Obama's Biggest Enemy

It's not that the Republican candidates make Obama look good. 

It's that the Democrats made Obama look bad.

That is the main hurdle Obama faces in 2012. At this point the Republicans are an irrelevant sideshow.

A lot of the objections to Obama are objections to what certain people in Congress and the Senate did. That includes "Obamacare." Obama made a big mistake by notching his belt on that. He should have staked out the center early, reigned in Pelosi and others, and avoided identifying himself too closely with any product of the legislature.   He has stayed close to the center most of the time.

Despite being shot in the back by his own party, Obama is doing pretty well. So far. Figures on the economy will be getting better, which Obama can -- unjustly --take credit for, and at the same time will take away the strongest campaign issue from the Republican candidate. So as Obama grows thanks to economic circumstances beyond his control the Republican candidate will weaken.

Obama is responsible for none of the economy and half the deficit; whether that will play in Peoria is up for grabs.

The Republicans have two issues, the economy and the deficit. Every other Republican plank is a losing plank according to polls.

"Obamacare" is none too popular. Yet most Americans feel a need for some kind of healthcare legislation. So attacking "Obamacare" can be a losing proposition. The winning position is to attack the bill as it stands and promise changes--but the Republicans are more or less precluded from doing anything positive on healthcare. They painted themselves into a corner on healthcare. "We will find a way to kill it" is all they can say.

Then we have a weak crop of GOP hopefuls, all subjecting themelves to the usual cannabalism and taking mostly positions that may be popular with some Republicans but are losers among all voters.

The GOP nomination. I've compared this to a horse race where they all go out slow and the best horses lose their edge and any horse can win. Romney is still the best horse and been in longer than anybody else, but with all these poll leaders and Romney looking like he can't put them away, it makes him appear really weak. And he is too darned colorless. He needs to show strength and decisiveness without being stupid.

Most of the time when you show strength and decisiveness in order to show strength and decisiveness you get stupid.  

In my opinion, Romney has made a mistake by painting himself as conservative and by attacking the administration on the Iraq withdrawal. Typical Republican quicksand. Romney has tried to campaign for the general election but he also has moved to the right in order to secure the nomination. The Republicans deviate so much from the nation as a whole that quite possibly one cannot secure the nomination and remain at the center. Huntsman is an example; look where he is now.

Part of Romney's problem is that the Republican party has no vision. There is no golden city on the hill that Republicans can aspire to. For Republicans, everything is restrictive on individual choice and liberty or favoring a tiny minority over the majority, or a yearning for a mythical past. Not only do Republican stances on most issues go against the majority but they lack a positive popular goal to generate enthusiasm. All Republican energy is negative energy. Which you can see in the posts of some Republicans on here.

The Big Circus

Checked the caller ID of my business phone a minute ago. Call from "Newt 2012." I am still on some Republican call lists because I voted in the 2000 primary--for McCain. When I take the calls I try to explain reasonably politely that I do not vote for Republicans. That if no Democrats, libertarians, Greens, Anarchists, National Socialists, Socialists, Communists, Whigs, or Labor Party candidates are running against a Republican for an office I leave the ballot blank.

I am open minded to the extent that I will listen for a little while to what a Republican candidate has to say, but that is in order to try to benefit whoever is in the opposition. Also for entertainment value.

There's a lot of entertainment value to be found in the Republican Party these days.

Meanwhile, in the shark tank, consie talking heads are turning their guns inwards on Newt Gingrich. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1211/70178.html They would prefer the honorable monogamous Mitt Romney.

Who, if he were truly honorable, wouldn't be associating himself with Republicans.

Treatment of These Heroic Happy Dead Brought Home for Burial

"heroic happy dead" is a line from the e.e. cumings poem "next to of course God, America" where a pompous politician is giving a hackneyed version of the Gettysberg Address with all the usual buzz words.

So.  It seems we don't treat our military dead a heck of a lot better than those who dug the mass graves in Bosnia.  

So what?  

Here's what.  From my posts in a Talk Lubbock thread.

Dead is dead. It is not logical to fret about whether all body parts of your loved one are in the casket or urn or whether somebody elses are mixed in or are there instead. Those were my sentiments concerning those graves that were moved up near Chicago way: so what?

It is only a question of respect and of due care. And of hypocrisy and lies, since the remains of U.S. soldiers are claimed to be so carefully honored, which is a crock anyway. Empty propaganda. "We honor your sons and husbands and fathers so much that we pay them little and curse them and kick at them during boot camp and send them off to die for no good reason but once they are dead, we are very considerate of the integrity of their remains and spare no expense to bring them back as whole as possible." Shit.

If I went somewhere and died or was killed, I'd just as soon be buried or burned there or left to rot on the roadside. It's appropriate, poetic, to lie where you fall. Used to be the common lot of all soldiers.

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The problem is, we shot ourselves in the foot. We need those happy heroic dead to use as a recruiting tool. That's why this is so bad, not because of the soldiers or their families or hurt feelings.

Live soldiers are too likely to be homeless or to have a problem with D & A or psychosis or complaints about Agent Orange or some obscure caustic or infective substance found in the sand dunes of Saudi Arabia. Dead soldiers do not talk back or disappoint or talk to the press later. I mean, sure they're dead and maybe it was because of mistakes theirs or ours but we can spin that. Do all the time. Rearranging the facts is only one of the functions of the Pentagon and DoD.

All that ponp and ceremony over dead soldiers is a recruiting tool. It gives old soldiers who ought to know better the chance to talk about patriotism and sacrifice and the costs of freedom (never mind that invading places on the other side of the globe has not a fucking thing to do with our freedom) and it gives young soldiers and prospects the achy weepy feeling of courage and resolution and flag-waving that so impresses their otherwise apt to be neglectful girlfriends and/or wives and friends.

So when corpses are not treated with absurd ceremony and respect, it makes us think, "our government doesn't care, they are using us" and so they are and have been so many times in the past, when we have gone to war because of a politicians mistakes or ambition or plain foolishness.

They don't want us to know that we are just pawns they push around on a checkerboard the size of the world. We don't want to know that either, or rather to be reminded of it, obecause it makes us feel so small and makes our lives so meaningless. We willingly join in the big deception. We want to be deceived. We beg to be included in the deception.  We'll even help write the script.

Next time you listen to the GOP pseudo-debates, keep yore ear tuned to see which of those bastards has plans for you and your children on some battleline they deem significant to them. And let me tell you, some of them do have plans, for yore money and yore offspring's lives and blood.

Basically, We're Screwed

Bob Schiffer made a couple of closing comments today worth thinking about. He said that governing has become a short interval between campaigns, and that if competitors go after each other tooth and nail, they kill not the opponent but the sport (actually he used the Burger King and McDonald's analogy).

Campaigns have been getting longer and longer. Earlier primaries, would-be presidential candidates beginning their run two years or more before elections. I remember when the primary was in May. Isn't that plenty of time for the nominee to campaign before November? If in the days before the internet, before cable television, television itself, even before radio, May primaries were thought to be fine, why is it different now?

Politics is close to the NFL as the national blood sport. In money spent and taken in it exceeds the NFL (my guess). Campaign spending has created a whole new industry in the economy, an industry of fund-raisers, pollsters, campaign managers and staff, advertising agencies, media. Is that healthy?

When the president was sworn in January 20, 2009, attacks were continuing by those claiming the president was not constitutionally quaified for office; those were not just a handful of cranks but were joined by probably 5% of the population. After a month or so, other attacks began with loud resolutions to replace the president in the next election. Some of course were urging removal by other means. It was a very short honeymoon, 30-days max.

How does all this affect governing? It hurts it.

1. It makes for a more divisive, disagreeable relationship between parties. It means that any incumbent hoping for re-election has to take every action with an eye to a far off campaign, and that the disloyal opposition is always on the attack. All of which we have seen, are seeing. A hamstrung Congress.

2. Always campaign skills are not the same skill-set needed to do the job. The best potential president, for example, did not run or was eliminated at an early stage and certainly never got to the point of nomination. We are left with the smooth voices, the pleasant faces and bodies, tha ability to say what is profitable to say. (In Romney's case that may not be enough.)

3. When there is a winner (I hate to use that word here; maybe "loser" would be more accurate, the loser being the one elected, except that the real loser is the citizenry) he takes office moving his campaign staff into the White House where they advise on every decision, making every presidential term a perpetual campaign. Just as we have created a whole industry to manage and advertise and report on campaigns, we are actually being governed by campaign managers under new titles.

4. In the legislature, the bigger part of an incumbent's job is glad-handing supporters and courting lobbyists and campaign contributors. All decisions are made with a view to money and votes.

What can you do about this? A single six-year term for president is one thing.   Single four-year terms for the House.   Moving all primaries to a later date is another. Limits on campaign spending. All of which would require constitutional amendments.    Fat chance.

Basically, we're screwed.

There are Republicans and then there is Right

Somehow conservatives and Republicans have co-opted the word "right," as in "right versus wrong."   Which perverts the meaning of the word.    Much of the time -- well, most of the time, I was only trying to be polite-- those describing themselves as being on the "Right" are way out in left field.  If anyone deserves to be called lefties, it is they.  Round-the-benders.

Remember that rat movie, where the exasperated actor -- who still gets a lot of TV parts btw -- shrieked to the villain, "You made me hate myself!"

The Republican Party makes Republicans who try to do the right thing hate what they have done and think up excuses for why they sought to do the right thing.

For example, Huckabee was a rather liberal governor, but became radicalized when he ran for president. The very reasons why he ought to have been a good choice for president the party defined as heresy and forced him to recant.

Romney, similar situation. He tried to do the right thing and it is coming back to haunt him in the ghoul-haunted woodland of Republican politics.

Gingrich, similar. Here's an account of one of his missteps that ought to be a plus for him. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-02/gingrich-accepting-gore-invite-lands-on-love-seat-with-pelosi.html   Wanna bet?

I might add to the list what Gingrich said recently about illegal aliens. What Perry said about educating the children of illegal aliens.

But that issue is not a matter of the heart as Perry put it, but of common sense. What else can we do? Illegal aliens are here, some 10-11 million of them according to a new poll, about 60% of whom have been here for 10 years or more, and many have children, many of those children born here, which means they are American citizens even if their parents are not.

What do we do, seek out and deport the illegal parents but keep the citizen children? Where? How?

Do we have the legal right to deport citizen-children because their parents are illegal?

There are so many practical reasons why we cannot find, detain, process, and deport ten million illegal aliens. Money, manpower, legal complications, crowded dockets.

But tell that to the Republican hard core.  If you are close to right in the sense used by Webster and you are a Republican  running for nomination, you painted a target on your back. 

Campaign Fraud?

NOW folks in Atlanta who knew the Cains are coming out of the woodwork and telling about Cain's marriage and infidelities.  

Was Cain playing a joke on all of us?   Taking supporters on a ride so he'd have a neat story to tell the fellas at the club?  That's how it sounds. 

When a candidate lies and supporters give money based on those lies, isn't that fraud?   Can't campaign donors sue Cain?  Weren't crimes committed?

I was taken in too, not that I would have voted for him based on what I thought he stood for.   But those who donated real folding money ought to get reimbursed, from Cain.

Cain's Rap

Lyrics Copyright 2011 by Inmate #24602/ El Alacran/Gangsta Pale

The Bitches, They Bring a Brother Down

All the world hate a successful man.
And the bitches try to bring a brother down.

Yo' mama try to bring you up nice an' girly,
All the bitches wanna bring a brother down.

Yo' mama wan' to make you a mama's boy,
All them bitches need to bring a brother down.

Teacher she tell you no, no, no you can't,
Everywhere bitches to bring a brother down.

Yo' girl forget to take a pill, give you bad news,
All the bitches have to bring a brother down.

Yo' wife want to keep you tied down safe,
All the bitches work to keep a brother down.

Yo' wife she want you under her thumb,
You know the bitches they want a brother down.

You work hard for hard money, earn yo' pay,
You know the bitches try to bring a brother down.

Ever'body got a hand out, want a piece of the pie,
All the damn bitches keep a brother down.

You reach for the sky, hands pull you back,
Ever' damn bitch wanna drag a brother down.
--------------------------------------------------

Am I saying this?   No.  Is Cain?   Sort of.  Cain's patronizing atttude toward women is not a good one.  His attitude makes me think he did what he was accused of -- sexually harassing women in the workplace.    Do I think all these "troubled" women Cain "tried to help" have it in for him and are making false accusations?  No. 

This is not the situation with Bill Clinton.   Bill Clinton had a problem, and one that impacted his presidency.  But as far as we know he did not harass women at work or assault them.   And he didn't put them down in an offensive patronizing way.

It's the Stupid Economy! and Other Musings

Of course regulation increases unemployment.

Why? Because regulation reduces profitability and reduces business start-ups. Does that mean regulation is bad? Not necessarily. Without regulation we would most all lead shorter, more miserable lives. Go read The Jungle and The Robber Baronsfor a look at what this country was like before regulation.

Every benefit has a trade-off. You gain something and you lose something. That is the way of life.

Is regulation the only factor causing unemployment? Of course not. There are business cycles, boom and bust, feast and famine.

This wave of unemployment has a number of causes. Some of it is because of regulation, some because of bad regulation, some because of social and population trends, some -- most-- because of deep-seated changes in the structure of our economy.

"Deep seated changes." What do I mean by that? Partly the shift away from a manufacturing economy to a service economy, and a decades-old trade imbalance. Too many of our workers service the rest of our workers or have the function of middlemen. When the most profitable, most productive industry is the financial industry, you know there is a problem.

Sure, we could have a regulatory and tax policy that does not drive away manufacturing as much as now. But less regulation means less safety, less security, more hardship on workers, on all of us. And even then, American workers would still not be willing to compete with those abroad who make less than a dollar an hour.

There are those who say they want a laissez-faire hands-off policy toward business. Well, laissez faire means looking for the lowest paid workers. It means providing for them as little as possible. No retirement, no health insurance, minimal safety. Laissez-faire is no remedy.

Basically, our economy is not shifting into a higher mode, but is senescent. What? Did you expect America to keep on leading the world in GNP/GDP and standard of living? You know that is just not possible. It's time for reversion toward the mean -- becoming more like the countries that we look down on.

Can we change? Somewhat, but that means a total overhaul of the economy and our spending and saving habits -- a complete overhaul of values -- and it can't be done quickly if at all.
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Back 20-30 years ago, futurists like Al Toffler were saying, "we are transitioning from a manufacturing economy to a service economy. And that's good. Instead of being a nation of steelworkers we will become a nation of computer programmers. We are evolving into a higher type of economy."

That view was wrong. The service economy meant that there were more fast food workers, not computer programmers. More employed in government, more in law, banking, finance. Basically, instead of creating new products to sell abroad, most of our energies were focused on selling things to each other, at higher and higher prices. Generating commissions and brokerage fees every step of the way.

The Age of Dominance of the Middleman. Of the middle-bureaucrat. An age where the bank VPs and "customer service reps" a/k/a salesmen outnumber tellers.

We are like a school of piranhas, that attack and feed on each other instead of hunting outside supplies of food, or making our own.

The worst piranhas are in the financial sector. If you have any money, they are targeting you.

Remember back in the 1960s, when you'd get phone calls from strangers trying to sell you magazines or whatever? Then the cold calls started to hawk insurance, stock tips, and investments. If they thought you have a few thou to your name, they'd hound you.

You've all heard of Bonnie and Clyde. Pretty Boy Floyd, Dillenger. When we think of crime in the 1920s and 1930s, that is what we think of. Forgotten is the fact that there was an explosion of bunco activity back then, often involving screwy financial schemes and frauds. See J. Frank Norfleet's book on that, for the experiences of a West Texas rancher with slick fast talking con men.

Well, today banks, brokerages and insurance companies have replaced the simpler con men of yesteryear. Now it is insurance and investment schemers who have their hands deep in your pocket, and virtually own most politicians. So often, what they do is legal. Or if it is illegal, it is hard to understand just how, and they own the prosecutors anyway.
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Remember when you'd open the newspaper and there was a McCoy's ad insert? McCoy's would advertise the cost of 2 X 4s in 8' and stud length, half inch drywall, batts of insulation, even screws and nails, for pete's sake! Places like Home Depot would more or less do the same.

McCoy's is gone, from Lubbock at any rate. Along with Payless Cashway, that advertised the same way. And what kind of advertising do you see from the building supply stores like Home Depot and Lowe's? They rarely advertise basic building stuff any more. Now it's the high dollar stuff, like $150 lavatory faucets, high end refrigerators, prebuilt closet shelving. You want screws or nails, you buy them in a box and not by the handful.

See what I am trying to say? We as consumers have gone from building new structures to making what we have more upscale. A totally different consumption habit, totally different values.

Remember the Ivory soap TV commercials? Can you believe it? P & G actually advertised Ivory bath soap, 99 44/100% pure soap, on radio and TV. They used to advertise plain old razor blades on TV. Shaving cream. No more. Now what do they advertise? The expensive high dollar stuff, no more plain soap or shaving cream.

Remember the local bakeries advertising bread? Baldridge's (no holes!), Mrs. Bairds. How often do you see plain old bread advertised? What they advertise are the so-called value-added items, processed foods, boxed and packaged foods. You never see "We have white rice, .45/lb in bulk!"

Consumption has gone upscale. The fish are feeding on ... other fish in the same school.

Why do Republicans shoot themselves in the foot?

Seems to me they are shooting themselves in the foot. That they have an institutional death wish. I mean, think about the "issues" that the present crop of Republicans have chosen to hang their hats and fight their battles on. Look at some high profile GOP issues.

1. Staying in Iraq and Afghanistan longer. For pete's sake, this is a loser from the get-go. Most Americans feel we have done enough, spent enough, and taken enough casualties there. Guess who's going to be voting in November, 2012: Answer: a lot of average Americans! Don't the Republicans know that?

2. Strong action against Iran. First of all, President Obama is doing what he can, which is about what any president can, short of direct blustering about military action, which would not help the situation. Most likely, Obama is doing exactly what Gingrich said he would do, but Obama can't talk about it and Gingrich can.

Think about the situation: would you start another war in the Middle East, which we cannot afford, and cannot afford the consequences of, in order to, maybe, delay another war for maybe 5 years, tops? The general Republican answer is: Yes!

3. Waterboarding. Most of the GOP candidates favor using waterboarding, except maybe Ron Paul. Issue DOA. Our military disapproves of waterboarding. Most everybody except Cheney and a handful of Republican candidates reject waterboarding. Including the president who used it, over a period of a couple of years, early in his administration, waterboarding one guy more than a hundred times, the process was so effective. Waterboarding is a nonissue and non-winner outside of a redneck bar past midnight where most of those polled favor nuking Iran and the whole Middle East.

4. Protecting the very rich from increased taxation. Now what do you think about a pack of candidates who hang their hat on low taxes for a tiny minority of the very wealthy, who have been doing especially well lately? Whose votes would you ask for if you were running for office, the 5% or the 95%?

5. Abortion. Look. It's very simple. The Supreme Court has spoken, and there is not much you can do on the national level. Possibly the next president or two might have a chance to name a Supreme Court justice, which will have little effect. Plus, most Americans are content to leave abortion laws where they are, instead of having government dictate to people and doctors what they cannot do with their own lives and bodies.

6. Helping the economy. Now this is not a bad idea to hang your hat on. But look who's doing the talking. An ex-IRS tax accountant and religious fanatic, a life long professional politician, a one-time business executive who has spent a big chunk of his life in politics and running for president, a former fast food CEO who is accused of sexual harassment and misconduct, another pro politician who has learned to feed at the trough of political PACs. And the problem is that each of them touts their experience in helping the economy and putting people to work. That is a joke.
Imagine President Cain announcing a program to aid women in getting breast implants in order to improve their employment chances, Bachmann with a program for subsidizing church-related employment, Gingrich fostering employment in PACs.

To Be Continued.

Moderate Winds Coming in the GOP?

If there is a moral to be derived from the November, 2011, elections it is that people distrust extremes.  

Our political parties, more and more, have catered to extremes.  One in particular.

Romney has been running a presidential campaign for months, seeking to appeal to voters broader than the extremist voting blocks that make up the GOP.  The others, except for Huntsman, kept their eyes on the extreme blocks and hoped to get to nomination, without thinking beyond that.

This week, Romney made a statement that the sexual harassment charges levied against Cain were serious if true.   Romney knows he must patch the wounds in his party and reach out to average Americans rather than than Cain's hardcore backers.  He has to write those Cain supporters off, if necessary.

If there is a new leavening of the GOP, will Huntsman's numbers rise?   Would Huntsman be a possible running mate for Romney?   Don't hold your breath on that.  

Cain III, The End

No. 4 is coming out, today, at a press conference.

For the good of the party, Cain needs to bow out now.

Why for the party? Because it puts the other candidates like Romney and Perry in a vise: If they attack Cain, they alienate Cain supporters, and there are supporters out there who still think all this is a "high tech lynching"; if Romney and Perry say nothing, they alienate half the country.

Look for Cain's withdrawal sometime today. Unless he wants to take everybody down with him.

Note:  I considered Cain a good candidate months ago, a personification of the business friendly side of the GOP.  [Hmmm.   Is there another side?   Actually I considered Cain and Huntsman to be bookends among the candidates.  Huntsman has faded from barely there to still barely there.]  Cain has a sueful message for Americans, that you can succeed by hard work, that you get nowhere blaming and making excuses.   He has never been a viable presidential candidate.

Herman Cain, continued

Don't even go there," Cain told reporters this weekend, with righteous outrage, as though they asked him something private and irrelevant to his qualifications for public office.

Previously Cain and his followers were blaming Perry for bringing up the accusations, as though it was scurrilous and underhanded behavior to do so.

And certain conservative voices are saying this was a mugging; that to dig out accusations of sexual harassment from 15 years ago is dirty pool and indefensible.

Private? Past? Irrelevant? A mugging? I guarantee that if Cain were being considered for the job of CEO at Landry's for example, they would be quite concerned about the allegations. Shouldn't we be concerned when it is a candidate running for president?

Typical for the miscreants to turn on the whistleblowers.

Yes, Cain has probably experienced a decline in testosterone from 15 years ago, unless he is getting external dosages, but a possible pattern of behavior, thought at the time to justify sums of money paid out to at least two and maybe three women independently, shows that Cain had and may still have a behavioral problem that we cannot ignore.

And remember, these were not co-workers, they were subordinates. The sexual harassment of subordinates by a boss is one of the slimiest examples of corporate behavior.

The extent to which certain conservative Cain supporters want to see this buried demonstrates a cavalier lack of concern for the rights of employees and women employees in particular.

It is hard to figure how Republicans wanting to bury all this think they are going to broaden their base in 2012. If you are desperate for votes, and both Cain and the GOP are, you don't alienate half the population of the United States by dismissing sexual harassment accusations as a "political mugging."

Cain

Cain is toast.  The flirtation is over, trending into repulsion:  "How could I ever [choose one] 
-have dated that man
-have considered voting for him."

There have been too many mistakes, too many instances of misspeaking then having to restate, and now, with these stories of old harassment claims, Cain is finished. 

The attack on the Perry camp for outing Cain's past is an absurd, self-condemning attempt at distraction.   

The lamest and most common response in politics is to say "These charges are politically motivated."   Well who the fuck cares what the motivation was;  the only question is "are the accusations true?"  

In Cain's case, it is pretty clear that accusations were made and payoffs made on behalf of Cain.  If that does not prove Cain's guilt, then let him speak to the accusations. 

Mad Children

This weekend, at a time when Condaleeza Rice's expose of the utter non-thinking vapidity of the Bush administration has come to light -- the total lack of an end game in Iraq or any thought of needing one -- the Mad Children of the Republican Party are howling on the playground, trying to drown-out adult conversation.


Diane Arbus captured this image of a Mad Child, a Republican-in-the-making, with grenade in hand. Perhaps he is running for office today. Or, could he be some former Republican president?

At a time when most Americans and a majority who served there want to be shut of Iraq, Bachmann and Romney and Santori are trying to shout out the adults, saying that we should stay in Iraq beyond the first of the year.

The Mad Children seem to think the president should make clear to the Iraqis just who is in charge in Iraq, telling home truths that the Iraqi government is a mere puppet, and that Iraqis can't dictate terms to the conqueror.

And Romney, Bachmann, and Santorini think that approach would keep Iraq from getting still closer to Iran?

Noisy, violent, controlling children wanting to play in the adult world.

My Take on Occupy Wall Street

Where you totally misscharacterize the facts, GOPer, is that the demonstrators are not Democrats per se; some are Democrats, some are independents, some have never been involved before, but will be now, in 2012! There may even be a Tea Party Republican or two.

They are demonstrating against Obama as much as against the financial-industry-friendly Republicans, and those politicians who take campaign donations/bribes from financial wheeler-dealer firms and from big corps. Obama, you ought to be aware, does that too.   Obama likes to suck up to the Wall Street mob.

Whereas the Tea Party Republicans are anal-retentives out to laager their wagons and keep other folks from grabbing their stash or disturbing their peace and quiet in their regimented Republican ghetto neighborhoods, the Occupy Wall Street crowd are more representative of the American people as a whole-- disparate in income and ethnicity, including some out of work or having trouble with finances or concerned about those who are.

The political parties would do well to address the demonstrators' concerns. I don't know if this movement will fade out in a week or continue in some form or other. But you ignore or ridicule these demonstrators at your peril.

Which reminds me of what JS wrote above. JS sounds a lot like solid well-off Republicans 40+ years ago, talking about those demonstrating against the Vietnam War. Surprise! Turned out the protesters and draft dodgers were right! The Vietnam War was a matter of a corrupt, lying government and military here trying to prop up a corrupt, lying series of governments in South Vietnam, all to the short term profit of certain industries here in the states.

You may not like the hygiene of the messengers, but you damn well better pay attention to the message. 

Unmentionable

I like Herman Cain. He's telling some hometruths, that you don't get anywhere with a chip on your shoulder, that however strong prejudice is, YOU are more responsible for what happens to you than anybody else. Similar message to that of Bill Cosby, btw.

Huntsman seems lost, left behind. Is he still in the race, theoretically speaking?

Cain, Huntsman, and Paul can really teach us something. And between them, they can articulate the various prospective futures of the Republican Party. I wish that win lose or draw they would take the debates on the road to educate Americans of both parties, to make us THINK, as Phil Donohue liked to say. Forget the others, forget the election; Cain, Huntsman and Paul are the ones to listen to, even if you don't plan to vote for them.  *

Changing gears. I saw this -- http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2011/10/07/could-unmarried-woman-sink-obama/ -- on Google News links. Always hungry for tabloid fodder I clicked on the link. "Aha!, I thought, Obama's got a girl friend." Then I found out the headline was misleading; they weren't talking about one embarassing mistress, they were talking about Obama's appeal to single women, who voted for Obama overwhelmingly in 2008.

Read that article. Do you notice something? Something not mentioned? The A-word maybe?

That article fails to mention a component of Obama's and the Democrat's appeal to single women voters. Abortion. When GOP candidates start hitting on abortion, single women get nervous. THEY don't want some old fart, male, bald, overweight,** calling the shots on their reproductive rights. And hence they avoid certain Republicans like the plague.

Abortion in my opinion is a non-issue, at least at the federal level, or ought to be.

Did you notice something else? How much has the A-word been pushed around in the GOP "debates"? How much has Romney uttered the A-word? Can you guess why?

*Leading candidates you do not want to listen to.  They say what gets them votes and avoid what costs them votes.  It's the ones who trail in the polls who can afford to tell the truth, to utter the unpopular.

**  Old, fat, bald, wanting power over a woman's reproduction?   Like Congressman Neugebauer, maybe?

Dial 9-11 for Hypocrisy

What follows are my posts more or less in response to a thread started about the 9/11 monument in Israel.  

Let me say by preamble that the wallowing in national grief over the WTC is misplaced and turns my stomach.  Knowing that, you are prepared to continue reading or not.   9-11, get the fuck over it.   It was only a warm-up for the tragedies to follow.
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Where are the memorials for those innocent Iraqis who have died since 2003? For innocent Afghans? Way, way over 3,000 in the case of Iraq. http://www.iraqbodycount.org/

One might also inquire about memorials to innocent Palestinians killed by Israelis.
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Mohammar Qadaffi, Hosni Mubarek, and even Saddam Hussein were American allies who were betrayed and dumped by us because a friendly or hands-off relationship with them became too embarassing and politically incorrect.

Saddam was Reagan's counterweight in the Middle East. Then 60 Minutes ran pieces about the mass killing in the Iran-Iraq war, and the use of poison gas and acquisition of weapons of mass destruction. THEN Saddam became a non-person to the Bush One administration. Too dirty, too messy to be involved with.

Before invading Kuwait, Saddam sent a communique through the State Dept to the Bush administration, asking in effect if the U.S. had any objections to his pressing his claim against Kuwait, said claim being the rationale for invading.

I first heard this in a Reader's Digest article in the early 1990s. Now, thanks to Wikileaks, we know more about it. See for example Ron Paul who claims Bush tricked Saddam into invading: http://www.dailypaul.com/156160/ron-paul-enters-evidence-of-bush-war-crimes-in-congressional-record My own interpretation was that the U.S. did not reply, thereby giving tacit permission for Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.

The time to draw a 'line in the sand' of course was before Saddam invaded, not after, when he could not back down without a loss of face and the respect of his enemies. At the very least, George Herbert Bush totally blew it. At the worst, well, you have Ron Paul's opinion.

Back to casualties. How many Iraqis have been killed since 2003? Iraq Body Count is a conservative count. They have debunked claims of 490,000 and a million civilian casualties. http://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/beyond/exaggerated-orb/ THEIR count is 115,000 civilians dead from military activity by the USA and allies. More deaths to be found in the action reports released by Wilkleaks. This does NOT include insurgents killed, it does NOT include Iraqi soldiers killed. Does anyone here think we fought bloody battles with the Republican Guard and they took only a few thousand killed? So THE TOTAL or Iraqis killed, on all sides and civilians on no side, is probably a couple of hundred thousand.

And we are making such a fuss about 3,000 killed on 9-11. Hell, we have 30,000 killed in auto accidents each year, ten thou plus killed in suicides, accidents and homicides from firearm, 40,000 killed annually from medical malpractice. Hell, we lose a lot more than 3,000 Americans every year because of a freekin lack of medical care!

Not to bring up for a millisecond all those dying in the Sudan, in Somalia, in central America, in a hundred places around the globe that few of us can find on our maps, whose deaths mean nothing in comparison to a handful of over-fed, well-heeled paperpushers who died at the WTC.

And these g.d. propagandists want to build a memorial to those killed on 9-11 and hold prayers and church services and damn those Americans and non-Americans whose preventable deaths they do not want to bother to try to prevent. As we see in that monument in Israel, and in our own 9-11 memorials and services, this is nothing but propaganda, manipulation of popular opinion for political purposes.
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I'm sorry about that, _______.  Sorry about your leaving.  Think I'll do the same as soon as I post an attack on LISD's new $30,000 parking spaces that I've been planning for a month.  Then, maybe you will come back.

You don't like my comments because I am at base a moralist, and I don't hesitate to do the politically incorrect thing of accusing you or the nation you support of being wrong or hypocritical.   You want to blissfully ignore the numbers and the facts and to pretend that you, and Israel and the United States and your religion, have an hereditary exclusive on being right and just. 

I agree that it should have been Saudi Arabia that put up a 9-11 monument;  considering the relationship between our nations and the role of S.A. in 9/11, much of which has not been released to the public by the 9/11 Commission and will not be for another 12 years, the Saudis really should have built such a monument as a conciliatory gesture.  But since the House of Saud is sitting atop a keg of gunpowder -- earlier this year it looked like they would be among the casualties of the Arab Spring -- it is somewhat understandable that they did not tweak the ears of the lion that will one day overthrow and execute them. 

Why did Israel build a 9/11 monument?    To show that they and we have a common enemy-- Arab fundamentalism.  Never mind that 99.99% of Muslims are not terrorists, they want to express common cause with the United States in this ongoing battle against Islam.   They also want U.S. aid to continue.   They want America off their backs in how they treat the Arabs and Palestinians among them.    I don't really consider those motivations to be all that admirable, though probably you do.

The terrorism happening in Israel cuts both ways; that is all that I have said and all I am saying;  Israelis are both victims and victimizers.   A  missile is launched from a neighborhood in Nablus; there is a retributive attack on that part of Nablus.  And so it goes in an endless cycle of vengeance.  How do you break that cycle?

I wonder -- you ever watch those WWII movies where the occupying Germans execute innnocent citizens because of something the resistance has done?    That actually happened, btw.  In Holland for example the townspeople of Nijmegen or Arnem were told that if the culprits in the Dutch resistance did not give themselves up, that 10 or a dozen men and women would be selected at random and executed for what the resistance had done.    Think about that.  And consider this:

From http://www.cdi.org/terrorism/chronology-pr.cfm, quote:
[i]"October 23, 1983 - A suicide car bomb attack against the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut kills 241 servicemen. A simultaneous attack on a French base kills 58 paratroopers.
"In response, President Ronald Reagan ordered the battleship USS New Jersey, stationed off the coast of Lebanon, to shell the hills near Beirut." [/i]

Reagan asked in a press conference afterward  "Ever hear the sound a 16" shell makes?"  Reagan like John Wayne was an expert on war and cannon because he had been in the movies.

So if the terrorists who killed 241 Marines (because their commander was stupid enough to biillet them in one dense, vulnerable pile, but that's another part of the story) were thought to be from the Druze villages in the mountains, then we shelled the villages.    Obviously it would be the merest chance that a perpetrator was killed by a shell.  It was enough that someone in the same village, the same neighborhood, the same house, was killed. 

Get my point?   That we do the same things we accused the Germans of doing in WWII occupied areas, and tried them for, by the way, as war criminals.    We and the Israelis are higher tech and we often kill from afar when we exact retribution for a terrorist attack.

Wonder what Lebanese or Palestinian families think about the bombs from above when they come.   Which brings up the inevitable question, "Who is the terrorist, and who is seeking revenge for terrorism?"  Are the boundaries always clear?

Obama Speech

Well-written and delivered, in form a challenge to the other side -- "You pass this or the consequences are on your head."  So now Obama can to a degree sit back and relax, knowing that the whole thing probably will not get passed unchanged and if any change is made, he can blame the Republicans for any problems with the economy.  A win-win scenario for the Big O.  Unless the whole proposal passes and the economy is still sour, in which case Obama takes the hit.   But what is the likelihood of that?   (The Jobs bill passing, I mean, not the economy staying sour.)

As to the bill itself, I cain't kick.  I would like to see more of a carrot and a stick applied to American companies who move operations or jobs abroad, and more tax disadvantages to companies with officers paid a lot more than the rank and file.   It ain't American, and while we can't tell companies how much to pay their board and executives, we can sure as heck penalyze them when it comes to taxing. 

Also, as always, there is too much deference toward the financial industry.   American business is separate from the casino shell games played in the finance sector.

And in the meantime,  Republican presidential hopefuls will be tearing each other apart, while Obama, like Caesar at the Colisseum, sits on his throne and watches.   

I'm disappointed in Bachmann's reception.  Not that I consider her a good candidate.  It's the way the GOP faithful are bypassing her in favor of taller and louder men.  Her content is not that different from Perry's, both being on the looney side of the street.   Why is he getting the attention while she is fading?  Not fair.  I think it's because she is a little woman.

I've said before that the Republican candidates are a handsome bunch this year.    The hair dye and transplants, the botox, the spa treatments, have really paid off.  And I am sorry to say, that is what a candidate most needs:  handsomeness.   The time is past when Americans will elect a fat, bald, stooped, short, or wrinkled person to the White House.     We are all about appearances and soundbites and shortness on substance.

Perry would have appalled previous generations, whose children and grandchildren now stand enthralled.  Sad to say, he is the man of our time, which says more about us, about some of us, than about him.

Not that Perry will win against Obama if nominated.   I feel Huntsman is the best candidate to go head to head against Obama.    The loss will not reform Perry or his (or Bachmann's or Gingrich's or Palin's) supporters.  They will retire to their dens to lick their wounds and plan revenge.    As a character said in Lord of the Rings, "After a rest and a respite, the evil grows again."  

I know it's bad to characterize a significant segment of the American population as evil, but that's how I feel.   They have cleaved to the false prophets and the anti-Christ prophesied in the New Testament. 

See!   I can wax religious too.

Cult

On the GOP, check this out: http://www.truth-out.org/goodbye-all-reflections-gop-operative-who-left-cult/1314907779 By a former Republican who had enough.  He is incisive too in his dissection of the Democrats. 

Despite what I post here and elsewhere, I don't really think that merely being a Republican qualifies one for a padded cell. There are thoughtful Republicans out there with a useful perspective that could help the country. But increasingly the GOP is dominated by a Far Right lunatic fringe that does behave like a cult.

In fact, their beliefs form a politico-religious complex, and are constantly reinforced by a radio-TV-print- propaganda barrage like that of Herr Goebbels in the 1930s.  

To hear some preachers spin it, Jesus was the prophet of free-market capitalism and of low taxes and no restrictions on big business and the rich.

Sunday, trying to get the news programs on TV, I passed a channel where a preacher was preaching -- conservative politics and economics. So much for the Sermon on the Mount. So much for feeding the hungry and clothing the naked. So much for the parable of the rich man and the eye of the needle. The Republican-Religious Fundamentalist complex are forging a new religion, suited to their joint purposes.

If I were the parent of a young Republican today, I'd seriously think about arranging a kidnapping and deprogramming exactly as though he or she had gotten involved with the moonies or scientology or a radical sect of Islam.

I think there is a coming civil war in this country over core values that will make the 1861-65 Civil War look like boys throwing rocks at each other.  The conservatives are already armed to the teeth.   It is incumbent on those opposing the conservative Religio-Republican agenda to prepare as well.

On Creationism, Installment (n+1)

"...look at the beauty of this planet, today and through the millions of years that this planet has existed...."

Precisely. But what many creationists are saying is that the evidence that you can see and touch that the earth has existed for millions of years (or billions) is a lie, planted there by a God or a Satan wanting to entrap humankind into false belief. How do you fight that? How can you? It's impossible to argue with someone who denies logic and the evidence of one's senses.

For that matter, what alternative to evolution does a literal reading of the Bible offer? There are two separate creation stories in Genesis, neither of which agrees with the other. Genesis 1:1 through 2:4 versus Genesis 2:5 and following. Two differing accounts of Noah and the flood.

Logically, there would be a big dispute between Genesis 1:1 creationists and Genesis 2:5 creationists: "No, you're wrong, take that!" Bam! Pow! That there is no such rift among creationists is due to poor reading comprehension or nt wanting to comprehend. It is simply amazing how the biblical understanding of fundamentalists is managed and controlled by the few.

The Religion Disease

Extreme religiosity is associated with brain damage. Hit an agnostic hard enough on the head and he/she will turn to God. And I am convinced that some are born with defective brain wiring, that there is in effect a God gene. [Wasn't this a lead article in a Newsweek some years back?]

But lemme explain my view more clearly. Humans have big brains. Along with those big brains are baggage, self-defeating irrational behavior, an assortment of nearly paralyzing feedback loops in nerve cell programming or development. Especially, though, we fear.

With our big brains, we can imagine all the bad things that can happen to us and to those we like or depend on. The ability to anticipate bad things means fear. Fear can be paralyzing, numbing. Truly, Frank Herbert wrote in Dune that "fear is the mind-killer...." So we humans do anything we can to alleviate fear. By magic, by rituals, by appealing to gods.

Irrational behavior is not seen only in humans. It's not only a big-brain thing. Consider, if you will, the chicken. Put a chicken into a skinner box, give the chicken intermittent reinforcement. If a chicken gets fed when it pecks a certain lever, then the chicken pecks at the lever when its hungry. BUT. If the chicken is rewarded by a food pellet only SOMETIMES when it pecks a lever, the poor chicken goes crazy, obsessively pecking at that lever.

We are exactly like that chicken. [Gambling is as good an example as religion. When I go into a casino, I see all those chickens pulling at slot machine levers. Gambling is an obsession caused by intermittent reinforcement.] We pray or sacrifice, and often times, more often than not, things work out okay. (We only die once, but we fear death many times. And the last time, when we die, we do not live to draw any kind of false conclusion from the experience.) So like the chicken, we pray and propitiate the gods constantly and obsessively. That is how we deal with anxiety.

Think about sacrifice. God or gods have no need of human sacrifice. They don't eat flesh or the produce of the field or anyone's first born. But we obsessively offer these things because they mean something to us! We created the gods, in our image, with our wants, to obsess over us. We are the center of our universe, and the gods we create obsess about humans and the conduct of men and women! [I say that God needs to get a life, study astrophysics or go knit worm holes around the universe and get away from obsessing over human sexual behavior and that pet ant farm on earth.]

Confession time. I've never confessed this to anyone, though some may guess. Remember Jack Nicholson in the movie "As Good As It Gets"? I have for many years and especially in times of fear and stress engaged in ritual behavior, you know, turn three times clockwise before leaving home, touch the doorknob five times, turn the key back and forth twice, avoid the cracks in the step, and so on. Not quite like that, but close.

Why, for pete's sake, do things that stupid? Because they work, or seem to, at least part of the time. Think about that chicken in the skinner box, given intermittent reinforcement. That ritual behavior is precisely like the ceremonies of religion, in the case of Christianity, telling oneself that "Jesus is with me and there is no reason to fear death for myself or my loved ones because at death we will become one with Jesus." I knew an old man, seemingly rational, except that he would constantly, every few minutes, say quietly, "Praise Jesus!" When he was talking, he'd interrupt himself every few sentences to say, "Praise Jesus!" Perfect example of ritualistic behavior. And how is that any different from telling a rosary by fingering the beads, or spinning a prayer wheel?

Where religion is not purely the result of brain damage, it is a product of our irrational ways of coping with fear.

Employment, Wages, Unemployment

I've argued against the "union-busting" that Gov. Walker and the Tea Party movement pushed through in Wisconsin.  My problem was that the legislation was not broad enough.  Not just unions should be targeted.  Executives and CEOs should be too.  If there is a pay-cut in government or in a company, it should be across the board, with executives leading the way.

Walker may not have "won" in the long run but he had a point. 

The point that he had is the need to enable companies to reduce salaries/wages when the company/economy is going downhill.

I think this might be done by enacting a law that permits companies to make across the board cuts in the pay of all employees, including all executives and board members, despite any contracts to the contrary, when the profitability of the company has gone down to zero.

Some years ago, I started thinking about a new way of paying employees.  A base wage that eould not change, with bonuses for individual productivity, for team productivity, and in relation to the profitability of the company.  Pay by formula.   When hard times strike, employee pay is automaticaly reduced.  The employee has to tighten his or her belt, but still has a job.

More of that would end the need for unemployment compensation.

As it is, employment/unemployment and compensation is very unfair.  Production line employees get laid off when misfortunes hit.  Engineers get laid-off with a nice nest egg in severance pay.   And too often, the CEO gets a bonus or a new CEO is hired for a record amount. This is crazy.  These companies are run with a total disregard to employee loyalty, and a blatant in-your-face statement about the differences between executives and line employees.  There can be no loyalty in such a company.  No teamwork.

You have to treat everybody alike or at least similarly.  Except that cuts should be higher in the executive suite.

I've never believed in lay-offs. Permanent employees ought to be ... permanent. Not seasonal like migrant farm workers. Not as a pool that can be discarded or picked up as needed.   But being permanent means too that they share in the fortunes and misfortunes of the company.   That pay cuts occur immediately and automatically, according to an objective formula.  It means employees have to realize that income will vary, that there are no automatic raises or cost-of-living increases.

Which brings up the unemployment picture.

With the 2012 election coming, some are saying that something has to be done about unemployment, that it is a problem that must be fixed. That someone in charge, like the president, needs to wave a magic wand and cure things. To a large extent they are wrong, pandering to misinformed popular opinion.

Many of those jobs lost will not be replaced. The companies that survived are leaner and meaner, doing more now with fewer employees. Less deadwood, fewer chair warmers and middle managers, more automation. Those jobs will not be coming back.

Then too, some companies and industries are gone.

Jobs continue to be exported. There is one area where the president and Congress can try to make a difference, by providing incentives for American companies to stay in America and disincentives (penalties) for leaving. Lower corporate taxes, for example, with high penalties for companies that attempt to fictionally move elsewhere.

International business competition is becoming a more level playing field. More competition from China, India and Brazil means some U.S. companies will be losing market share or going out of business, a trend that has existed for 50 years and will continue. In the very long run, Americans will be no more wealthy than folks in half the nations of the world. This is a statistical principle called "regression to the mean."

More and more, U.S. income and lifestyle will regress to the mean of the world as a whole. That is unavoidable.

All of which means that a lot of the unemployed will not be getting an equivalent of their old job back. They are going to have to settle for retraining, for a less expensive way of living. To find new goals and interests. There are no magic wands.

Any politician who doesn't tell us this is lying through his/her teeth.

Copyright 2011 by El Alacran and The Refracted Image

Giffords and Thoughts

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/12/gabrielle-giffords-photos_n_875498.html?icid=main%7Chtmlws-sb-n%7Cdl1%7Csec1_lnk3%7C215783 

When you harm another being, you take a great deal onto yourself. 

If you harm but do not kill, them you have to live with your responsibility for what the life of that being has become.   This applies to Congressman Giffords, to those who were paralyzed or who have brain damage from an auto collision, and to deer wounded by a careless hunter.

When I was a sripling, I was very aggressive and as soon as I learned to make what we called a "negro-shooter" out of a forked stick and rubber bands, I started shooting at birds.   Which did not make my grandfather, who taight me how to make such a weapon, very happy.  Especially when I shot at and injured a bird.  Then again, at Lake Colorado City, I threw a rock at a lizard and hit it, injuring its leg.  Each trip back there, my mother or grandfather would remind me of what I had done and would point out the gimpy lizard.  It's a lesson that most of us learn.  Never well enough to stop us from doing harm carelessly. 

Where this is seen most often is driving, where a vehicle hits another vehicle, pedestrian, or cyclist.  Especially the later two, where brain and/or spinal cord damage occurs so easily.

The prescription is the same.  We just have to think about what we are doing, always.

If you are caught with your pants down, go into therapy

That's the Woods' fix, and the aptly named Weiner's too.   I admire Schwartzenegger for not going that route for shrugging off blame, so far and not publicly, anyway. 

Libya

Barack is acting like a g.d. Bush neocon, trying to remake the world in neocon fashion and attempting it on the sly.

Problem is this. What IS, is for reasons. If Saddam is in charge in Iraq or Mohammar in Libya, there are reasons behind that, a whole culture behind that. You don't just haul off and remove the top man and some generals and ministers and everything suddenly falls into place for an America-lovin' democracy. Don't work that way. If you are in the game in order to effect regime change then you are intimately embracing the tar baby and lobbing bombs around like a high-tech coward is not worth jack shit.

In the case of Libya, U.S. and western intervention was sold to the press and to the UN as the only way to protect lives. But at a certain point, when it comes to lives lost the toll behind our bombing and killing Libyans and the overall casuualty toll for extending the rebellion outnumbers the lives that would be lost from Qadaffy's winning over the rebels.

And suppose Khadaffi is out and the rebels in, what does that mean? Peace and enlightenment and democracy? Probably not.

"The Undefeated"

Sarah Palin?  "The Undefeated"?  Really?   Didn't she turn tail and quit her job as governor?   But that's not fair::  she didn't quit;  she left a boring unpromising low-paying job as a public servant in order to become a highly paid media star on flextime.  Which was where she was before entering politics, a TV presenter. 

On Knowledge, Faith, Argument, Education

As for religion, why should we draw lines and say, "This is a matter of fact, which can be argued with, but this other gets into faith which we ought not to argue with"? Business is supposed to be reality-based, science, the same. Why not religion? Why not faith?

Who was it that said "The unexamined life is not worth living"?

IMO we each ought to question every aspect of our (and other's) beliefs, not just once but periodically, like housecleaning. It ought to be a part of high school curriculum to question everything, values, mores, theories of government, of religion, nothing excepted. In h.s. government class, there needs to be a part where students criticize democracy, capitalism, any established shibboleth. In science, have a segment where students have free rein to criticize any scientific tenet.

I am not saying that classes can be disorderly and anarchic, but that there needs to be a time and place for everything. Some facts can only be learned by rote. Other concepts need to be discovered. Some subjects call for creativity while others don't. Sometimes debate is useful. At present, IMO, schooling blurs the lines, so you have kids responding to a fact question by exercising creativity or giving an opinion; the real purpose of education is to teach kids to know the difference and to clearly distinguish between what they know and what they think they know and what is uncertain or arguable.

It is common to grade a test so that getting 90% of the questions right means getting an "A".  What grade do you give an airline pilot who gets 90% right?  Dead?  Probably. 

And there are so many areas in which our problem is thinking we know when in fact we do not.  True ignorance is not in not knowing, but in not knowing you are wrong.

The most important thing to get out of school is to know what one knows and what one does not know, and to be able to distinguish what is definite and knowable from what is unknown or a matter of opinion.

It is creationists who say that biology classes ought to let students question the validity of evolutionary theory. Well, okay, nothing wrong with questioning. But talk about teaching students to question religion and those creationists get all het up and say that is off limits. Why? Can't take what you try to dish out?

Stosselpoopery

Stosselpoopery as in nincompoopery.

What ever happened to John Stossel?  I hadn't heard about him for years since enjoying his segments on a TV program called 20/20.

A link posted in a forum took me to a blog he has over on Fox Business.  From ABC to Fox.  Quite a fall.   Drugs?   Alcohol?  Depression?  Loss of motivation?   We may never know.    And that blog confirms it:  the clever and insightful John Stossel is no more.  He has joined the brain-dead at Fox.  The Zombie Network.

Here's the blog post I'm talking about:  http://www.foxbusiness.com/on-air/stossel/blog/2011/04/25/where-did-all-anti-war-protestors-go   

It never occurs to Stossel that those who protested over Afghanistan or Iraq trust Obama more than Bush to bring those occupations to an early conclusion.   But there's more than that to what Stossel terms "the anti-war movement."

For me, I opposed the invasions of Afghanistan and of Iraq from the outset, especiually the Iraq invasion.   Why?   Was I "anti-war"?   Not really.  What I was was "anti-roll-over-and-play-fetch,"  which was the role the Bush administration and overwhelming political correctness tried to force Americans into back in 2002-2003.  We were to be the good doggies, and Cheney-Bush the ones who had us on a leash.

Ever had a tenacious salesman in your living room, one who simply would not leave until you signed his contract?  A really, really, hard sell?  And what does that tell you about the product the salesman is selling?   That was the Bush-Cheney administration before invading Iraq.   Quite obvious at the time that there was something wrong with what they were pushing, or else they would not have been pushing so hard.  Obvious that we were being conned by all the scare tactics relating to 9/11 and al Quaeda.

And most everybody went along, almost all the "liberal media," Oprah Winfrey who basically talked down someone who wanted to oppose the Iraq invasion on her TV show, even in the senate and house.  To oppose invading Iraq was to be ... unAmerican.  Only a handful of well-known people dared speak up.   The story of the emperor's new clothes updated to 2003.

So, I was anti-invasion, not anti-war.   I was anti-occupation later, because the occupation was so horribly mismanaged in the early years, politicized, with positions parceled out to the party faithful on the basis of their support, not on the basis of ability.  

At the same time, I did not favor full military withdrawal.  I mean, if you bomb a nation back to 1850, do you just go away and leave them to rebuild by themselves?  Don't you have a duty to stay and lend a hand?

The Chinese say that if you save someone's life, then you are responsible for them.   I  say that if you destroy someone's house and kill members of their family, and discover it all was a mistake, then you have a heavy burden of responsibility and that you can't turn your back and go home and forget about it.

Back to Stossel.  He does not see the nuances in opposition to Bushgressions and Cheneycasualties.  He struggles to string together words to throw like scraps of raw meat to ravening Fox-readers.  RIP John Stossel.

Will the GOP Find a Young New Lover?

So you're 30+ years old and mother of three squalling brats and carry 30 extra pounds and your second hubbie has gone to parts of persons unknown and won't be back, and your apartment smells like dirty diapers. You can dream, can't you? So you read the National Enquirer about celeb love and breakups, and buy those little romance paperback books that have hunky men enbracing buxom lasses on the cover. Will a white knight like that come and take you away from all this?

You sigh and know that white knights are uncommon around here, and if one were to get lost and knock on your door. he wouldn't be interested and wouldn't come in because of the smell and the noise.

So you leave the kids with mom and hit the bars, knowing that when the hour hand moves past 12, everybody gets prettier.

So it is with the Republican Party. Kissed too many beaux, slept with too many, had too many kids, drunk too many beers and eaten too much fast food and what is left is not too attractive to anybody in a position to be at all choosy.

Short and unsweet analysis. "2012 and the republican rescue fantasy" http://washingtonexaminer.com/politics/2011/05/2012-and-republican-rescue-fantasy From the article:

"COLUMBIA, S.C.

"Talk to enough people around this key primary state and you'll learn two lessons, over and over again. One is that there is absolutely, positively no unity among Republicans about any presidential candidate or potential candidate; there's no such thing as a frontrunner. The other is that in the back of their minds, many Republicans are hoping that somewhere, somehow, a superhero candidate will swoop down out of the sky and rescue them from their current lackluster presidential field. They know it's a fantasy, but they still hope....
Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/politics/2011/05/2012-and-republican-rescue-fantasy#ixzz1LoqxbBTg

More on Osama

After four days, we have some facts.  Kudos to our government for fessing up.

There was llittle resistance.  The woman was killed along with the AQ messenger before entry to Osama's house.   There was no resistance by Bin Laden of his son. 
 
This was an assassination by a Seal hit team from the outset.

Apart from theoretical matters of legality and morality, it's hard to second-guess that decision.  After all these years, we still don't know what to do with Khalil Sheikh Mohammed.  We sure don't need a breathing and untried Osama & Son in perpetual confinement at Guantanamo like some "man in the iron mask" ordered imprisoned without trial by a French king while we hold off Amnesty, Int'l visits by bayonet.

Simpler and cleaner with lower risk of future terrorism to just kill them.

Does it bother me?  Sure it does.  Those polls like to ask "Do you think America has lost its way?"   Well, yes;  sure.  Partly if not mostly for the way out leaders have bent the laws.

We are not as far from an extra-constitutional dictatorship as we would wish.  Here is proof that ours is not a government of laws but of men and expediency.

We were told that captured terrorists, terrorist-affiliates and suspects were soldiers and not criminals, that our domestic laws did not apply to them, and so they were carted off to a legal no-where at Gitmo, where an extra-constitutional system was set up to supposedly try them, when and if we got around to it, maybe.

But is it okay to assassinate unarmed soldiers? That's what happened this week in Pakistan.

Truth is, we have done this before, in WWII and since. We did it in conflict with American Indians. And it is a legal and moral dilemma only if we think about it. Most Americans are not thinking about it. We never have much.  The price of gasoline is forever on our minds more than morals.

The Problem With Political Polls...

Nothing better illustrates the problem with polls than the current chaos of the Republican Party.  Is Donald Trump the current GOP favorite for the presidency?  Or is he merely the best-known name?  Or is he merely the one jokers name when they are asked questions in a poll?  Are the respondents teasing the pollster?  Have Palin and Gingrich really fallen so far? 

We don't know.

Obviously, a long time before an election polls are especially inaccurate.  But polls have built-in inaccuracies.

The most accurate poll is the exit poll, where those who just voted are asked how they voted.  Exit polls are far superior because, most of all, only those who actually voted are polled.   When most voters don't vote, political polls have to be taken with one huge dose of salt.   

I think this can partly be corrected by polls asking respondents "how strongly do you feel about the upcoming election?"  and weighting the response accordingly, on the assumption that those who feel most strongly about an election are most likely to vote.  Which is not always true, especially a long tie before the election.  

Or only those who always vote can be identified -- I nearly always vote--and their opinions given extra weight. 

There are other problems with polling.  There is the fact that every response is voluntary.  Can one assume that those who are too busy to waste time answering a bunch of questions do not show a distinctive voting pattern?  Then there are the

Osama.

Nothing has really changed and the spin continues.   The real wars are still being fought, and they are between American and American.

How do I feel? Relief that it has finally happened. No jubilation, no celebration, no fist pumps. No joy in Mudville.

Justice was not done. Partly because there ain't no justice, partly because if justice were done, how many of us and our leaders would be left standing?

Most interesting thing about Bin Laden was the interplay between him and our nation. The ways we enabled him, the ways he fed disease within us. A curious symbiosis. 

One wonders what will happen and how or if we will cope now he is gone. 

We need our villains, and if there are not enough to go around we must manufacture them.  Osama came along in a post Soviet Union vacuum, when the country needed a unifying object of fear and hate.  I think the hatred we have seen of conservatives for liberals, Republicans for Democrats, and vice versa, since 2004 was an indicator that the value of Osama as such an object was on the wane.  Will we turn on one another now with renewed anger?  That may be.

More On King James and the 1611 Version of the Bible

Why do I like to talk about the Bible and Bible translations?  Because it digs into history and is a confortable respite from pressing business and the latest bad news at home and abroad.  Harmless academic inquiry, but still occasion for a good argument!  Here's the latest installment.

The craving for an unchanging translation, a single book that once and for all answers all questions, moral and scientific, is one reason many turn to religion in the first place.

In my opinion, the Bible is not such a book. It is filled more with questions and contradictions than answers. Study Euclidian geometry if you want a logical, self-contained system. Many disagree with me, and that is all right.

Was Elizabethan English the most perfect form of English? Well, it was the language of Shakespeare and Milton. But compared to the English of George Orwell or scores of other modern writers, how can one say it is more nearly perfect?

Actually much of the English of the "King James" or Authorized Version was not that of the translators. It is said that nearly 100% of the sentence structure of the New Testament and 60% of the Old was that of John Tyndale, who was executed around 1535. Basically, the translators plagiarized earlier translations. Wycliffe borrowed from Tyndale and the Geneva and Bishop's Bible from Wycliffe.

Ironic, wasn't it, that the English sovereign killed Tyndale for making and publishing an English translation of the scriptures, and then less than a hundred years later, a later sovereign declared that a new translation ought to be made and that one was based on the one by the man who was murdered by a predecessor king. But so it goes.

Actually it was Elizabeth who first urged that a big new Bible be made, and that turned out to be what came to be called "The Bishop's Bible."

James did, at a conference on improving the church, order that a Bible translation be made. But he didn't pay for it, and neither Parliament nor a convocation of bishops joined in authorizing a new Bible. James himself was a bit of a scholar, far more than most kings, and had done some Bible translating himself. But he had nothing else to do with the "King James" Bible.

I suspect James' reasons had to do with the fact that the Roman Catholic Church published a new English translation, the Douay-Rheims, in France just a few years before. National pride, or vanity, since James knew he would be mentioned on the title page?

Obamablame

At a meeting this afternoon, it was remarked, "The federal estate tax exclusion has gone up to 5 million this year." Someone else said something like, "He must have missed that one." "He" meaning Obama. There were some nods and chuckles around the table, me excluded. Some kind of cut an eye my way, and I was stone faced, looking at the tabletop.

Bear in mind federal income taxes are at 20-year low levels, 45% of Americans don't pay any federal income tax, etc. Low marginal tax on the most wealthy.   

Still the expression lingers, "Tax and spend Democrats."   Democrats have done their share of spending, but taxing?
On Wednesday, a gent said, "Obama cut out the COLA from our social security." My understanding is the Cost of Living Adjustment is pegged to the CPI; when the Consumer Price Index is stable, there is no COLA. That Obama had nothing to do with it.

And so it goes. Obamablame.

The High Federal Income Tax Fantasy

Take a look at the AP release in today's newspaper. http://lubbockonline.com/money/2011-04-18/super-rich-see-federal-taxes-drop-dramatically

So much fussing about taxes, All the Tea Partying and such, you'd think the federal government was scalping taxpayers, flaying them alive, yet federal income taxes are at low levels unseen for decades. Obama is a freekin' low tax president! So far. From the article:

"WASHINGTON — As today’s tax filing deadline nears, ponder this: The super rich pay a lot less taxes than they did a couple of decades ago, and nearly half of U.S. households pay no income taxes at all.

"The Internal Revenue Service tracks the tax returns with the 400 highest adjusted gross incomes each year. The average income on those returns in 2007, the latest year for IRS data, was nearly $345 million. Their average federal income tax rate was 17 percent, down from 26 percent in 1992.

Over the same period, the average federal income tax rate for all taxpayers declined to 9.3 percent from 9.9 percent."

The article went on to say that 45% of households pay no income tax at all. There's more and it's a short article. Read it.

So what's the big deal about taxes? Most of us are close to getting a free ride. Why the demonstrations? Why the dumping of tea into Boston harbor in 2008? Why was my stepson keeping us up late one night arguing that the Democrats were destroying the profit motive by taxing us to death? (Yes, he had a copy of Atlas Shrugged under his arm at the time.)

Is all the protest because the protestors are brainwashed by a handful of demagogues?

Well, yes. Demagoguery brought a TV hostess turned politician from Alaska wealth and fame.  No shortage of demagogues on FOX.   And the nutso conservative mob are willing to send money to any con-man who scares them with an anti-Democrat patter.

Though some of the concern is not for the tax situation as it is but as it might be, a sort of pre-emptive strike, as it were.

Also, there is a fallacy in the article. Do you see it? They are talking about federal income taxes. They are not including the other ways we are taxed, nearly 10% on many purchases through the sales tax, state income tax in many states, property taxes. When you add up ALL the taxes, federal, state and local, have taxes gone down?

But the Tea Party movement is primarily an anti-Washington, anti-federal government movement. Perhaps they ought to be taking aim closer to home.

Updates on Sitting Disease

Which is more deadly, a pack of cigarettes, a case of beer, or ... a sofa or chair? It may be the sofa or chair.

And couple the chair or sofa with TV, or work on the computer or telephone, for just a half dozen hours per day, and you have the long term equivalent of cyanide.

Employers should offer hazard pay for those who are sitting down a lot. It's more dangerous than working as a utility lineman, for example. What do you say? Double time for those who sit down at the job more than four hours a day? Tell your boss.

I was first alerted to "sitting disease" by an article in Bicycling Magazine by Selene Yeager like this one: http://www.womenshealthmag.com/health/sedentary-lifestyle-hazards

Enough of my rant. There's a NY Times mag article updating research in the area at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17sitting-t.html

Some choice quotes with my own emphasis and comments added in:

'The conventional wisdom... is that if you watch your diet and get aerobic exercise at least a few times a week, you’ll effectively offset your sedentary time. A growing body of inactivity research, however, suggests that this advice makes scarcely more sense than the notion that you could counter a pack-a-day smoking habit by jogging. “Exercise is not a perfect antidote for sitting,” says Marc Hamilton, an inactivity researcher at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center. ... [This is the scariest part. We always tell ourselves that we can reform, change our evil ways, and undo the damage. These scientists are saying that we can't even go to the gym every couple of days and undo the damage of sitting.  Maybe we can't even take a walk after work and undo the damage.]

'This is your body on chairs: Electrical activity in the muscles drops — “the muscles go as silent as those of a dead horse,” Hamilton says — leading to a cascade of harmful metabolic effects. Your calorie-burning rate immediately plunges to about one per minute, a third of what it would be if you got up and walked. Insulin effectiveness drops within a single day, and the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes rises. So does the risk of being obese. The enzymes responsible for breaking down lipids and triglycerides — for “vacuuming up fat out of the bloodstream,” as Hamilton puts it — plunge, which in turn causes the levels of good (HDL) cholesterol to fall. ... [In a word, instant metabolic syndrome. Ye ever helpful editor.]

'Over a lifetime, the unhealthful effects of sitting add up. Alpa Patel, an epidemiologist at the American Cancer Society, tracked the health of 123,000 Americans between 1992 and 2006. The men in the study who spent six hours or more per day of their leisure time sitting had an overall death rate that was about 20 percent higher than the men who sat for three hours or less. The death rate for women who sat for more than six hours a day was about 40 percent higher. Patel estimates that on average, people who sit too much shave a few years off of their lives. ... [And we wonder how it is that retirement kills...]

'“Go into cubeland in a tightly controlled corporate environment and you immediately sense that there is a malaise about being tied behind a computer screen seated all day,” he said. “The soul of the nation is sapped, and now it’s time for the soul of the nation to rise.”'

Did you read all that? Odds are, you're gonna die an hour sooner because you sat there and read it. If the sitting don't kill you, the worry will.

Wreck a chair, save a life.

The Bible and Me; A Personal Memoir

Considering I am somehwere between an agnostic and out and out atheist, what is it about me and the Bible?  What is the interest, the fascination, about?  Several reasons.

First, since I was a tadpole, I've been interested in ancient history.  Back when I was 12 or 13, you's likely find me reading a translation of the Aenead or the Odyssey or Myers' Ancient History (a high school textbook commonly used back at the turn of the century, the turn from the 19th to the 20th century, that is)  or Ben Hur or Howard Fast's novel about Spartacus.   

My grandfather's books included Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and a set of  Plutarch's Lives of Illustrious Men, and his copy of Webster's First International Dictionary had fascinating paintings of historical ships and sea battles in it, that I poured over back in the trackless darkness before my memories began.  That was the drift of my upbringing; I should have majored in history and become some kind of scholar.

Plus all of us are fascinated by archaeology, right?  Who isn't?  A treasure hunt bearing the approved seal of science.

I am not a "minimalist," believing that Bible stories are independent from history and that Bible is useless as a guide to the past.    To me, the Bible is a resource that can be excavated like an archaeologial site.  There is much to be inferred from the Bible, unseen by those who claim to believe in it and study it.

Second, I like to read, and by exposure to the masters have slowly learned to treasure a good writing style.   Well, friends, the Bible in its 1611 version is a darn good example of good English writing style, and a style that has influenced  many generations of writers in English.

Third, and this gets right down and personal, biblical matters take me back to a simpler time of life.  There was a time when I was a believer, or something of a believer, and  we were all younger and unsophisticated and life was spread out before all of us with more promise than now.  For Christmas, 1960, I was given what I wanted most, a Bible.  Later, at school about 1965, I found a book about Hebrew history by a guy named Sanders, who taught that the wanderings of Abraham were really the wanderings and adventures of a tribe, preserved in Bible stories. 

Those old days make one feel warm and fuzzy, bringing back a time when one could believe that history, past, present and future, were encoded into the mysteries of the Bible.  That everything one needed to know was all bound up between the covers of a single book.   Haven't believed that for a long time.

One of my teachers, a Methodist, said to us one day that the future of the world is told in the Bible, one supposes the books of Daniel and Revelations and various prophets.  Now I consider that an extreme view, but with myself at that time reading on Ben Hur which touched on puzzling out the meanings of Daniel and mysterious prophecies of "a time, three times and a half-time" or whatever it was, a Biblical orientation to life and scholarship was altogether believable.

Anyway.  All this is by way of introducing some comments I made in relation to a newspaper story about all (or some) of the English Bible versions and paraphrases available today.    Here they are:

Fact is, each translation is doctrinally based. Necessarily. If you are a fundamentalist/evangelical, you choose the NIV or NKJV, if you are Catholic, you choose a Catholic translation, if middle of the road Protestant, you might pick the NRSV, if Jehovah's Witness, you will use a JW translation. If you are Jewish, you likely prefer a Jewish translation of what Christians call "the Old Testament".

Neat, isn't it, that versions are available that confirm our prejudices!

In general, there is a "Wycliff-Tyndale" thread of English translations that has persisted from the 1500s up to today. The KJV borrowed extensively from earlier translations by Tyndale and by Wycliffe, and the RSV and NRSV preserve much of the words and order of the KJV.

Those I like are the NEB, Jerusalem Bible (JB), and New Oxford Annotated Bible (NOAB).

What I don't like about the KJV is the way everything is organized by verse and not paragraphed to reflect poetry or subject. Most newer English translations present poetry as poetry.

A translation I'd like to commend is the Good News/Today's English Version, which despite the irritatingly simple English is a remarkably good translation, more accurately translating the 23rd Psalm than any other you can find except Jewish versions, and making clear that NT quotations are from the Septuagint.

The NRSV was the first mainstream translation to try to use gender-neutral language, and eventually even the NIV jumped onto that bandwagon. Because I am interested in scripture as close to original as possible, I join with Americanfirst in not liking this updating process.

About ten years ago, I was in an evangelical bookstore on South University and asked if they had a NRSV in stock; they didn't know what it was, though it had been out for years. They had NIVs, NKJVs, NASVs, and KJVs. It's the Presbyterians or Episcopalians or Lutherans or students who might want a NRSV.

If you want to stir up a hornet's nest, look at Isaiah (Isias) 7:14 in different versions. The story of the virgin birth in the New Testament arose from a mistranslation of Isaiah in the Alexandrine Greek version of the Hebrew scriptures, which created a seeming "prophecy" that the exclusively Greek-reading Christians fulfilled by concocting a virgin birth story. Of course, others have a different spin on this.

So when you shop for a Bible, check out Isaiah 7:14 and other key scriptures. But make sure the notes give you the alternative readings.
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Um, didn't the Dead Sea Scrolls date from about the 1st century B.C.? They include the oldest copies of most OT scriptures. The next-oldest texts are only about a thousand years old, and agree pretty well with those among the Dead Sea Scrolls. But not perfectly; never perfectly.

There are many, many passages the meaning of which has to be guessed at. One reason being that Hebrew writing has consonants only: you have to guess at the vowels from the context. Other reasons being that the meaning is just not known for sure, or that available sources differ.

And the Septuagint --the translation of Hebrew scriptures into Greek made by Greek-speaking Jewish scholars in Egypt before about 150 B.C. -- is in places a bad translation. Which is important to Christians because that Greek translation was, to them, their "Bible," their Old Testament, and nearly all quotations of scripture in the New Testament were taken from the Septuagint.

Going back to Isaiah 7:14. It was the Septuagint that translated the Hebrew "a young woman shall give birth to a son" as "a virgin shall give birth..." So here is a prophecy that seems to have originated from a translation error.

But WAS it a translation error? Some argue that Jewish scholars in Alexandria, Egypt, had access to better Hebrew versions than we have today (remember Alexandria was THE center of learning in the ancient world), and that the Septuagint is a better translation. You see the problems.

Translation is everything. But the hardest part of the process is deciding what to translate from, because there are no original scriptures; there are only copies and versions, and the translator has to decide which are best. Which are questions of judgment and of doctrine.
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... or two out that compares Bible translations and paraphrases. Worth checking out.
Yes, the Jehovah's Witness' New World Bible did come out rather badly in comparisons.
Tell you what I like in a translation/version--

1. The name for "God" that was used in the original text. This is interesting because different names are used, and I have a theory about that which I won't get into. Yahweh, Adonai, Elohim, El Shaddai, Kyrios, etc. Most versions do not transcribe the name in the original language, but put in "Lord" instead. I like the Jerusalem Bible because it uses the name Yahweh when the Hebrew did.

2. Paragraphing that shows poetry as poetry, and uses paragraphing to help convey meaning. The KJV does not versify poetry and has a paragraph symbol. Forcing the Bible text into verses is artificial and hides context and meaning.

3. Plenty of notes about alternate versions or readings, and these must not be too doctrinal. There are plenty of study Bibles with a lot of notes, but some of these are very doctrinal and prejudiced. I have a KJV conservative study Bible (Falwell is named as an adviosor) that is handy for getting the low down on extreme thinking.

4. Type that is not too small or too large.

5. Arrangement of words into lines on the page that make reading comfortable. Two column text is not for fast reading. Neither are verse numbers in the text, IMO.

6. Paper that is not too thin or that allows the print on the reverse page to come through. I prefer creamy to beige off white paper and not that thin white "Bible paper."

7. A cover and binding like an ordinary book. Some may want the opposite -- a Bible that looks like a Bible.
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I don't like to use the term "King James Version" preferring to call it "the 1611 version" instead, because James didn't pay for it and had little to with it. None of the Bible translators who worked on that version got paid much for their labors. James didn't care. Nothing came out of his pocket, yet he got more credit than the ones who did the work. Ah, the privileges of kingship.

Wonder how many of those who love the KJV realize that King James was gay? Kind of fitting and ironic, isn't it, that the name of "Queen James" is affixed to a Bible version so beloved of homophobic fundamentalists? Who says there is no God?

Back a few years ago, there were many Christians in America who thought that the KJV was the original Bible, that "Authorized Version" meant "authorized by God." Some of the posts indicate we are not far from that here and now.

Something nobody mentioned yet: when you make the language of the Bible too simple, you downgrade the text. The Bible ought to sound sonorous and other worldly, and not like two teenagers rappin' in the school hallway. The KJV (or QJV) is definitely sonorous and other worldly.

When the language is too simple, I find it unappealing to read. Even the NRSV has gotten too colloquial. This is one reason why I like the New English Bible (NEB), because the language is literate and doesn't read like a 4th grade schoolbook.

The Jerusalem Bible is not too bad to read, and to those who love the English language, it has another appeal: J.R.R. Tolkien was involved in the translation/editing.

Originally posted at http://lubbockonline.com/faith/2011-04-12/bible-matters-what-difference-does-translation-make#comment-165012