There is no question that for nearly two centuries there was an unwritten sign on the White House, “Muslims, Catholics and Jews need not apply.” The usual requirement for a man to be elected president was that he be a mainline Protestant and that he attend church a few times a year – just enough to give the electorate a comfortable feeling that he shared their beliefs. I remember well the hysteria when John Kennedy was running against Richard Nixon. A pollster asked one woman which way she was voting, and she screamed back at him, “I’m voting Lutheran!” Kennedy proved that a Catholic could be a patriotic president. I don’t think we’ll see a Jew or Muslim elected president in my lifetime.

It is widely held that George W. Bush woke up one morning with a startling insight. He had come to the conclusion that a man could get elected president solely with the support of the religious right. It seems to have worked for him, and he wasted no time after gaining the Oval Office in doing their bidding. Whether or not one agrees or disagrees with the religious philosophy of the right, one has to be concerned with the marriage of religion and politics. Synonyms for the word “religion” include “faith” and “belief”. Those are key definitions. In religion, as opposed to science, one takes things on faith regardless of physical evidence to the contrary. One has one’s beliefs which are firm regardless of the fact that they cannot be proven, such as the virgin birth of Christ or the bodily assumption of Mary into heaven. Our constitution entitles everyone to whatever religious beliefs one wants, whether Pentecostal or Druid.

However, if a minority (or even a majority) decides by force of law to impose their beliefs on everyone else, such as the teaching of the so-called creation science along side of Darwinian evolution, we will have reached a critical point in the history of this country. The freedom of religion concept will have been warped into the imposition of a single religion by the state. This is a concept that has been abandoned by all enlightened governments for years. We must tread lightly down this road. We are walking against the trend of history and progress. We may well not like where this road takes us.

Fairness in American Life

2005-05-01T16:15:00.000-07:00

In the late 1960s I had the opportunity to meet Sir John Thouron when I was fortunate enough to win a Thouron Scholarship to do graduate work in England. Sir John had married Ester DuPont and the two of them decided that there needed to be a greater understanding between the citizens of their respective native countries. Thus they established this scholarship to send students both ways to study in the U.S. and Britain.

Sir John had an interesting biography, which included gallant service in WWII. He had led a group of bi-lingual officers and men who parachuted behind German lines as the Third Reich was collapsing to prevent the massacre of Allied POWs by the Nazis. I asked him if it was true that the Nazis might do such a thing, and he said it was quite true. There was a genuine concern, based on intelligence data, that the Germans were planning such a program. When the Germans finally surrendered, Sir John’s unit was assigned the job of interrogating various officers and men of the Wehrmacht to classify them, according to their activities, for prosecution as war criminals. He told me that the men under his command had differing views of the Germans they questioned. The French and Poles did not want to do any interrogations. They just wanted to summarily execute all the Nazi officers they had in their possession. The British officers would question the Germans, but would then roll their eyes and say, “Damn, if he’s that bad, we ought to take him out back and shoot him now.” Only the Americans, Sir John said, gave any degree of a break to the Germans, trying to find some mitigating circumstances to explain their actions.

This is a fundamental trait that the world has always associated with Americans – fairness. We have always been viewed, with good reason, as being a fair and generous nation. That’s why we had codified in our laws the so-called “fairness doctrine”. The fairness doctrine was quite simple. We, as a nation, granted certain corporations the exclusive right to broadcast radio and TV programs on a certain portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. In exchange for this exclusive right to their portion of the spectrum, they were required to be fair. If they broadcast a program – other than straight news – which had a political message, they had to offer comparable time for free to the opposing side to air their response. This was a very simple, easy to understand and unquestionably fair practice.

Then along came Ronald Reagan. The courts ruled that the fairness doctrine was just an FCC regulation, not a law. When Congress subsequently enacted it into law, Reagan decided that it wasn’t fair to require corporations to be fair. After all, they owned those TV and radio stations. They paid for the electricity to broadcast those programs. They paid for the studios in which the programs were put on. They paid the staff to do the program. Why should they be required to give equal time to the other side? So Reagan vetoed the bill; the fairness doctrine was gone.

Not surprisingly, this gave rise to the right wing radio and TV broadcasts that have come to dominate the airwaves. After all, it takes money to run a network, and who has that money – the corporations who want their people in power in the government. As a consequence, we have seen the right thrive politically as they receive thousands of hours of free propaganda broadcasts for their political positions. We have even seen an entire network news department (Fox) whose sole role seems to be to function as an echo chamber of the Republican Party.

It’s time for the majority of this country to take back control of the process. Not to give it to either party or either political viewpoint, but rather to return to a true fair and balanced presentation of the political news.

Moron-in-Chief

2005-04-30T15:37:00.000-07:00

Neither of the Bush presidents has stood out as a polished public speaker. Both are notorious for miscues, blunders, malapropisms and gaffs. A lot of ideas have been put forth about the reasons for why they mangle the English language. For example, Maureen Dowd of the New York Times says that Bush I was always admonished by his mother if he used the “I” word too often. This supposedly led him to such contractions as “Not gonna do it” rather than, “I’m not going to do it.”

The son’s miscues, however, bespeak of a simpler explanation – intellectual laziness. It does not take a brilliant mind to be able to speak and write articulately (although by the accounts of those around him, the president is quite smart). What it does take is work. You aren’t born with the ability to speak like Winston Churchill – for that matter, Winston Churchill wasn’t born with the ability to speak like Winston Churchill. He worked at it. It was amusing during the 2000 presidential election to watch W stumble through public appearances. Amusing because you knew that the public would never be stupid enough to elect such a dolt. So watching him confuse Slovenia and Slovakia, hearing him call the Greeks “Grecians” or the Timorese “Timoreans” always brought forth a chuckle. Then the nightmare scenario happened – the Bushies stole the election. Now it wasn’t funny no more.

It is not amusing to be led by a moron. It’s not funny, it’s scary. It’s frightening because you don’t know what miscues he’s capable of on a global scale. Like invading the wrong country in search of weapons and terrorists poised to strike the U.S. You can never be sure how easily he is being manipulated by Machiavellian court retainers eager to push their own agenda.

Bush compounds his Three Stooges act by trying to appear smart. He likes to cock his head to one side and smile when he tells you his latest insight into real world problems as though he is letting you into some secret knowledge known to only a few. During his news conference yesterday – his first in a year – W was addressing the energy crisis. He said, “One of the great sources of energy for the future is liquefied natural gas. There's a lot of gas reserves around the world. Gas can only be transported by ship, though, when you liquefy it, when you put it in solid form.”

Now it may not strike you as odd that W thinks that liquefied natural gas is a solid (in which case it should be called “solidified natural gas”), but I find it distinctly disconcerting that the leader of the Free World, the most powerful man in the world doesn’t know the difference between a solid and a liquid. You’d think that all those years he spent as an alcoholic would have familiarized him with the subtle but distinct difference between ice (a solid) and Scotch (a liquid). Didn’t he know what was meant by ‘Scotch on the rocks’? If he doesn’t understand the most basic science concerning the phases of matter – solid, liquid and gaseous – how can he have the nerve to pontificate on global warming? He says the science just isn’t there that global warming is caused by human activity. How the hell would he know?! He doesn’t know the difference between a solid and a liquid!

Bush wants us to support him as he pours billions of our tax dollars down the rat hole of a missile defense shield. He says it will work. Do you believe him? Do you believe a liquid is a solid?

It is not a minor thing. This wasn’t a one-time gaff. The man clearly has no interest in the job others have worked so hard to get him into. He’s already gotten us into one ill-advised quagmire in Iraq. He’s screwed up the Federal budget with his profligate tax cuts. Now he wants to “fix” Social Security with a plan that will accelerate its insolvency.

During the 2000 campaign a poll was taken. Bush won on the question, “Which candidate would you most like to sit down and have a beer with?” I suggest we buy him a whole case and send him back to Crawford.

An Adroit Change of Direction

2005-04-27T16:54:00.000-07:00

Heard the latest? The speaker of the House, Rep. Dennis Hastert, has decided to “step back”, as he puts it, from the ethics problems surrounding Majority Leader Tom DeLay. That means he sees the handwriting on the wall. The continuing build-up of public dissatisfaction for the way the Republicans are shielding DeLay is beginning to sink in. Rep. Ray LaHood, R-Ill., praised Hastert for being willing to ''pivot'' on the issue.

“Step back”? “Pivot”? Is that Republican-speak for flip-flop? Gee, it seems to me that whenever a Democrat re-evaluates his position on a controversial issue, the Republicans are quick to label him a flip-flopper. Now apparently this same character flaw, when exhibited by a Democrat, is a virtue to be praised in Republicans. They are lauded as being strong and magnanimous in their ability to see through the fog and identify the weakness of their own previously held convictions. They are praised for being adroit and skilled at changing direction and heading off on a new course.

Democrats will have to remember this terminology when it comes their time again to revise their thinking on a particular matter of public policy.

But enough of Dennis Hastert’s adroit footwork. The real story here is the ongoing struggle by the Republicans to protect Tom DeLay from his ethics violations. Last year he was admonished three times by the ethics committee. You have to figure that he acted pretty unethically for the Republican-controlled House to let him be admonished three times. So, to save themselves some work, the Republicans changed the rules of the ethics committee. In essence, they made it harder to press ethics charges against a member. This was just a bald-faced power play to shield DeLay from answering for his own behavior.

Now, Republican leadership [is] considering a plan to allow the entire House to vote on reverting to the old rules. It was also possible that Hastert would decide to allow individual votes on each of the three changes that Democrats objected to.

The most controversial of the three rules changes created a system under which an ethics complaint would automatically be dismissed unless a majority of the panel voted to act on it within 45 days. Under the old rule, a complaint would automatically trigger an investigation unless the panel voted to dismiss it within 45 days.

Republicans said the old rule created an environment in which lawmakers who were falsely accused could not be exonerated without a bipartisan vote of the committee. But Democrats said the new rules made it easy for Republicans to bury complaints against DeLay.

The committee has 10 members, five from each party, meaning that neither side can provide a majority on its own. [AP 4-27-05].

Just remember what Mr. Bush is always telling us. His party is the party of values. Their values are the same as your values. Yeah, right.

Tribalism Gone Rampant

2005-04-26T23:30:00.000-07:00

Our much-vaunted administration is becoming increasingly frustrated with the flea circus that passes for the elected Iraqi government. On the one hand, they cannot impose their will on the Iraqis without giving everyone the idea that the government is our puppet. On the other hand, the longer the Iraqis dither and argue amongst themselves over who gets to sit in the front seat, the more emboldened the insurgency becomes, the more Americans die and the closer the deadline for the writing of the Iraqi constitution comes.

There is no way that the Iraqis will hit the August deadline. They are too factionalized. In fact, factions are the only way those people know how to operate. Look at every wire service report that comes out of Iraq. Whenever it mentions one of the elected legislators, his/her name is always followed with a parenthetical identification of their religious or ethnic affiliation – Yawer al-Hisbin (Sunni). Tribalism is rampant in the region. The first tribe each of them identifies with is their religion (Muslim, Christian, etc.). Of course, 98% of them are Muslims. Next comes their ethnicity, Arab, Kurd, etc. Then comes their subset religion – Sunni, Shiite, etc. Next comes their tribal or family group. Finally, and just barely, comes their citizenship – Iraqi. Only when these people start thinking of themselves as Iraqis first and drop all these regional and sectarian groupings are they going to be able to come together and form a constitution.

Don’t hold your breath. Everybody has an agenda. The Shiites have been kept out of power for decades and are itching for some get-even time. The Sunnis want to get back into power. To them it just doesn’t feel right not being the big bosses. And the Kurds have the most critical agenda of all.

The Kurds have lived semi-autonomously for the last decade thanks to the northern no-fly zone we have enforced. They want to maintain that autonomy, and they want it officially sanctioned in the new constitution. Not only that, they want control of the northern oil fields. They know that the revenue from those wells will give them significant power. Lastly, they want to reverse the effects of Sadam’s "Arabization" of Kirkut. When Sadam was in power, he continuously moved ethnic Arabs into Kirkut and forced many of the Kurds out. (Again that tribalism.) Now the Kurds want their houses back.

The Kurds have a chance to pull this off because the recent election gave them a veto power in the voting on the constitution. It takes a super-majority (75%) to approve the new constitution. Thanks to the fact that the Sunnis boycotted the election, the Kurds have enough votes to stall any constitution that does not meet their demands. Don’t think for a moment that they are going to let this once in a lifetime opportunity slip through their fingers. Expect a long, hot summer in Iraq and continued frustration on the part of our administration as the various factions fight for their positions.

The Debt We All Owe the President

2005-04-23T22:23:00.000-07:00

The Constitution says that the president can be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors. Bill Clinton was impeached for not keeping his zipper up in the Oval Office. Now I don’t know about you, but I can’t say that my personal life changed one way or the other as a consequence of Bill Clinton’s peccadilloes. George W. Bush, on the other hand, poses a serious threat to the “domestic tranquility” and the “general welfare” of this nation, two ideals specifically mentioned in the preamble of the Constitution.

In 1993, when he had a majority in both houses of Congress, Bill Clinton pushed through a tax increase. Every Republican in Congress voted against it, but only after denouncing it as fiscally irresponsible and predicting the imminent demise of our economy. Every Republican legislator predicted rising unemployment and failing businesses. A doom that would dwarf the Great Depression was supposed to befall us as soon as this bill became law. Not one of them mentioned how the crazy “supply side” economics of Reagan and Bush I had quintupled the national debt from $1 trillion to $5 trillion dollars. (Voodoo Economics someone once called it – can you remember who?)

Well, the bill was passed and signed into law by President Clinton. This rest is history. This country enjoyed the longest, most sustained economic expansion in its history. The stock market boomed; unemployment fell. The Federal budget went from a deficit to a surplus, and we finally had an opportunity to pay down some of the massive government debt run up by the Republicans. For a brief, fleeting instant there was even talk of completely paying off the national debt. This country has had only one short period in its history, in 1835, when it was not in debt. There was even concern in the financial world of how a debt-free government would affect the bond market. How, for example, would long-term bond rates be set if there were no 30-year government Treasury bonds as a reference point? Ha, ha! How silly of us to fret over such eventualities.

We all know what happened next. W stole the 2000 election and made his first priority the elimination of that evil government surplus. Within days of taking office he rammed through Congress a massive tax give away to the wealthy and plunged the government back into red ink. The irony is that there never was a budget surplus. And, W’s government knew that. The ‘surplus’ was actually the excess collections of Social Security taxes that are supposed to go into a government trust fund to be available when the system goes from surplus to deficit in 2018. In his book The Price of Loyalty about W’s first Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neil, Ron Suskind tells of a meeting between O’Neil and Alan Greenspan where they both agreed that Bush’s tax cuts were a bad idea and that the surplus was not real. Well the tax cuts were in and O’Neil was out. No deficit hawks in this administration. O’Neil was even shouted down in a cabinet meeting by Dick Cheney who declared ‘Ronald Reagan proved deficits don’t matter’.

Now, two days ago, that same Alan Greenspan has come out and said that “a combination of the current deficit and the unpredictable aspects of health care entitlement programs could put future federal budgets on an ‘unsustainable path.’” That’s Greenspeak for we are going to be in a world of hurt if we don’t do anything about the Federal debt. Don’t expect the Bushbaby to do anything about it. Like all Republicans, he never met a deficit he didn’t like. W campaigned in 2004 with a plan to reduce the deficit by half in five years. Note the beautiful subtlety of his pitch. A: he is not going to reduce the debt by half in five years, just the deficit, i.e., the rate at which the debt is piling up. B: the target is five years out, in other words one year after he is term-limited out of office so it becomes someone else’s problem.

How did our national debt situation get so thoroughly out of control? It is somewhat akin to the Savings and Loan collapse of the 1980s. Back then, Newsweek ran a cover story asking how it was that the media had so totally missed that debacle. Their conclusion was that economic stories are hard to explain. (Economics is not known as ‘the dismal science’ for nothing.) When a tsunami kills a quarter million people, it is an easy story to cover – earthquake causes tsunami, tsunami drowns people and washes away villages. Even if people can’t conjure up a mental image, there is plenty of video and still photos. I’ve never seen a single photo of our $7 trillion national debt or the additional $11+ trillion of personal debt, of which $2 trillion is high interest credit card debt. I doubt one exists. How do you conjure up an image of $7 trillion? Try thinking of it like this, it represents about $25,000 for every man woman and child in the U.S. Another way of looking at it is, if all the people in the U.S. were grouped into families of an average of four people, every family could have $100,000 towards the cost of a new home if that national debt was owed to them. In many parts of the country that would buy them a comfortable home free and clear. (Instead, they are obligated to pay that $100,000 back in future taxes, taxes for which they will get no government services – highways, parks, homeland security, etc.)

While Clinton’s affairs, for which he was impeached, had no effect on your or my economic security, Bush’s profligate spending and irresponsible tax policies have a real and direct effect on it. And the effect is extremely dangerous. I suggest we impeach Bush for his reckless and irresponsible fiscal policies.

Ann Coulter - Right Wing Haridan in Residence

2005-04-22T18:50:00.000-07:00

A mini firestorm erupted this week when Time magazine put that right wing cretin Ann Coulter on their cover. I haven’t been as irritated as this since about 10 years ago when Newsweek did a cover story on Caroline Bisset, John F. Kennedy, Jr.’s girlfriend. I thought it was outrageous that someone would merit the cover of a national news weekly solely on the basis of sleeping with the son of a dead president. Talk about being a minor celebrity once removed! I canceled my Newsweek subscription forthwith, a subscription I had maintained for nearly 30 years. I don’t know if I’ll do the same with Time for soiling my domicile with Ann Coulter’s visage or just don a pair of latex gloves and carry the offending thing to trash can. If I had an outhouse I know what I’d do with her picture, but unfortunately I don’t.

The author of the Coulter piece wasn’t four paragraphs into it when he got to the core of her beliefs. It seems that Coulter hates liberals because they feel it is their constitutional right to suck the brains out of a partially delivered fetus. You really have to admire the far right. They have a beautiful way of summarizing their beliefs. With a completely straight face, they can look you in the eye and say, “We’re for despoiling the environment, shifting the tax burden from the wealthy to the middle class, raising the allowable level of arsenic in drinking water, blocking an increase in the minimum wage, preemptively attacking countries that pose no threat to the U.S., wreaking the economy by heaping huge government deficits upon the next generations, ‘solving’ the insolvency of the Social Security System by shifting $2 trillion of its assets to private accounts (thus accelerating the date of its insolvency), insulting our allies and squandering decades of hard-won goodwill, but we’re opposed to late term abortion so we’re better than the other guys.”

The title of one of Ann Coulter’s books, “Treason”, says it all. “If you oppose our political philosophy, you’re a traitor to this country.” How dare she! How dare anyone publish such garbage! Oh, right, I forgot. The First Amendment gives her the right to make an ass out of herself. It’s time to wake up people. A fringe element on the right has wrapped itself in a pseudo-family values position and is using that argument to slowly take this country down a path to ruin. We’re going to get into a serious ditch when this bandwagon throws a wheel, and digging ourselves out is going to be soooo much harder.

John Bolton's Tipping Point

2005-04-21T21:43:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I mentioned that a tipping point might have been reached in the case of Tom DeLay, the House Majority Leader who has been under constant scrutiny for ethics violations for several years. Republicans are beginning to sense that his problems may become their problems and, like rats leaving a sinking ship, they are beginning to abandon him. It didn’t take this long for them to dump Trent Lott like an old 8-track cassette after he made racist remarks at Strom Thurmond’s birthday party, but then he was never that popular with the Bush crowd and that cheap hairpiece made him look like a used car salesman.

It looks now as though a tipping point is being reached in the case of another Republican lout, John Bolton. The Chinese water torture of a relentless drip, drip of revelations about his boorish behavior toward subordinates whose views did not support his own extremism is beginning to take a toll. Of course, the only opinions that matter in this case are those held by Republicans because they have a majority in both the Senate and on the Foreign Affairs Committee which must report out his nomination to be our ambassador to the U.N. Yesterday, Ohio Republican Sen. George V. Voinovich requested a delay in the committee vote citing an uneasiness with some of the allegations. The other possible Republican committee member who might jump ship on Bolton is Rhode Island’s Lincoln Chaffee. The soft-spoken Chafee said Bolton is "absolutely not" the best choice for the job. He compared Bolton's temperament to that of bombastic New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner according to the Associated Press.

I think that Bush will eventually have to jettison Bolton, but not before some alligator tears are shed as they proclaim him the best man for the job done in by liberal treachery. That will be a sad day for everyone concerned. Bush will have to accept a defeat, something he never does and certainly never does graciously. Condescending Rice will have to take Bolton back into the State Department, something she didn’t want. (Why do you think she recommended him for the U.N. job in the first place?) Bolton was by all accounts a loose cannon, a backstabbing thorn in Colin Powell’s side, and Rice saw the U.N. as a good outpost for him, away from Washington and too remote to stab her in the back. And the Republicans will lose someone who can tell all those nasty foreign diplomats in the U.N. how awful they are in language that would make a normal professional diplomat cringe.

Potpourri

2005-04-20T19:41:00.000-07:00

Normally I try to keep each day’s entry to a single subject, but events are happening so fast these days, there is too much to cover. So, I’ll give a scattershot approach to today’s journal.

Let’s start with that favorite subject of mine, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. He is apparently familiar with that old saying, the best defense is a good offense because he went on the offense again today. Once again Mr. DeLay is on the warpath against the judicial system in this country. Now Republicans will tell you that they detest activist judges. By that they mean judges who make law from the bench. But what they really mean is that they love activist judges along as their activism suits the Republican Party. When an activist judge is a liberal, that’s when their blood starts to boil. The ‘liberal’ activist judge who is the target of Mr. DeLay’s current ire is Ronald Reagan’s appointee to the Supreme Court, Justice Anthony Kennedy.

"Absolutely. We've got Justice Kennedy writing decisions based upon international law, not the Constitution of the United States? That's just outrageous," DeLay told Fox News Radio on Tuesday. "And not only that, but he said in session that he does his own research on the Internet? That is just incredibly outrageous." [J.J. Holland, AP 4/20/05]

Imagine that! A judge who has the temerity to do his own Internet research. How low can the judiciary in this country sink? Mr. DeLay better be careful. Some of these judges that he is criticizing so ferociously may be the ones who sit in judgment of him when his ethics problems get to court. This is important too because today the Republican chairman of the House Ethics Committee agreed to begin hearings on DeLay’s ethics violations. I think we are seeing the tipping point for Tommy-boy. Last Friday nine former Republican members of Congress came out against him. Even W is beginning to distance himself from DeLay. A White House spokesman says that Bush and DeLay are friends, but that there are degrees of friendship. That’s Bushspeak for, you ain’t my friend when you start dragging down my poll numbers.

Well W signed the new bankruptcy law today. Now all those credit card cheats will have to pay up. The credit card industry said that they needed this bill to protect them because people were running up big charges and then ducking out through bankruptcy. I thought that the 30% interest rates they were charging were supposed to be their protection. I.e., on an unsecured loan you have to charge high interest rates to cover the likelihood of bad debts. I guess now that they have the protection of this new bankruptcy bill we’ll see those high credit card interest rates come down real soon. Don’t hold your breath!

I guess I jumped the gun on my blog yesterday when I reported on what an unsafe place Iraq was becoming. Today it virtually exploded. The Iraqis found 50 bodies in the Tigris River and another 12 killed execution style in a soccer stadium.

On Tuesday, insurgents killed at least 15 people throughout Iraq, including two U.S. soldiers hit by a suicide bomber in Baghdad, and a former aide to Saddam Hussein's half brother, Sabawi Ibrahim al-Hassan, who was gunned down in southern Iraq, officials said.

A car bomb exploded Wednesday near a U.S. convoy in an area of western Baghdad where the notorious Abu Ghraib prison is located, setting an oil tanker on fire, said police Maj. Moussa Abdulkarim. Two Iraqis were killed and five wounded, said Hussam Abdulrazaq, an official at the nearby al-Yarmouk Hospital. The U.S. military had no immediate information on the incident.

The two other car bombs exploded in southern Baghdad. One missed a police convoy but hit a civilian car, killing two Iraqis and wounding four, said police Capt. Falah al-Muhamadwai. The other exploded in a parking lot near Bilat al-Shuhada police station in Dora area, wounding four civilians, said police Lt. Hassan Falah.

South of the city, one Iraqi policeman was killed and two were seriously wounded when their patrol was hit by a roadside bomb in the town of Mowailha, said police Capt. Muthana Al-Furati. [S.N. Yacoub, AP 04-20-05]

Just an average day in Mudville folks.

Get Ready for the Sucker Punch

2005-04-19T17:34:00.000-07:00

We’re hearing a lot of good news out of Iraq these days. Our military says that they may be able to start pulling out some of our troops. The insurgency is lightening up, you see. Attacks against American soldiers are down to an average of just one a day – that’s 30 a month for the mathematically challenged. That figure is down from about 130 per month earlier this year. This good news is cited to show what a wonderful job we’re doing in Iraq in training and setting up Iraqi security forces. Isn’t self-delusion a beautiful thing to behold?

Wake up and smell the burnt cordite, guys. The Iraqi insurgency is getting ready to sucker punch the U.S. Of course attacks against the U.S. military in Iraq are down! The insurgents aren’t stupid. Why go up against guys with M-16s and .50 caliber machine guns when there are all those soft targets out there – civilians, police recruits, local government officials, collaborators… The insurgents are going to lull the U.S. military into a false sense of mission accomplished, wait for us to leave, then try to stage a coup. In the meantime, they will keep killing Iraqi civilians.

Why attack their own people? Because they can create instability, a dissatisfaction with the elected government’s ability to provide security and a longing for “the good old days” under Sadam when at least you could walk to the market without being shot.

If anything, the Iraqi insurgency is even more of a challenge than the Viet Cong. Although the V.C. was a guerilla force, towards the end of the Vietnam War, they engaged the U.S. military in direct combat with massed forces practically in traditional set-piece battles. We knew who their leaders were and where their support came from. We could identify their supply lines. They even wore uniforms. The Iraqi insurgency is nebulous, diffuse, unidentified and ephemeral. We don’t know who they are, where they are getting their arms and support from or even where they are holed up. We can’t identify their primary leaders, save one. And, we certainly haven’t been able to capture any of them. How do you defeat a force that you can’t see? How do you get a force that you know nothing about to negotiate a surrender? Who speaks for them?

Day after day, the drumbeat of attacks against civilians in Iraq goes on. Just in the last 24 hours a dozen Iraqis have been killed by insurgent attacks including six potential recruits, four soldiers and a Defense Ministry advisor and his son. And, of course, yesterday Marla Ruzicka, an American civilian volunteer, was killed in Iraq by a suicide bomber targeting a convoy of civilian contractors.

So the beat goes on, and Washington continues to try to put a phony spin on it telling us how much better things are getting in Iraq. If things continue to improve at this rate, we’ll be withdrawing forces under fire in a rear guard action as the insurgents take over the country.

Rudolph the Right Wing Terrorist

2005-04-18T17:39:00.000-07:00

If you are like me, a patriotic American citizen, you are probably waiting and watching each day to hear news of the capture of the world’s number one terrorist Osama bin Laden. Our government seems to have forgotten about Mr. bin Laden in recent years. We are more focused on Sadam Hussein who, it turns out, posed no threat to the U.S. and was just quietly minding the store like so many other Middle East dictators when we decided that he and not, say, Mohammar Qaddafi, needed to be deposed. But that is the subject of another blog.

In any case, we did recently capture another terrorist and put him in jail for life. I am referring, of course, to that right wing American terrorist Eric Rudolph. Mr. Rudolph is not Mr. bin Laden. However, they do have a number of things in common. They are both driven by strong religious beliefs. They both see terror and murder as acceptable weapons to achieve their goals. They both go (went, in the case of Mr. Rudolph) after “soft” targets, i.e., innocent, unarmed civilians. They both see themselves as the final arbiter of any question regarding the legitimacy of their targets’ beliefs, i.e., they set themselves up as judge, jury and executioner. Neither sees any purpose in working through legitimate channels of public discourse or legal channels of change such as the electoral process in the case of Mr. Rudolph or the U.N. in the case of Mr. bin Laden. This is no doubt because neither stood even a slim chance of convincing a majority of others to support their extreme positions.

More and more in this country we are seeing a growing acceptance on the right to ignore the rule of law and resort to vigilantism. We saw it with Timothy McVeigh. We saw it with Eric Rudolph. We are seeing it with these right wing zealots calling themselves the Minutemen who are gathering along the Arizona/Mexico border to take it upon themselves to turn back illegal immigrants. Their efforts are supported by the right wing media and even by some elected officials (see my blog on April 10 about House Majority Leader Tom DeLay suggesting that liberal judges may get what’s coming to them). As I said in a previous blog about Republicans as bullies, they will have their way by one means or another, legal or otherwise. This is undoubtedly one of the greatest threats facing this country today.

The Republicans Rally Around DeLay

2005-04-13T22:14:00.000-07:00

The Republicans are taking a page out of the 1967 movie, “Don’t Raise the Drawbridge, Lower the River”. How does an old Jerry Lewis movie apply to the Republican Party? Well, take the ethics problems of House Minority Leader Tom DeLay. Ethics problems? the Republicans ask. No problem. We’ll just change the definition of ethics. Last year they hurried through new House rules that said a member could only be brought up on ethics charges once he had been indicted by a court of law. This little change was specifically for the benefit of one person. You guessed it, Tom DeLay. DeLay is under investigation in his home state of Texas for illegal fund raising. He, of course, says it is a partisan witch-hunt. The fact that the D.A. chasing him is a Democrat seems to support his charge. The fact that the same D.A. has indicted lots of Democrats is lost on Mr. DeLay.

Under normal circumstances, DeLay would have had to step down while these charges were being investigated. Now, with the new rules in place, rules written specifically for him, he remains in power until indicted.

The Republicans in Congress have been furiously backing and filling in a desperate attempt to keep Tom DeLay in power. Why? Well for one reason, he’s one of their own, and they stick together. For another, most of them are afraid of him and his power. The reason the applause would go on for so long after one of Stalin’s speeches was because no one wanted to be seen as the first to stop clapping. DeLay is a masterful fundraiser with strong ties to the religious right. Anyone in his own party who crosses him cedes access to his reelection slush funds and risks seeing that financial support go to a possible challenger. Only a real fool would do that.

Their most recent move was to pack the House Ethics Committee (now there’s an oxymoron) with DeLay supporters. The committee is evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans (the only congressional committee that is), so as long as the Republicans remain united, DeLay is safe.

DeLay’s latest ethics violations to come to the surface include paying his wife and daughter $500,000 to work in his PAC (Political Action Committee). Also, he took a trip to Russia supposedly paid for by the Russian businessmen he was visiting – a definite no-no according to Congressional rules. It seems the money as channeled through a non-profit in the Bahamas (can you say money laundering?) in order to hide its source.

It is almost fun to watch the party that came to power vowing to return righteousness and virtue to Washington, slip on their own vomit. To think that these are the same sleazeballs who impeached Clinton for getting whacked off in his office!

DeLay even had the temerity to wrap himself in the virtuous mantle of the Terry Schiavo affair and claim to a group of right wing supporters that God had brought her case to national attention in order to focus America’s attention on the threat to the right and to him specifically posed by the liberal left. Apparently, even God doesn’t want to be seen as the first one to stop clapping.

The Republicans as Bullies

2005-04-11T17:33:00.000-07:00

Have you ever watched how George W. Bush walks? He walks with his arms bowed out from his side like a gunslinger. When I was in high school, boys who wanted you to think they were muscle bound would walk like that – a testosterone-fueled image of imminent aggression. This suits the president because it summarizes both his domestic and foreign policies in a single posture. A take-no-prisoners bully.

To complement this image, W has nominated John R. Bolton to be the new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Bolton is on the record as hating the U.N. He once said that you could cut off the top 10 floors of the U.N. building and it would have no effect on the functioning of the organization. His is an outspoken critic of international dialogue, multi-lateralism and cooperative ventures. His stated position is that the U.S. should only back those initiatives at the U.N. that suit our immediate and direct national needs. I suppose that this would mean that we should not support AIDS prevention in Africa because it poses no immediate gain for the U.S.? Or, helping to end the reign of terror in Darfur?

As I said in a previous blog, the Republicans are turning into real bullies. They control both houses of Congress, the White House, have appointed most of the Federal judiciary including 7 of the 9 Supreme Court justices, but this is not enough for them. They want it all. In his last term, W got the Congress to approve 200 of his 210 judicial nominees. The ten that didn’t make it through were a grab bag of far right extremists that any right-minded president would have been ashamed to nominate. Now that he has won reelection and has bigger majorities in both houses of Congress, W’s first order of business is to re-nominate those 10 losers and force them through Congressional approval. Not satisfied with 95%, he wants 100% and the 49% of the public that didn’t vote for him be damned.

The plan is to invoke what the Republicans are calling the nuclear option. They will, by decree, change the rules of the Senate – rules that have been in place for over 200 years – and end the right to filibuster judicial nominations. The Constitution gives the president the right to appoint judges to lifetime positions on the Federal bench “with the advice and consent of the Senate”. Note that does not say “with the rubber stamp of the Senate”. It says with the advice and consent. If the Senate advised W that some of his nominees are too extreme and withheld its consent in his last term, W will not accept that. He must and will have his way. He and his minions will bully their way through the Senate the way that they bullied their way into Iraq. We’ve got the power; let’s use it.

Fortunately, even some Republicans are having second thoughts about invoking the nuclear option. Not only does it look like a naked power grab (which it is) but also they may want to preserve it for the inevitable day when there is a Democratic president and they no longer have a majority in the Senate.

Getting back to John Bolton, did you know one of the reasons that Secretary of State Condescending Rice nominated him for the U.N. job was that she wanted him out of the State Department, where he has a reputation of being a real backstabber? One of the prime issues facing him in his confirmation hearings is the charge that he tried to get two intelligence analysts fired when they wouldn’t change their report on Cuba’s alleged biological weapons capability. (They said that Cuba had none; he insisted that it did.) In support of Bush’s warped international diplomacy style, Bolton clearly fits right in.

DeLay Targets the Judiciary

2005-04-10T18:40:00.000-07:00

Are Tom DeLay and the Republicans trying to instigate another Oklahoma City bombing? What, you might ask, do the Republicans have to do with that terrorist attack? Well, in my opinion, there is a direct link from Ronald Reagan to Timothy McVeigh. Reagan came to power denouncing the Federal government. In fact, in his first inaugural address, he stated specifically, “Government is not the solution to the problem; government is the problem”. This earned him a round of applause and a breathless following of the righteous eager to dismantle the source of all their problems (i.e., taxes), the Federal government.

Reagan’s chant was taken up by Newt Gingrich, the Republican House speaker whose anti-government diatribes were so vicious that even some of his fellow Republicans were left queasy. Eventually Gingrich overplayed his hand – as demagogues often do – and was forced out by his own party. But by this time the Republican right’s visceral anti-government message had been picked up by talk radio and that echo chamber of the Republican Party – Fox News. With Howard Hunt and Rush Limbaugh making daily diatribes against the government, it was only a matter of time before some dim bulb like Timothy McVeigh would see it as his patriotic duty to lash out against the government. His means? A 4,000 lb truck bomb that killed 168 people. The “government” he targeted? A Social Security Administration office, a day care center for Federal employees in the building, an FBI office … So, in my mind, a direct line: Reagan to Gingrich to Limbaugh to McVeigh. Direct orders? No. Encouragement? Likely.

Now Tom DeLay and his fellow Republicans have identified a new branch of the Federal government for hate crimes – the judiciary. Why? Because they (the judges) wouldn’t or couldn’t stop Terri Schiavo’s husband from having her feeding tube removed. I.e., they followed the law.

Representative Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, escalated his talk of a battle between the legislative and judicial branches of government on Thursday, saying federal courts had "run amok," in large part because of the failure of Congress to confront them.

"Judicial independence does not equal judicial supremacy," Mr. DeLay said in a videotaped speech delivered to a conservative conference in Washington entitled "Confronting the Judicial War on Faith."

Mr. DeLay faulted courts for what he said was their invention of rights to abortion and prohibitions on school prayer, saying courts had ignored the intent of Congress and improperly cited international standards and precedents. "These are not examples of a mature society," he said, "but of a judiciary run amok." (New York Times April 7).

In the Washington Post on April 2nd it was reported: DeLay issued a statement asserting that "the time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior." He later said in front of television cameras that he wants to "look at an arrogant, out-of-control, unaccountable judiciary that thumbed their nose at Congress and the president."
“The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior?” Does that not sound like a call to arms? Is he not lighting a fire under some nascent Timothy McVeigh to start assassinating Federal judges?

Even the Republican-appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court William H. Rehnquist said that judges must be protected from political threats, including from conservative Republicans who maintain that "judicial activists" should be impeached and removed from office. L.A. Times, Jan. 1, 2005. And this was before DeLay hit his stride in April.

The Republicans are never happy unless they are bullying their way across the American landscape. They have been given the White House for 28 out of 40 years from 1968 to 2008. They control both houses of Congress. They have appointed a vast majority of the Federal judiciary including 7 of the 9 Supreme Court justices. But that is not enough. Like anyone who gets it all, they want more. They will not be happy until every last minority right in this country collapses under the weight of their majority. If they can’t get it legally and constitutionally, it appears they are ready to take up arms and get it by force.

The Fall of Communism

2005-04-08T16:30:00.000-07:00

Every child knows from personal experience that, whoever is closest to a thing when it breaks, gets the blame. Some people would have us believe then that just being around when something collapses automatically gives you the credit for causing the collapse. With the death of the pope, many pundits are giving him credit for bringing down Communism by backing the Solidarity workers’ movement in his native Poland. Worshipers of St. Ronald Reagan are quick to point out that, while the pope deserves some of the credit, the real credit goes to Ronnie, who very adeptly bankrupted the Soviet Union by overseeing an enormous buildup of the American military – and nearly bankrupting us in the process. (It should never be forgotten that the American national debt quadrupled under Ronnie from $1 trillion to $4 trillion with another trillion added by his successor, George H. W. Bush.)

Not so fast. Yes, the Soviet Union finally collapsed while Reagan was, as the historian Haynes Johnson puts it, “Sleepwalking Through History”, but that doesn’t make Ronnie the architect of that collapse. Firstly, it ignores the long, tireless efforts of many leaders both here and abroad throughout the Cold War. Presidents, both Democratic and Republican, beginning with Franklin Roosevelt, all had the problem of dealing with the Soviet Union at the top of their agenda. Reagan was far from the first to make sure that the American military was always technologically far superior to the Red Army.

However, no single American, indeed no single person, deserves credit for bringing down the Soviet Union. In fact, credit really goes to simple advances in modern consumer and business technology, not military hardware. For decades the leaders of the Soviet Union were able to offer up one excuse after another to their people for their miserable plight – the backward condition of the nation they inherited from the Tsars, the devastation wrought by WWII, etc. And they always could fall back on a simple refrain, “as bad as things are here, they are worse in the West”. The communications revolution brought about by TV, the Xerox machine and the fax machine gradually undermined all that. People living in Leningrad (now Petersburg, again) could pick up TV broadcasts from Finland. More and more Soviet citizens were traveling to the West. People living in the Eastern European satellite countries could see the affluence of the West first hand. Books and homemade newspapers (samzidat in Russian slang) were “published” on the office copier and handed from one person to another. A simple phone connection gave you, via a fax machine, the ability to receive uncensored news and information from the West. Gradually, the charade became harder and harder to maintain. Russians weren’t fools, and they couldn’t be fooled forever.

Mikhail Gorbechav was elected First Secretary of the Communist Party to straighten out the mess, and his first order of business was to introduce glasnost (openness) to the Soviet system. That, not Ronald Reagan, spelt its death knell. A system based on lies cannot survive openness.

Another primal factor for the collapse of the Soviet empire was the simple decision by Hungary that they were no longer going to enforce a closed border. Hungary simply decided to let anyone who wanted to to cross their border into Austria. Since citizens of the Warsaw Pact nations were allowed to travel more or less freely between them, lots of East Germans, Poles, Czechs and others simply went to Hungary and crossed to freedom into Austria. The loss of the best and the brightest could not be sustained forever. The system was cracking and a lot of pushes from a lot of directions finally caused the whole thing to collapse.

One would be well justified in asking, if Ronald Reagan’s defense buildup brought down Communism in the Soviet Union, what about China? They feel just as threatened by the U.S. military as the Soviets did. How come they didn’t spend themselves into bankruptcy? Well, they didn’t, and neither did the Russians.

The Chinese have two additional threats to deal with that the Russians never experienced – satellite TV and the Internet. The former is a little easier to control. They simply do not allow Western broadcasts into their system. I was in China twice in 1992. On my first visit, I could see lots of English language TV from Britain and the U.S. On my second visit, just a few months later, that had all been cut off.

The Chinese maintain strict filters on their Internet service providers too and extremely high phone rates for international calls to reduce fax traffic. Nevertheless, the genii cannot be kept in the bottle forever. Communism there will eventually give way to democracy because the free flow of ideas can never be completely stopped.

The Medal of Honor

2005-04-04T17:50:00.000-07:00

George W. Bush tried to bask in the reflected glow of a true war hero today when he posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor to Sgt. Paul Ray Smith who died in the early fighting in Iraq. With his usual bumbling syntax and mispronunciation, Bush couldn’t even read the citation clearly. But as he read the description of the battle that killed Sgt. Smith and praised his heroism in fighting for, and dying for, his country, one could not help but remember how Bush hid out in Alabama when it was his turn to fight for his country. He, along with all the other Republican superhawks somehow managed to find other things to do and other ways to avoid duty in Vietnam – Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Pat Buchanan, Dan Quayle … the list goes on. How clever they were and how enterprising their parents were in devising ways to keep them out of harm’s way.

I think that it is time to put the Bush – National Guard story to rest once and for all. Take it from one who was there (i.e., in college with a lot of great guys facing the draft during the Vietnam War), Bush is a draft dodger. As the Vietnam War raged, the Selective Service System closed loophole after loophole to keep up with their manpower requirements. The first to go was the marriage deferment. In the middle of the night the Johnson administration announced that, effective a certain date just days hence, married men would no longer receive a deferment for the draft. There was a rush to Las Vegas for quick last minute marriages mostly by couples who were engaged already. Next was the student deferment. Staying in college past your original four years would no longer work. If you didn’t graduate with your incoming class, you lost your student deferment. So changing majors and adding a couple of years to college was no longer an option. Then starting in 1967, students entering graduate school got one year only. That’s why Bill Clinton had to write those letters from Oxford. That left only two sure outs, the National Guard and the Coast Guard. Every young man of that period knew that the National Guard was your best way to avoid a live fire exercise in Vietnam. Why do you think there was a 500-person waiting list for the Texas National Guard and why it took political pull to let W jump over that list and get in?

I’ve always felt that there was a keen irony in the Kent State massacre when National Guard troops opened fire on student protesters killing four. It was draft dodgers shooting war protesters.

So yes, Bush dodged the draft by using political clout to move to the front of the line and get into the Texas Air National Guard. But then, he couldn’t even give his country the full service that was called for. And why should he? He and his family had already demonstrated what contempt they had for the system. He ducked out of his last year or so of service because, as he put it, he had other things to do, i.e., he had been accepted into the MBA program at Harvard. Once the National Guard had punched his ticket, he was free from all worry about ever being drafted in the future. He could kick back and booze it up at Harvard knowing that other young men from poorer families would do the dying in Vietnam. There’s an old saying in poker, “sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good.” George W. is living proof.

John Paul II's Legacy

2005-04-03T23:26:00.000-07:00

There is a long-standing tradition in Western civilization of not speaking ill of the dead. This arises from the fact that the dead are not able to defend themselves against personal attacks. Nevertheless, we are all responsible for our lives and the legacies we leave behind. Thus, a person with a major public presence must be prepared to accept the criticism along with the accolades.

I want to confine my comments on the late Pope John Paul II to just a few criticisms. I will grant that he was arguably a very good person and a holy individual by most measures. I am sure that he was motivated by a sense of both duty and good. However, his stringent adherence to the medieval doctrine of the Catholic Church had serious and dreadful consequences for many poor people throughout the world.

Obviously, the Church’s strict rigidity on the issue of clerical celibacy is an important factor weighing on the issue of pedophilia in the ranks of the clergy. John Paul II was adamant that the church was not going to budge on this issue. He was also way too slow in disciplining the Catholic hierarchy in America for its continued protection of pedophile priests.

Similarly, his dislike for Western secularism and materialism was a motivating factor for his stand on abortion, contraception, divorce, remarriage and gay rights. As a consequence of these positions many people around the world, particularly poor women were condemned to a life of abuse, early death from too many pregnancies and pernicious poverty.

John Paul would have done well to take note of the first of the seven deadly sins – pride. Pride, or in his case, arrogance stemming from his powerful leadership position could well have blinded him toward considering a more compassionate position on many of these subjects. No doubt he preferred to see the church as a rock, constancy in a sea of change. But there is no question that Western secularism and materialism has enable countless millions to live in comfort, free from the scourge of poverty and disease. That same materialism is gradually dragging the rest of the world out of poverty.

John Paul, it seems, was more prepared to see the world’s legions of poor live in continued poverty and disease rather than have them stray from his interpretation of God’s word. That is arrogance and pride of a very high order.

The Story of O

2005-04-02T21:34:00.000-08:00

I’d like to tell you a story about my friend Oscar, whom I call O. Oscar is your prototypical small businessman, entrepreneur and Republican to the core. Oscar never met a tax he thought was fair or justified and never had a good word to say about any government program unless it was one that he directly benefited from like the low interest loan he got from the Small Business Administration to start his company in the first place.

I first met O through the Rotary Club where we were both members. Over the years we also served on various committees of the Chamber of Commerce, so we became well known to one another. O ran a small manufacturing business and produced some type of widget that I never understood but apparently was quite the thing for his high tech customers. One of O’s biggest complaints was our local airport. It just wasn’t big enough to accommodate even the smallest jet airliners, and O constantly had to drive to San Francisco to begin his business trips there. It was an unvarying theme of his that, if we could just lengthen the runway at our airport, it could handle 737s. Then we could fly to Denver or L.A. directly and connect on from there instead of having to drive for two hours to SFO. When I would point out to him that it would take tax dollars to improve the airport and you can’t have low taxes and government services, he’d give me his standard reply, “We pay plenty in taxes. The politicians just waste it.”

One day O came to the Rotary meeting looking pretty dejected. When I asked him why he had such a long face, the story came pouring out. It seems that a young man recently hired right out of high school had ruined a production run of widgets because he couldn’t read the gauges on the equipment properly or do simple calculations. Now their quarterly shipment to their biggest customer would be delayed, and they’d have to forfeit a performance bonus. O was lamenting the miserable job the high schools were doing in turning out students. I commiserated with him and told him that, for a state so dependent on the high tech industry, it was a real shame that we were below the national average in spending per pupil and that we ranked 48th out of 50 states in terms of the most students per teacher. We are 9th in the country in per capita income and 48th in per student spending per $1,000 of personal income. I gently reminded him how energetically he had campaigned against a recent school bond measure. O fell back on his mantra, “We pay plenty in taxes. The politicians just waste it.”

At the next Rotary meeting O came in fuming. It was costing him a fortune to keep his delivery trucks running because of the lousy condition of California’s roads. A truck that normally lasted 10 years was a worn out wreck in just 4 as a result of the constant pounding the body took from potholes the size of tank traps, not to mention the constant tire replacements from front-ends thrown out of alignment by all those potholes. Recognizing his mood, I felt it was best if I didn’t bring up the need for tax dollars to repair the highways.

The mayor was the speaker at lunch that day, and O was quickly on his feet during the question and answer session. He was demanding to know why the fire station nearest to his factory had been closed down, pointing out that his insurance bill had soared as a result. The mayor was trying to explain the difficulties of budget cuts resulting from the most recent round of state tax cuts when O cut him short. “We pay plenty in taxes. The politicians just waste it.”

With the poor state of California’s infrastructure, O’s business continued to suffer. His customers were demanding just-in-time inventory deliveries. But O couldn’t meet their demands because his trucks were always stuck in traffic, a result of no funds for highway construction. His plant was vandalized and the police were too slow to respond, a consequence of cutbacks in staffing, as O and his ilk constantly demanded lower taxes while expecting the same or better government services.

In time, O went out of business. Bankrupt and broke, he had, however, achieved true Republican nirvana – he no longer had to pay any taxes. Somehow or other it didn’t seem to brighten his mood.

Pity Poor Colin Powell

2005-03-31T17:07:00.000-08:00

Pity poor Colin Powell. He has worked so hard over the years carefully climbing the government career ladder – first in the Army with two tours of duty in Vietnam, then through the Pentagon’s bureaucracy up through Army Chief of Staff, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Bush I. At every turn, he carefully weighed his options and played his political cards close to his vest. Right up until 1995 no one even knew what his political party affiliation was, or even if he had one. Both parties courted him as the ultimate American success story. An African-American who made good through the meritocracy of the Army by virtue of hard work and intelligence.

In my opinion, Colin Powell merits a political job, as he is the consummate politician. He never sticks his neck out, never stakes out a position, and never takes the lead. Several stories from his biography have always said more to me about who the man is than what he would like us to glean from his public persona.

I was watching him being interviewed once years ago by Larry King. King brought up a story about Powell’s early days as a shave tail lieutenant stationed at Ft. Benning, Georgia. It seems that Powell’s Volkswagen had been pulled over by some redneck sheriff who took umbrage to a particular bumper sticker that it sported. King, who had heard the story and knew or suspected that the bumper sticker espoused a liberal position (probably in support of Lyndon Johnson for his passage of the Civil Rights Act), asked Powell to elaborate on the story. Powell took on his wooden Indian look and wouldn’t say anything. He left King there on national television with egg on his face. Powell knew that by giving a political opinion he was going to alienate some fraction of the listeners, and, no matter how small that fraction was, he just wasn’t going to do it. He was too cowardly to take a stand on what his principles were (perhaps because he doesn’t have any) if it might cost him some political support down the road.

Then, in his book The Commanders, about our leaders during the first Gulf War, Bob Woodward relates a story about a meeting in the Oval Office. Bush I had gathered all of his advisers together including Powell, as Joint Chief’s Chairman, and asked for their advice about attacking Iraq. It was the eve of war. Powell was opposed to the venture. But he wasn’t going to say anything unless someone else spoke out first and said that they were against the idea. If they had, Powell planned to speak up and say, “Uh, yes, Mr. President. I also think this is a bad idea.” In the event, no one else spoke up and Powell went along with the crowd. There he was, the senior military advisor in the meeting, taking a six-figure salary from the American taxpayers, but he didn’t have the stomach or the integrity to give his boss his honest opinion. He was prepared to send our sons and daughters to die in what he considered a misadventure rather than risk some minor political loss should he be in the minority on the vote to go to war.

Well, the day finally came when Powell had to state his political allegiance. Both parties were courting him – an original American Horatio Alger. So in 1995 Powell made one of his typical political judgments. I imagine he looked back and noted that from 1952 until 1995, a period of 43 years, the Republicans had controlled the White House for 27 of those years. It wasn’t a real tough decision. Well, maybe there was that thing as to how the Republicans were so opposed to affirmative action, which Powell supported, and how they were opposed to abortion, while he supported a woman's right to choose, but now was not the time to start letting principles stand in the way of advancement. So he came out as a Republican. In due course he was rewarded with the position of Secretary of State in the Bush II government – a perfect administration for him to serve in, one where loyalty trumped integrity at every turn, where keeping your mouth shut and getting along by going along was the order of the day. In other words, his kind of organization.

It was almost amusing watching Powell spend four years kissing up to the younger Bush – a man who clearly did not respect Powell’s opinions and who was easily swayed by the war mongers Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. Now Powell is on a mission. He wants to get his party’s nomination for president some day. Task number one is to rehabilitate his image while still maintaining a modicum of loyalty to his former boss. So we read the headline yesterday, “Powell Says U.S. Was 'Too Loud' Over Iraq” (http://uk.news.yahoo.com/050330/325/ffamy.html). Treading very carefully to blame only his old enemies in the Pentagon – Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz – Powell is still being the loyal company man and defending the Bush-baby.

Forget about it, Colin. Do you really think that the religious right, which has a hammerlock on the Republican Party, is going to stand by while the party nominates a moderate? This is a new Republican party, my friend. They eat their moderates – for breakfast. All those years of kissing up are wasted. All that Chapstick spent for naught. You bet on the wrong horse this time, and it’s leaving the stable without you in the saddle.

Bunny Wolston
March 31, 2005

The Launch

2005-03-29T19:00:00.000-08:00

Hello and welcome to my new blog, The Liberal’s Lament. You might ask how the name came to be. Let’s take it from back to front. Lament because of the sad state of liberalism today in our country. Since the 1960s with the political campaigns of Richard Nixon and George Wallace, Americans have been slowly but steadily fed a continuous stream of negativity regarding the concept of liberalism. (Most of you are probably too young to remember George Wallace’s pet phrase – pointy-headed liberals – a simultaneous condemnation of both liberals and intellectuals. This coming from an unapologetic racist.) By the 1980s with the advent of Ronald Reagan on the national political scene, the pace of liberal denigration really began to pick up. Now the word was virtually spit upon the listener, usually with curled lip combined with a venomous sneer. Liberals were likened to a fifth column, an unpatriotic, insidious, slow, rotting disease that was eating away at the core values of this country. A disease that had to be cut out. And no extremism against liberals was too severe to save this glorious country from the depravations that they had planned for it. It was this kind of thinking that led directly to the Watergate scandal and Nixon’s eventual downfall.

The word liberal has become so tainted by this long, dreadful propaganda attack that most putative liberals today refuse to call themselves by that name. They have taken refuge in the label “progressives” resurrected from the liberal parties of the 19th century. It is perhaps the saddest legacy of the extreme right wing of American politics that they can make grown adults ashamed of their own generous, broad-minded, freethinking and tolerant beliefs.

OK, so much for the lament part. Now what about the liberal? What is a liberal? Well, I kind of like the über-liberal George McGovern’s definition. To wit,

‘Webster's dictionary defines it [liberalism] as "a political philosophy based on belief in progress, the essential goodness of man, and the autonomy of the individual and standing for the protection of political and civil liberties." From the beginning, Americans have believed that the conditions of their lives could and would be improved, that is, they have believed in progress. One cannot conceive of a nation dedicated to democracy that does not rest on faith in "the essential goodness of man." It would seem even more likely that in a democratic society most of the citizenry would accept the importance of personal freedom--"the autonomy of the individual"--as well as the need to protect that freedom.’
Harper’s Magazine Dec. 2002

McGovern’s definition of a liberal doesn’t seem to contain anything that an intelligent person would deem to be shameful – certainly not by my interpretation. Conservatism, on the other hand, that political yin to liberalism’s yang, must have some serious negative connotations to it. Why else would some recent politicians feel the need to identify themselves as a modified conservative? Why is it necessary to call yourself a ‘compassionate conservative’? Is it because conservatism is by its nature unsympathetic, hardhearted, callous, cruel, pitiless and unfeeling?

That ultra-conservative William F. Buckley, in his book Up From Liberalism, defines conservatism as:

…the tacit acknowledgment that all that is finally important in human experience is behind us; that the crucial explorations have been undertaken, and that it is given to man to know what are the great truths that emerged from them. Whatever is to come cannot outweigh the importance to man of what has gone before.

To quote George McGovern again from his same Harper’s article, “The business of conservatives is, in other words, to cling tightly to the past, and although such a stance can be admirable, a stale and musty doctrine is of little use at a time when the nation needs not to fear the future but to seek out ways to improve it.”

So, welcome to the Liberal’s Lament where I hope to offer commentary and insight from time to time on the zeitgeist and to defend liberalism and its supporters from the tyranny and calumny of the right.

Bunny Wolston
March 30, 2005