Hampton New Hampshire Mad Dog Democrat

Snob Appeal

2012-03-07T15:34:00.002-05:00

Rick Santorum was not foolish to use the word snob in connection with college education.

Like Rush Limbaugh, who is the well spring of Republican Party thought, he knows which resentment to which he can appeal.

I interviewed a man today who has been a welder for 30 years. Welders these days are not just guys with torches and masks. This guy had welded everything from space shuttles to airplane engines to medical devices and what he does is very high tech and highly skilled and requires a talent for measurement and a lot of practical math.

But some years ago he was working at a company, managing thirty employees in his department and doing a terrific job. The company's earnings had risen ten fold over his tenure there and his supervisors and bosses decided it was time to bring him into management.

Until they found he had never been to college. He was not only not promoted, but because they felt they could not simply keep an employee who had become so visible and valuable in a non management capacity, they fired him.

All because he had not earned his merit badge: College.

So when President Obama says everyone should be able to go to college, for people who smoulder with the resentment of that experience, they hear it as, "Everyone should go to college." And they think: Why? Why should some feckless privileged frat boy who spent four years drinking on his fraternity porch be promoted because his father paid for 4 years of college.

Fact is, not everyone should go to college. Fact is, the college degree should not be a ticket to promotion at the workplace and should not even be a ticket to the hiring interview. In our zeal for a "meritocracy" we breed understandable and justifiable resentment among those who have been mindlessly made into losers.

Funny thing is, the resentment is not directed toward the owners of the factories, but always toward the President and the Democrats.

That one, I'm still trying to figure out.

Rush Limbaugh: The Boil Lanced

2012-03-04T18:26:00.003-05:00

Sometimes, in medicine, you have to dissect open a wound and follow it from the surface downward into a deep cavity, to really appreciate the extent of the pathology. One of the most common instances of this is a a peri rectal abscess, which can, once excavated, wrap around all sorts of anatomy and be far more extensive than anyone appreciated when they first began cutting.

So let's explore, layer by layer, the peri rectal abscess which is Rush Limbaugh. I have thought, until now, of Limbaugh as the central nervous system of the Republican party, but now I realize, he is the the peri rectal abscess. But then, rectum, brain, when talking Republicans, I repeat myself.

Limbaugh attacked Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown University law student who had the temerity to say she thought the Jesuit institution, which provides health insurance to its non Catholic workers and students ought to include in that health insurance contraceptive coverage, which she considers part of health care for women.

To his credit, and typical of the Jesuits, the president of Georgetown, who disagrees with Fluke, quoted Saint Augustine, "Let us , on both sides, lay aside all arrogance. Let us not, on either side, claim we have already discovered the truth."

You got to love the Jesuits. Mad Dog was on the faculty of that Jesuit institution for nearly 30 years, and if there is an order in The Church, which can disarm you with its open mindedness, it has to be the Jesuits. But I digress.

Rush Limbaugh.

Rush Limbaugh says Ms. Fluke went "before a Congressional committee and says that she must be paid to have sex. What does that make her? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She's having so much sex she can't afford the contraception. she wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex. What does that make us? We're the pimps. The johns." And then he adds, the coup de grace, saying if we are all be asked to pay for her having sex, we ought to demand something for our money, "We want you to post the videos [of you having sex] on line so we can all watch."

Whew!

Where do you begin? There's a lot going on in there.

First, there is the idea that a woman who asks for coverage for an IUD or an oral contraception is asking to be paid for sex. If she had a health insurance account, from which she could withdraw money for any health care cost, would she still be asking to be paid for having sex?

When most people think of a woman asking to be paid for sex, they are thinking about a woman who structures a deal with a client: I will have sex with you if you will pay me money. Here we have a woman who says, I would like treatment which will protect me if I behave in a way you do not want me to behave, but I want to avoid some very unhappy outcomes.

Before we go on: The insurance payments for Georgetown students do not come out of the taxpayer's pocket. The payments come from the pockets of the parents of the Georgetown students, for the most part.

And then there is the notion that insuring someone engaged in a risky behavior is something the insured is being paid "to do?" Consider the auto wreck. Have we paid the woman who was knocked unconscious and fractured to be knocked unconscious and fractured?

If we paid for the installation of a seat belt in her car, would we be paying her to have a wreck?

We want to prevent breast cancer, so we pay for mammograms. If a woman is found to have breast cancer, we do not say we are paying her to have breast cancer.

Then there is the usual Limbaugh escalation to moral outrage: If you make me pay for your coverage, then you are making me complicit in your crime of having a need for contraception, and that makes me both a pimp and a john, a participant in illegal and immoral sex.

Well, up to this point, there is a certain logic: You are demanding other people become involved in the implications of behavior they may not approve of and so they have a right to feel possibly complicit. It's all hyperbolic and over the top and exploded into outer space, but there is a shred of a line of reasoning.

Until we get to the sex videos.

And this is not exactly new with Rush Limbaugh.

I well remember, during the Clinton years, a twenty minute rumination by Rush Limbaugh about the Clintons having sex at the White House. First he elaborated about how fat Bill Clinton had become. Then he expounded on how fat Hiliary was. Then he put them in a bed in the Lincoln bedroom. Then he cackled about the creaking and moaning of the wooden timbers of the Lincoln bed, straining under the weight of the Clintons having sex and on ad nauseam.

What was really peculiar and striking was the detail with which he described the sex and duration of his description. He simply would not let go of it.

He was getting rather breathless describing it.

It was Clinton porn, right there on the radio, courtesy of Rush Limbaugh.

Limbaugh had his paid guffawers in the studio, laughing like drunken hyenas at a fraternity party, of course, but he was stoking his own flame.

I am not a psychiatrist. I am not even much of a fan of pop psychology.

But I would say, this man has a problem with sex.

I mean, just look at the man.

I don't want to even imagine or explore why he might have a problem with sex, with women, especially with women who, while they might want to have sex with some male, would not under any circumstances want to consider having sex with Rush Limbaugh.

Even thinking about Rush Limbaugh having sex has got to be a pretty disturbing proposition for most people on the planet, no matter what their gender.

None of this would be particularly germane to a political website, were it not for the particular psychopath we are considering.

After all, Don Imus is just as rancid, but Imus, as right wing as he is, does not inform, does not formulate thought for the Republican Party. Rush Limbaugh does. He is the central nervous system for the Tea Party Republicans, for Joe Six pack Republicans.

Rush Limbaugh is the pacemaker for the heart of the Republican Party, Fox News.

And this is what they are made of.

Yikes!

The Big Tent: Republican Party Style

2012-03-01T22:43:00.003-05:00

Double Click on Cartoon to View

Sometimes Hendrick Hertzberg is simply on his game.

Writing in the New Yorker, March 5 he encapsulates what the Republican Party has become:

"An excitable, overlapping assortment of Fox News friends, Limbaugh dittoheads, Tea Party animals, war whoopers, nativists, Christianist fundamentalists, a la carte Catholics (anti-abortion, yes; anti-torture, no), anti-Rooseveltians (Franklin and Theodore), global warming denialists, post-Confederate white Southrons, creationists, birthers, market idolators, Europe demonizers, and gun fetishists."

And that's not to mention, Ayn Rand idolaters, Ronald Reagan worshipers, super patriots, endless war advocates, labor union bashers, American Royalists, constitutional originalists (whatever that may be) Bible thumpers, anti contraceptive, anti pre marital sex, anti sex Puritans.

And that's just the short list.

These are not people you can talk to. These are people you have to defeat, dismember and drive a stake through their hearts because, if you do not they will re emerge like so many zombie vampires and try to kill the Republic.

A Republic, as Ben Franklin once said, "If you can keep it."

A Republic requires a loyal opposition. That, we ain't got.

Moral Hazard

2012-02-27T08:58:00.004-05:00

"Bail Them Out? Think of the Moral Hazard!"

( Double click on the cartoon to view.)

Downloaded to my Kindle are books examining the origins of the financial crisis which surely would have precipitated the second Great Depression, had the federal government not acted to avert it.

This appears to be a case of having studied history and as a result, having been able to avoid repeating it.

The origins, the history of how we got to the brink is, like all history, one long argument, and surely, there are many factors, but sometimes it helps to be simple minded and unencumbered by too many facts; Alexander, after all, cut through the Gordian knot with a single stroke, seeing a simple solution.

In my case, being simple minded, the story looks clear enough: For years Republicans agitated to rescind the safeguards, the regulations, placed on the American banking system after the 1929 Depression. The Republicans argued our economy could not compete with other economies around the world as long as our bankers were shackled by regulations which prevented bankers from engaging in the imaginative, creative, innovative practices which the rest of the world was developing. Unleash the animal ferocity of market forces, the Republicans cried, and the Democrats, as usual, not having the courage of their own convictions, not wanting to look like the slumped shouldered, wispy voiced wusses the Republicans said they were--the Democrats meekly acquiesced and allowed the repeal of a law called (and I've likely misspelled) Glass-Speigel Act.

So the bankers were now free to take the most carefully examined and reliable form of personal debt--home mortgages--and to buy and bundle these as collateral and sell these as stocks on the market.

Of course, as soon as mortgages became a commodity, the quality of the work which had made mortgages so safe and valuable evaporated, and the brokers didn't care what they were selling as long as they had something to sell, so the bankers rushed to find any names to affix to any paper mortgage and a lot of people found themselves new home owners and that phony phrase, The American Dream, became just that. A dream, not a reality.

Of course, as is true of most shoddy products, these mortgages looked good for fleeting moment but with time, they fell apart like cardboard shoes.

Then the whole thing collapsed, right on President Obama's head.

The Republicans, who had been the instigator of the whole fiasco then blamed it all on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the most available scape goats with a government connection, and loudly decried any form of relief for mortgage holders, for the average guy on the street, for the fools, as a form of "Moral Hazard."

After all, the mortgage holder was fool enough to sign a contract for a house he could not afford--now he had to take his bankruptcy and the loss of his home like any gambler who had lost a foolish bet.

Of course, there was no moral hazard talk in connection with the sleazy brokers or the sleazy bank officers or the sleazy Republican politicians who had built, marketed and sold the cardboard shoes.
No, all the moral hazard belonged to the little guy on Main Street, not to the Wall Street Crowd.

The Wall Street crowd had long since got its bonuses and moved on.

A Republican Mount Rushmore

2012-02-21T17:31:00.002-05:00

A stock question at every presidential debate is: Who are your heroes?

We have, in New Hampshire a nice granite surface, recently transformed from the Old Man of the Mountain into a blank palate.

With Republican majorities in the House of Delegates and the state Senate, we ought to consider whose faces might be carved into the stone.

For sheer, unbridled veneration, surely Ronald Reagan will get the nod.

As the man who most clearly enunciates the Republican gospel and as a man who inspires all Republican politicians and provides the phrases and the style to Republican values, Rush Limbaugh belongs up there.

And for pure gamesmanship and model behavior, Mitch McConnell, too long neglected deserves his place.

And one more thing, now that we are talking symbols. Do we really want an elephant? I mean, elephants have long memories and the last thing we want is to remember things. The Depression and how we got there, the rescue from the Depression and how that happened, the great Recession and how we got there, and how Obama averted it. Republicans live in the present. We have been called vulture capitalists, but you know, vultures eat only the dead. So we ought to consider a better pack animal, one who derives his strength from falling in line and coordinating attacks: The hyena, a better idea.

Destroying the Village to Save It

2012-02-21T15:26:00.005-05:00

Click on Cartoon To View It

"We Had To Destroy That Village, Mr. Ryan, to Save It."

Paul Ryan presented a plan to convert Medicare into a coupon care plan, where Medicare insured would receive a coupon for a set amount every year, (some estimated $8,000 per person annually) to cover all medical expenses for that year.
A coronary by pass surgery runs about $250,000, all of which is covered under current Medicare rules.

Virtually every Republican voted for this bill, to kill Medicare.

Ryan and the Republicans justified voting to convert Medicare to Coupon Care, as a way to reduce the deficit they had dreamed up (to justify killing Medicare.)

Class Warfare

2012-02-21T10:34:00.005-05:00

Double click on cartoon to view
"My Success Does Not Diminish your worth. That's the Politics of Envy."

Republicans are really admirable when it comes to marketing.
I've been watching Mad Men re runs and I can see the art now, as it applies to selling ideas.
So Ritt Romney is not "filthy rich," he is "Successful."
And the fact the rich are rich is not of concern to those who have been cut out...the rich are hard working and successful and they have played the game by the rules and those who are not rich, are not deserving.
The big concept is that if I am rich and have a bigger slice of the pie, you ought to be happy for me, and someday, when you are rich I will be happy for you. And my big slice does not make you any poorer, because when we grow the economy, the pie gets bigger and even your small slice of that big pie will be more than you can eat.
Just look at African Americans, who travel back to Tanzania or Liberia and come home saying they are lucky to be living in America. Even our poorest citizens are doing better in America, because the American pie is so big.

Nice fantasy, if you can sell it.

Entitlement Envy

2012-02-20T13:21:00.007-05:00

Double Click on Cartoon to View

A recent survey of Medicare and Social Security recipients noted that only 40% of those receiving payments realized these checks came from the federal government

Of Republican recipients of Medicare and Social Security, a substantial number say they are opposed to "entitlements" and would like to see the budget deficit addressed by reducing "entitlements."

When Republican candidates like Mitt Romney and Ron Santorum say they want to cut "entitlements" recipients of Medicare and Social Security apparently do not connect the proposed cuts to the checks they are themselves receiving in the mail

If you ask these same people how they feel about "entitlements," they are against entitlements, which they think of as government handouts to the undeserving
If you ask them whether they would be willing to give up Medicare or Social Security, they say they deserve these benefits because they earned them.
This might be called "Entitlement Envy."
Once again, the Republicans have been masters of rebranding. Call Medicare and Social Security, two programs they have been hungering to devour and destroy for decades, "entitlements," and you can likely slip by many voters the actual fact these voters would be hurt badly if the Republican bosses got their way.

Catholic Bishops, Contraception and the Right: An Unholy Alliance

2012-02-11T18:02:00.011-05:00

"The bishops have totally failed to convince their own faithful that birth control is a moral evil and now appear to be trying to get the federal government to do the job for them. "

--Gail Collins

Gail Collins, that peerless columnist for the New York Times has a tough job. She has to spend her days reading the rantings of the Republican right.

It's a tough job, but somebody has to do it.

Before we get to the really spectacular part, let me point out a little googling reveals nearly 30 states have laws which require institutions run by the Catholic church, hospitals mostly, to provide insurance coverage for contraception when they provide other sorts of health care insurance for their workers, who are, after all, by no stretch all Catholics.

So President Obama has fashioned a compromise to meet the objections of those who say if the Catholics don't want to support contraception, they shouldn't be made to support it. So Obama says, "Well, you don't have to pay for it, but the insurance companies, who make money from the contract you have with them, they have to pay for it." Nifty compromise.

Actually, I worked at a Catholic hospital for 30 years. A Jesuit hospital, it's true, but Catholic. The Jesuits have always been a very open minded order. There were times I was reminded there was a picture of the Pope in the lobby, but for the most part, they did not smack you in the face with the Catholic part. What they wanted to do was provide healthcare, and they weren't going to make you genuflect to get it. If you thought better of them after they had saved your life, well, maybe down the road, you might come to mass.

But the Catholic church I am seeing now I can hardly recognize.

And here's how the Right has reacted:

Congressman Chris Smith (R-NJ) says the President "will use force, coercion and ruinous fines that put faith-based charities, hospitals and schools at risk of closure, harming millions of kids, as well as the poor, sick and disabled that they serve, in order to force obedience to Obama's will."

Oh, that bad Obama, forcing the Catholic Church to bend to his will.
Or, Rick Santorum, decries the White House folks for "trying to impose their values on somebody else." Certainly, something Rick Santorum would never do.
hen there is Paul Rondeau, of the American Life League--don't you love the name?--speaking of President Obama: "This man is totally addicted to abortion and totally addicted to the idea that not only is he the smartest man in the room, he is the smartest in the nation and taxpayers will fund his worldview whether they like it or not."

h, yes, the poor right to lifers victimized again by that dictatorial Kenyan socialist who wants to use the world wide conspiracy with its black helicopters to force abortions on the nation's womanhood.

Those Democrats think they are so smart.

But wait, I don't understand. How did we get from contraception to abortion? I would have thought effective contraception would prevent abortion. Isn't abortion what you get when you don't have contraception?

I am obviously not the smartest person in the room.

That Interfering Government

2012-02-09T08:54:00.005-05:00

Watching the first episode of Mad Men re runs last night, I had to laugh out loud at the scene where tobacco company executives meeting with the creative staff of the advertising agency. The tobacco company CEO is fuming (both figuratively and literally--everyone smokes all the time on Mad Men--it's 1959). The government has forbidden the makers of cigarettes from advertising the health benefits of cigarettes. A plethora of studies have linked smoking to lung cancer and heart disease. But the CEO of the cigarette company does not want to believe those studies. He wants to believe the studies coming out of his own research institute. "We set up that whole research institute, funded it, it cost us a lot of money," said the CEO, "To prove cigarettes are good for you, or at least not bad."

As Upton Sinclair once observed: "It is difficult to bring a man to understanding, when his salary depends on not understanding."

Same is probably true in the global warming debate today.

Which is to say, the company funded research to find the results which would be good for business.

Those government "intruders," are intolerable, he says. It's going toward communism, right here in the USA, all these government regulations to prevent profitable companies from making profits.

It was all vaguely reassuring, to think big business rich people have been complaining about government regulators cutting into their profits for decades. The song Mitt Romney and Ron Paul and Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich are singing has been sung for decades.

But that doesn't make it any truer.

Win/Lose or Win/Win

2012-02-07T16:57:00.002-05:00

The basic dispute between the two parties during this election cycle is whether or not the "success" of the upper one percent comes at the cost of the success of the other 99%.

Of course, the question is more nuanced than this. We are really talking about the success of the upper 10 or 20 percent, which is where the huge slice of the pie is eaten.

Watching Downton Abbey, it is very clear that when an aristocracy controls so very much of the economy, the castle, the town, all the cottages, and even the churches, there is very little left for the common folk, who are then grateful to grovel for menial jobs, brushing their masters' shoes, making their ladies' beds and driving their masters about in their masters' cars.

And we can see even the most benign overlords, like the Earl of Downton, is still part of what keeps the vast majority in servitude.

We have the Republicans and those who support them, from Joe Sixpack to the local garage owner, who say the rich have made their money fair and square and their being rich has not made my life harder, except it reminds me, watching them drive by in their fancy cars, watching them at play or driving by their mansions, how far I am from having made it. But I realize, that is, as Romney says, the politics of envy.

And if the pie were infinitely expandable, or expanding, then the rich could have all the pie they want, as long as there is enough left for the rest of us.

But, it is beginning to look as if the way the rich get that way almost always means their gain is our loss. They don't pay taxes, and they accumulate so much wealth the national economy begins to look like a board game of monopoly, where the winner has so many hotels and so much property, the rest of the players find themselves struggling to just get round the board, watching their own supply of money depleted, paying for every space they land on, then money making the rich richer and preventing the poor from buying a single hotel to set down on Park Place.

But financial finagling is a slippery and arcane subject. Joe Sixpack cannot appreciate how it works. I know I can't quite get a handle on it.

I do know that when Mitt Romney does not have to draw a salary, when he can live on a source of income I didn't even know there was a word for--special dividends or what not, I've got a problem.

And you know when the Republicans cling to the line that there is no way they are willing to raise the taxes on the rich, if only back to the Clinton era level, despite the obvious black eye that gives them, despite being unable to justify it, they must be bought and paid for. It means all our suspicions about the phoniness of their howl about the danger of the deficit is just so much deception, because if the deficit really were so dangerous, the Republicans would be willing to do anything, even taxing their patrons, to get the country out of it.

A Simple Question

2012-02-06T18:25:00.004-05:00

In the 1980 Presidential debate, Ronald Reagan looked into the camera and summed up his argument for why he ought to be President. Actually, it was an argument not for why he ought to be President, but for why Jimmy Carter should not be allowed to continue being President.

Reagan said, "When you go into that voting booth, ask yourself one simple question: Are you better off now than you were 4 years ago?"

Thus began the validation of simple minded political discourse. It was perfectly appropriate, fair, incisive and legitimate to boil things down to a simple one sentence question.

The American people loved it. As H.L. Mencken observed: "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public."

So Barack Obama had better have an answer ready for Mitt Romney, when he stares into the camera and asks the same question.

I am hoping Barack Obama will pre-empt this attack with a question of his own: "You had better ask yourself, are you better off now than you were in the year 2000? That is the year when the Republicans effectively seized power of the government and started running the economy. Even my own election has afforded only a two year respite from the onslaught of Republican trickle down, voodoo economics. What you've got is basically Republican winner take all politics, with the richest one percent protected at all costs, and the 99% spurned."

"Or you could ask yourself a more interesting question: What would have happened if the Republicans had got their way and we had not bailed out General Motors, or the banks, much as we hated doing it? What sort of Depression would we be in now? And what would you have to look forward to, if the Republicans had the votes to vote through Coupon Care instead of Medicare, as they tried to do, but were prevented by the slim majority of Democrats in the Senate?

"If you like simple questions, here's one for you? Are you now among the one percent? I'm not asking whether you think you will be some day or whether you think the one percenters are the job creators or are a benign aristocracy looking out for the other 99%. I'm asking you, are you now among the one percent? Just remember, if you're not there now, the Republicans have cooked the tax books so you never will be."

Or Words to that effect.

Wouldn't you love to see President Obama look into the camera and throw those punches?

Oh, if pigs could fly.

The Politics of Anger

2012-01-29T16:53:00.005-05:00

Whenever I hear the pundits speak with much gravitas about how polarized our politics have become, shaking their heads at the depths to which our democracy has sunk, I think about the times when Presidents faced entrenched opposition just as deep and paralyzing and intransigent as what we face now, and deeper.

The paralells to the 1930's and the opposition Franklin Roosevelt faced are obvious and many have commented on them. FDR was accused of instigating class warfare when he spoke of the greed which had led to the Depression. He was vilified by his opposition, who insisted the best action for government was to continue to cut taxes for the wealthy so the wealthy would hire workers and restore the economy.

But for sheer petulence and obstinancy, you have to go back to the 1850's.

John C. Calhoun, in some ways the Newt Gingrich of his time, said, "Nothing can be more unfounded and false than the prevalent opinion that all me are born free an equal for it rests upon the assumption of a fact which is contrary to universal observation." Some were born to be slaves, and that's the way God meant things to be.

There was no give in this man, nor in Jefferson Davis, nor John Wilkes Booth nor Preston Brooks, who beat Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts with a heavy gutta-percha cane on the floor of the Senate chamber, attempting to murder the senator for a speech against slavery. Senators Douglas and Robert Toombs of Georgia watched without intervening as Preston reigned blows upon Sumner's head until the cane was splintered.

Sumner's injuries disabled him for three years and blinded one eye.

"Bully" Brooks became a hero in the South. From across the South, his fans sent him dozens of canes and even a gold handled cowhide whip which they urged him to use on other abolitionists.

If any of this echos in your mind with the Congressman from the South who shouted out, "You Lie!" during President Obama's State of the Union speech in 2011, or with Gabby Gifford's head injuries, I'm sure you are not alone.

We have faced intransigence before. In the 1850's, it led to Civil War.

It came as a President who fervently wished to compromise and to douse the flames of discord took office and tried to appease and negotiate.

It has taken three years for President Obama to get past his own denial and to see his opposition, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Eric Cantor, Jim DeMint, Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney for what they are.

Once the Civil War began, Lincoln turned out to be a masterful commander in chief.

He realized his primary job was to find the right generals. This took him several years, but he finally identified Grant, Sherman and Sheridan.

Let us hope President Obama has found his generals for this upcoming fight, and I'm not talking about Afghanistan.

2012-01-28T12:18:00.003-05:00

Ryan Lizza, writing in the New Yorker (1/30/12) about President Obama and the Washington cauldron into which he has been thrust provides enough detail to illuminate why any American President is, as Lincoln once said, more controlled by events than controlling them.

Like Lincoln, this man from Springfield, Illinois came to his office with a very clear intention. Lincoln's bedrock conviction was it was his primary job to preserve the union. He knew there were powerful forces he would not be able to control, mostly spewing forth from the volcanic emotions underlying the fight between slave states and abolitionists. But he was determined to save the union despite all that. He said to the slave states the decision to tear apart the union was their's to make. Lincoln did not want to separate; he admonished the slavers not to destroy the marriage, which he believed, despite all their differences could still be saved. Even after those frothing slavery advocates in Charleston pounded Fort Sumter into submission and the union forces had to withdraw, even after two years of bloody, bitter battles, Lincoln said, "If I could save the union by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; if I could save the Union by freeing none of the slaves, I would do it; if I could save the union by freeing some of the slaves and leaving others in bondage, I would do that."

In the end, he chose the last option. His famous Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves only in territory in rebellion against the federal government. Slaves in the border states, like Maryland, Kentucky and Tennessee were not freed. Even at the moment of what is often remembered as Lincoln's boldest move, he compromised.

Lincoln had to have war forced on him, and ultimately it was and he had to react.

Obama came to Washington with the same determination to compromise, to get past the passions and divisions of the two sides and to unite through reason. His favorite phrase is E Pluribus Unum, which appears on our paper currency, one out of many.

But, like Lincoln, Obama had to be pounded over the head with the intransigence of his opposition. Jim DeMint, the Republican, called his effort to deal with the economic crisis, "The worst piece of economic legislation Congress has considered in a hundred years." Not since the creation of the income tax, "has the United States seriously entertained a policy so comprehensively hostile to economic freedom or so arrogantly indifferent to economic reality."
Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader of the Senate, when asked whether he would support a bill which might mitigate the financial crisis asked why he should be asked to support a bill which might help re elect Obama. As if it would be non sensical for him to support something which might help the economy, help his own nation, if that solution also helped Obama.

Six conservatives met with Obama for dinner at George Will's house, a week before his Inauguration. They must have felt quite important. After all, here was the President of the United States coming calling to have dinner with them. Their opinions must matter in the highest reaches of government. One can only imagine the patter and the repartee and the warm feelings of self importance among these "opinion makers."

Before his first term was half old, Will described Obama as a "floundering naif," who advocates Lenin-Socialism. Charles Krauthammer, also at the dinner, described Obama as "sanctimonious, demogogic, self-righteous and arrogant"--now there is a clear case of "takes-one-to-know-one"--another guest (Kudlow someone) accused him of being a "crony capitalist," and someone else (named Michael Barone) came up with the cute Republican marketing phrase, "Gangster Government," and another said Obama was the "whiniest president ever."
But the most withering line, predictably, came from one of the smartest, most psychopathic conservatives, Peggy Noonan: "He is not a devil, an alien, a socialist,"--see how cleverly she sets this up--I am more reasonable and less hyperbolic than my conservative brethren. I am clear eyed and can see the essential core of the man. She proclaimed: "He is a loser."

Remember that scene from My Fair Lady, where the sophisticated linguist analyzes the central guest at the party, Liza Doolittle, who is a flower girl dressed up as a lady and this analyst divines she is no lady at all, but a fraud. Of course, she is masquerading, but the analyst gets what she is entirely wrong. He thinks she is not less than what she pretends to be, but more--she is a princess! Such is the judgment of the sophisticates of the court.

But what this really reminds me of is the time Lincoln took his secretary of war down to the rooming house where the diminutive general in command of the Union Army, George McCellan, was staying. The general remained in his upstairs room and did not deign to come down to speak with the President, or his secretary of War. He left them there with their hats in their hands until they finally realized he was not coming down. So he showed them.

That's how important George McCellan thought he was. People cheered George McCellan when he rode by on his great stallion. They stood up and cheered when he entered a room. He was a very important man.

Few American school children or their parents even know his name today.

The same, I dearly hope, will be true of these self important, oh so clever detractors. Peggy Noonan has never had a shot fired at her in anger and has never bet her job on a stealth operation by Navy SEALS carried out at night half a world away. She, like George Will, is the essence of a sissy--people who are oh so good with words, but cannot hit a fast ball, not to mention a curve. Nobody much, outside Washington, or devotees of Sunday talk shows knows who George Will or Peggy Noonan are--a blessing there. And certainly, 10 years from now, nobody even insider Washington will know who these dessicated authorities are.

I knew people like this in high school. There were boys who knew my record as a varsity wrestler and knew my statistics, how many take downs, how many pins, things I never bothered to record, never cared about. They followed me around with advice. They were important, they thought, because they analyzed my performance. They knew things I did not know.

But I knew a different sort of thing: What it felt like to step out on the mat, heart pounding, facing the hundred forty pounds of testosterone driven animosity across the mat.

And, remember one more thing about Peggy's loser: The night before the Osama Bin Laden take down, he delivered a cool-as-you-like comedy routine for all the professional talkers at the National Press Club.

Who you calling a loser, chump?

HyenaCapitalism

2012-01-27T18:29:00.004-05:00

James Surowieki, writing in the January 30 New Yorker, has finally shown me how the very rich manage to scarf up the lion's share of the pie and to leave nothing but slivers behind.

I knew they had to be gaming the system, just by looking at the results, but I did not know enough about the details of the game to really appreciate how they accomplish their win. Now, in one page, Surowiecki illuminates the scam.

A typical scheme is to buy a company which is doing pretty well, but starting to lag, as Wasserstein & Company did to Harry and David, the fruit retailers. The private equity guys then borrow a ton of money which becomes Harry and David's debt. Before that borrowed money can help improve the company, the private equity guys (Wasserstein&Co) pay themselves "special dividends" in this case a hundred million dollars. (The special dividends by dint of a very sweet tax provision are taxed at a very low rate.) Then the PE guys charge Harry and David "managment fees," (several million.) Six years later, after the PE guys had sucked Harry and David dry, it defaulted on its debt and dumped its pension obligations. Its workers were out of a job and out of the pensions they had labored years to earn.

Harry and David was sucked dry, a husk, but the PE guys had made millions and moved on.

These are the sorts of shenanigans Mitt Romney played at Bain Capital, but with other companies.

It's all legal, because Republican "job creators," entrepreneurs, don't you know, have enough senators and Congressmen in their pockets--in our case the Frank Guintas and Kelly Ayottes of the world to make this predation legal.

Rick Perry called it "vulture capitalism," but that strikes me as entirely too civil. Vultures, as far as I can tell only pick clean the carcases of animals killed by others. Hyenas, however, actually swarm around living creatures, and bring them down, and then tear them apart.

That's a more apt description of how the private equity nasties at firms like Bain Capital play the game.

But as Mitt Romney has said, he has no apologies to make for his "success."

After all, it's all perfectly legal.

To Have and To Have Not

2012-01-26T12:56:00.002-05:00

Like Curt Schilling before him, Tim Thomas the stellar goal tender for the Boston Bruins is a Boston hero. Like Curt Schilling he is a multimillionaire. As Mitt Romney would say, neither pro athlete has to apologize for his wealth because they earned it.
One may argue even if the free market is willing to pay Schilling $8 million and Thomas $6 million neither is a heart surgeon, and there's something out of whack here, but that is semi free market, monopoly twisted capitalism. Neither broke any laws pulling in their millions.
But Tim Thomas, like Schilling before him, is angry. He's angry because that socialist in the White House wants to give money to the undeserving and because Obama thinks government can and should do some good whereas Tim Thomas thinks government already does too much and wants to take some of his money and give it away to the undeserving.
Now, you might ask, why should anyone care what Tim Thomas or Curt Schiling think about politics or economics or financial fairness. They are professional athletes and we do not watch them because we are interested in their philosophy of economy.
Thomas refused to go to the White House to meet Obama because of his sense of outrage.
He joins the angry rich.
There may have been a time when the rich were smug.
There was probably a time when the rich felt themselves fortunate, chosen even, but they lived their lives of leisure and indulgence with smiles, cognizant of their own good fortune.
Here, in America, the rich are the angry ones.
I got mine fair and square and I want to keep it. Nobody gave me anything. I had to fight for everything I got and I didn't ask anyone for help.
Of course, in the case of professional athletes, there was a lot of infrastructure, from the roads to the stadium to the stadium itself, to the support for college programs where they were nurtured, to the public access to airways which supported the vast sums of wealth made available for their success.
But these angry rich see themselves as living off the grid, above the grid. They owe nothing to anyone, because they had to work hard.
I hear this from doctors not infrequently.
I worked hard in smelly organic chemistry labs for years in college and medical school while my classmates partied.
Of course, those labs, those schools were supported by government grants and the opportunity to work hard at Harvard or NYU or Vanderbilt was supported by their parents, so the coaching that made them good was given them by others, whether family or community.
But these guys are still angry and entitled.
Talk about an entitlement program. Talk about a sense of you owed it to me.
Well, then, you are talking about Republicans.

Coddling the Bully

2012-01-25T13:16:00.003-05:00

A coworker today told me she didn't like the Republican candidates, each for a different reason--Gingrich is clearly mentally unstable; Romney is a Cylon robot; Ron Paul is an anarchist; Ron Santori is a demagogue. But she doesn't like Obama either because he's ineffective and has accomplished nothing.

I tried to think of what to say: Well, he is ineffective because of anything he has failed to do, or because of anything he has done? Or is he a failure because the Republicans in Congress have been successful in making the government fail? The Republicans say, we are going to make this man fail, the fate of the country be damned. So is that his fault?

But that is not a line which is memorable or even works.

What can you say to a crowd which watches a playground bully, like Mitch McConnell, walk up and start pounding on the fat kid and the crowd says, "Well, the fat kid should have done more" ?

Blame the victim.

Mitch McConnell says right on camera his highest priority is preventing the re election of President Obama. Not jobs. Not repairing the economy. Not protection of the nation from terrorism. Defeat Obama. That's all that matters.

And there's a majority of Republicans in the House of Representatives who feel the same way. And there's 51 senators who feel the same way.

So the intransigence of the Congress is a reason to turn Obama out of office.

The last Democratic president, the Republicans impeached for marital infidelity, and the Republicans who led the charge were Newt Gingrich, who even as he inveighed indignantly against this moral reprobate in the White House was carrying on with a woman dozens of years his junior, behind the back of his wife. And Henry Hyde, same thing. He had an affair when he was just Clinton's age, behind his wife's back, but oh, that, he said, was just a "youthful indiscretion." Wink. Wink.

But all this is is just fine.

Is this a great country or what?

Until we get our own heads on straight, how can we hope for a leader who has half a chance of succeeding?

Tidy Lies

2012-01-24T12:00:00.003-05:00

"There was something bracing about the way he did it--his passion, his humor, his intolerance of stupidity, his preference for leaving an honest mess for others to clean up rather than a tidy lie for them to admire." --Michael Lewis, of Bill James in Moneyball.

This morning I was faced with a Hobbesian choice, which is to say, a choice between the lesser of two evils.

Caught on the treadmill, I had 60 minutes to watch TV programs with men seated in TV studios talking about who is going to win the Super Bowl, or I could watch air head bimbos with great makeup talk about who is going to win the Presidential campaign or I could watch last night's Republican debate in Florida.

I went with Florida--at least there were no commercials, which are often better than the programming, but this morning even the commercials were uninspired, so I had to stick with the debate.

What was fascinating was listening to each of the four horsemen of the apocalypse inveighing on the horrible, and I mean horrible, state our country is in, and they each quoted numbers and statistics so fast it was difficult to keep up with how bogus those numbers really are.

Newt Gingrich is a particularly facile historian. Did you know we entered World War II properly? We declared war on Japan through an act of Congress--the last time we actually did go to war by an act of Congress. Now, that is the proper way to get into a war. It makes the war much more respectable, or something.

Not that Newt disagrees with the wars we waged without an act of Congress--he is all for Vietnam and the Gulf War and Iraq and Afghanistan, far as I can tell. So are all the other Republicans, save Ron Paul, but he is not really a Republican.

They all know so many things and have the numbers (which I suspect they make up as they go along) to show: 1. The economic morass was caused by Obamacare.--which actually hasn't kicked in yet. 2. The economic morass was caused by the bail out bill or by the Federal Reserve (which is a Democratic Party plot to bankrupt the nation by lending money to welfare queens) and 3. We'll be right as rain just as soon as we stop all government spending and pay down the deficit and balance the budget--but none of this will require the rich paying more taxes; in fact if the rich pay less, the country will recover even more quickly. 4. President Obama's rejecting the pipeline from Canada proves he hates American industry and workers. 5. The tourist industry in Florida would be benefited greatly by more drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. 6. Ronald Reagan was the greatest President ever because he fought for free markets and good old capitalism and limited government spending which resulted in the greatest explosion of our national debt and deficit ever seen before or since him.

No, wait, that last part wasn't mentioned. Reagan was a saint. He did all the right things for the economy.

The trouble with the tangled woof of fact is that it is so untidy.

Economics 101

2012-01-22T12:49:00.002-05:00

As I noted last time, I admit to being untrained in economics, but that does not mean I know less about what drives our economy than professional economists. This is sadly true because of the sad nature of the dismal science, which is all conjecture and bias and precious little science.

The scientific method requires hypothesis, test (experiment), conclusion, reassessment when the next experiment gets done. The economist, whether he is the cluelss Milton Friedman or the more informed Paul Krugman, has to stop after the first step. His version of experiment, testing is, at best, a mathematical model.

Because the model involves math, it intimidates everyone but other economists, so it is often accepted as truth.

But if you want to learn something about the real economy, log on to the New York Times of 1/22/12, Sunday, and read the article "How U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work."

The central story here is how Steve Jobs suddenly decided he wanted stratch proof glass screens on his iPhone because he had carried the plastic screen iPhone in his pocket and the screen was scratched by his keys. And he wanted the change NOW. So his minions scurried off to China, where the factory had a dormitory filled with workers who were roused from sleep, given a biscuit and a cup of tea and they started churning out the new phones with the new glass screens overnight and Mr. Jobs had his glass screen iPhone.

This is supposed to demonstrate that: 1/ Chinese workers are more flexible and 2/ Diligent 3/ Skilled and 4/ Dedicated than American workers. Those Chinese workers in that factory will never be displaced by American workers. Steve Jobs loved them. His successors at Apple love them.

But the question you have to ask yourself is, how important was it that iPhone had a new glass screen overnight? If American workers had come in the next Monday, after they'd had a weekend at their kids soccer games, hunting or fishing, and they'd got those glass screens into the iPhones, say a week or two later, how much market share would iPhone and Apple have lost?

Here in Hampton, New Hampshire, I was astonished when I first arrived in 2008, and discovered the laundramat closed down at 3 PM on Saturday, as did the barber shops and many of the stores. It was like when I was a kid in Bethesda, Maryland and everything closed down at 1 PM on Saturday and nothing was open on Sunday, which was God's day, and you were supposed to be in church and not worshiping at the palace of Mammon on Sunday.

But you know, we all managed to plan a little and to get our shopping done and that meant we played ball on Saturday and Sunday rather than shopping. I doubt we bought any less; we just planned our shopping in advance.

I could be wrong.

By the time I left Bethesda, I could have my hair cut at 7 AM, Sunday morning by the Vietnamese barber, but, you know, if he had not been open then, I would have gone in on a Monday.

Anyway, this is all a digression, I understand.

A man I know who got rich making dress shirts for executives told me about the factory he had in Arizona. He lived in Maryland, but his factory was in Arizona and ultimately, he discovered he could make the shirts at a factory in China, pay for the shirts to be shipped back to the USA and he still could get the same quality workmanship and shirt for ninety-seven cents less per shirt and when you're selling hundreds of thousands of shirts to Brooks Brothers every year, that savings becomes significant.
But when you really questionned this guy, in a friendly, non judgmental way, what became evident was what really attracted him was he owed nothing to the workers in China. When he got his shirts from China, he sent the cloth in and out came the shirts and he paid the factory owner and he had no more cares than how to get the shirts back to the USA and sell them.

He did not want to be the father of the people who made the shirts. When he complained about "regulations" in the USA, he was talking about inspections to be sure the factory didn't go up in flames, and negotiations over pensions for the workers, and taxes he paid for the workman's comensation insurance, and taxes he paid for the employer's share of worker's taxes and the money he spent on medical insurance for his workers, which any year could rise enough to wipe out any profit margin.

"I just wanted to get a shirt out of a factory," he said. "I didn't want to adopt 400 children."

For this same reason, American companies now "outsource" or contract out lots of tasks and work to people who have a contract, but are not on their payroll. You do a specific task, and I pay you a set fee and I have no more responsibity to you or for you.

This is a far cry from the man in Georgia who kept his broom factory open, making specialty brooms because he had 30 workers who had worked for him for 30 years and he felt he owed them a job. And it's a far cry from the partner in the real estate development firm who kept the firm open after he and his two partners struck it so rich on a single deal that his two partners promptly retired, but he felt he had to keep the firm open because 12 people depended on him for their jobs. His partners were living the lives of country squires in Hunt Country in Virginia, while he went in to the office every day and worried about health insurance costs for his employees.

The fact is, that sort of paternal feeling of the CEO of the company who feels he owes his workers and his country something is becoming quaint and has been rejected as sentimental.

The company is run for the guys who own it, which, even in a publicly owned company like Apple, means Steve Jobs and a few others, who make hundres of millions while the Chinese factory workers live in dormatories.

Is this right?

Wrong question. That's the way it is, under current law and under current American values.

But it reveals the big lie in what the Republicans have been saying, that it's "Regulations" that is keeping American companies from creating jobs for American workers.

Regulations have nothing to do with it. You can say, well regulations which require factory owners to deal with unions are government regulation, and regulations which require the factory not burn down or poison the workers or the river next to it are regulations and regulations which take the form of taxes are government's heavy lash. But the fact is, American factory owners are willing to bear all that to make cars in America because it's still cheaper than trying to do it in Asia, and when it stops being cheaper, those jobs will vanish.

Fact is, making a product can happen anywhere and with current modes of transport, the other side of the world is just fine--the product is as close to you as your nearest Walmart.

American jobs will have to be done here only for those things where proximity matters.

You can out source the reading of an X ray to a doctor in India--and many if not most hospitals have already done this. You go to the emergency room after a brick has fallen on your head and the CT they do there is read in India, by a radiologist who doesn't even have to be roused from bed. He's already awake because it's 3 PM in India. But the neurologist who examines you, the IV tech who starts your intravenous line, the nurse who gives you your medication, those folks cannot be in India.

What's making American workers lose out to Chinese workers is a lot bigger than any set of government regulations. The Republicans are just looking for a scapegoat which will benefit their own election ambitions, and they've found it in "The Government."

Creating jobs here at home will take more thought than a few clever slogans. We've got to figure out what we can do here that those Chinese workers in the factory dormatories cannot do faster and more cheaply. We'll be happy to have what those Chinese factories can give us, but we have to figure out what they cannot do for us and we can do those jobs here.

Envy

2012-01-21T14:51:00.005-05:00

I was a science major in college, so I never got much beyond the introductory courses in economics.

I did, however, have lots of courses in anthropology, and some in psychology, and I can still read.

I've been reading Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson on economics and politics.

What these authors demonstrate, to my mind convincingly, is the very fact the distribution of wealth has become so extreme is a bad thing.

Those who control wealth or those who think they may one day control wealth will say there is no harm in a small percentage of people getting control of most of the wealth in the country, just as long as the pie keeps getting bigger so the small slice left to the "bottom 80%" is actually only relatively small--it is still so big it keeps that bottom 80% happy.

If the American economy is big enough, the poorest among us are still much richer than people in Africa and South America and most of Asia. The poor still have big color TV's, computers, automobiles, if not houses, then warm and dry apartments, entertainment, vacations and, this argument runs, even our poorest would be considered rich in Africa, Brazil, Asia.

The argument is, don't envy the American rich, their wealth does not make you poorer, or hurt you in any way. In fact, the argument goes, their wealth is good for you.

In fact, what Hacker and Pierson demonstrate is neither of these things are true. As the rich have got richer, the poor have got poorer, and in fact not just the poor have got poorer but people who were not poor in the 1950's, 1960's, 1970's have become relatively poorer.

I realize there are all sorts of statistics out there, but this fits my own personal experience. When I lived in a very asymmetric society--Washington, DC, even though I made more money than I do living in New Hampshire I felt poorer, and in fact was poorer in some very measurable ways.

The presence of rich people diminished my life.

How?

I had to compete with a group of much richer people when I went to buy a house. I was barely able to afford a three bedroom house in Washington, a very small three bedroom, with few amenities, because the competition for housing in the WDC area was made intense by rich people who would buy smaller houses, crush them and build McMansions. Gentrification became mansionification.

Money for the rich was simply less valuable than it was for me.

When the small ranch house next door was bought, crushed and a huge McMansion erected, my own house looked like a carriage house, and when I tried to sell, many buyers drove up and passed us buy and many buyers told us they could simply not get around the dwarfing effect of the house next door. Our house, assessed at $850,000 sold for $650,000, in no small part, and in reasonably direct measure, because of the power of the rich guy to diminish the value of what I owned.

The rich simply have the power to bid up prices, to blow away competition.

This is the essence of what Trusts used to do in the days of the robber barons--get control of a market, and ruin their competitors.

Moving to New Hampshire, I find there are rich people here, but not as many, and so my house is much bigger, and I can compete for restaurant meals and other goods and services because there are not enough rich people to out compete me. I feel wealthier, even though I am actually making less money.

People abbreviate this as "a lower cost of living." What that means is, you don't just feel wealthier in a society where incomes are more evenly distributed and there is no heavy weight of rich people tipping the boat over, you are actually safer and more wealthy.

The rich constitute a weight which threatens to capsize the whole boat.

If we taxed the rich at rates which were more prevalent in the 1950's, it's not that we could take what we got from the rich and make individual poor people middle class--those numbers do not add up. But what we could do is make it more difficult for the rich to simply bid up life for the middle class. We could use the money to educate, train and employ the middle class and help more of them to make the leap up to the next level.

The one percent are not irrelevant to the middle class. They are keeping the other 99% down. They may live in walled off, gated communities, but their influence seeps out and contaminates the whole pie.

Money is power and when you allow 1% to have too much power, the whole body politic is poisoned.

That's not the politics of bitter envy. That's simply what happens.

It's not so obvious in rural areas, like New Hampshire, where even poor people have land which makes them feel protected from others around them. It's more obvious to city people, like New Yorkers, who seem the limousines pull up the clubs and restaurants and they see when even 1% of the population wants something, that means you are crowded out. Even more so for living space, and space to recreate. The buildings which line Central Park have no middle class people. Only rich people look out over Park vistas.

We get so accustomed to the idea that, "Well, that is not for people like me," we do not even see any more that things don't have to be that way.

Shoreline property on Lake Winnipesaukee no longer belongs to middle class people, who owned small bungalows. They have all been moved out and displaced by the one percenters. And one of the biggest compounds along the lake belongs to Mitt Romney.

There is no Jones Beach, at Lake Winnipesaukee, no major public beach. The lake has become, for the most part, the property of the rich.

Along the Seacoast, there is public ownership. Hampton has three public beaches, and although private rich homes loom above the beach at Plaice Cove, the beach is open to the hoi polloi.

This is, to put it bluntly, a good thing. But as economic power is ineluctably translated into political power, one can see the movement toward a Lake Winnipesaukee effect may yet, years hence, grip the seacoast.

James Baldwin once observed that slavery harmed not just the enslaved, but it hurt the masters as well. That was a very keen insight. Those who dominate, who have to spend the energy and the malevolent force to dominant others become meaner, unhappier people.

We ought to consider taking the benevolent action of saving the rich and powerful from themselves, by taxing them down to size.

Democrat Nation: Where is Our Don Draper?

2012-01-20T18:22:00.003-05:00

Okay, citizens, we need to think.

Republicans have, it must be admitted, outclassed Democrats for years when it comes to selling ideas.

Romney is confronted with the fact he pays only 15% income tax when the average nurse or police officer pays 20%.

"I will not apologize for being successful," he says.

That's a sure fire applause line. Who would want a fellow citizen to apologize for his own, hard won success?

A lot of politics is about saying outrageous things and making them sound reasonable and correct.

So how do we point out the problems with this line?

"It's not your success in making money you should apologize for...it's your unwillingness to allow others to have a chance to be successful."

No, you haven' t shown how his success prevents others from achieving success.

How about, "You mean, you don't have to apologize for bribing the referees?"

That's closer.

Or maybe, "So you refuse to tax billionaires, and you refuse to apologize for that?"

Or, "So, if the game is rigged, the losers are guilty of envy?"

Or, "So, if the casino has rigged the games, the losers are guilty of envy, if they complain?"

I don't know. We need to work on this.

Al Sharpton Finds Redemption in Blueberry Pie

2012-01-19T14:33:00.006-05:00

Al Sharpton has redeemed himself.

Whatever sins he has committed in the past, however much he has offended by being a blow hard, an exploiter, a self promoter, however much you may have disliked him in the past, go on line and find his "Blueberry Pie," commercial.
Finally, a Democrat who can actually communicate.
He tells the tale of kids being caught with blueberry pie all over their faces and proclaiming their innocence to their indignant mother, who cooked the pie. "Oh, no, it wasn't us!"
You have to see it for yourself. If I were smarter, I'd figure out how to do a link to it.
But it's just right--to pick up the pie motif. The American pie, which the Republicans and their rich patrons have eaten and they claim they had nothing to do with the way the pie got consumed.

Oh, wait, I may have done it. Try clicking on this link:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=uisC1zHcxLk

Every Democrat should be wearing a T shirt or a sweat shirt with the Republican Pie chart (see above) to keep that image in the eyes of every citizen, red and blue.

It is, as Mitt Romney would say, the politics of bitter envy. And it works for us.

Dead Seals and the Feds

2012-01-16T13:36:00.006-05:00

This is not a dead seal, although there is a resemblance. This lab is alive.

Someone from the Gulf coast emailed me about my post about the dead seals who were washing up on the Hampton beaches last summer and fall.

The answer is, no there have been no more dead seals.
The federal government picked up each and every one, along with dead birds, and did autopsies which revealed influenza.
The implication was this particular virus had made the leap from gulls to seals, but that was never confirmed.
I cannot resist pointing out how effective and efficient and all around helpful our federal government has been in addressing this distressing event.
Of course, nobody in Hampton or along the seacoast said anything like, "Gee, I'm glad those federal workers were there."
It's not like when Superman swoops in and sets down the little girl, all safe and sound, and everyone beams and shouts, "Gee, thanks, Superman!"
The feds were just doing their jobs and nobody said, "Good old NOAA," or "Thanks."
They just expected this work would be done by someone and would have complained if those seals had been left to rot.
Live Free or Die.

Winner Takes All Politics (and Economics)

2012-01-15T19:34:00.003-05:00

Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson have written a book, Winner Take All Politics, about numbers and politics and economics.

What they discovered was that since the Bush tax cuts, which were sold as tax cuts for all, each of the wealthiest 400 families got $49 million extra dollars, whereas the middle class taxpayer got $600 the first year, and little since.

I think I have those numbers right. There are a lot of numbers.

What they describe, setting the numbers aside, is following World War II, the great bulk of the population got richer, with a huge jump in the percentage of college educated (owing to the federally funded GI bill) and a broad middle class emerged.

What has happened since the Bush tax cuts is the country has moved closer to Mexico and Brazil, where a very small number of very wealthy people are shuttled back and forth between safe havens, gated communities, while the 99% get their houses repossessed, or move back in with their parents.

Some of this was explained as happening as a result of technology and economic forces like the globalization of the economy, but as their work shows, what really drove this gobbling up of all the goodies by the one percent was government rules, laws, policy. The Congress and the Republican Presidents were in the pockets of the very rich and they made sure the very rich got everything they had paid for.

My coworkers at my office tell me they don't care how rich the rich get, as long as the pie keeps getting bigger and there's enough pie for them.

I don't think the American pie can ever get that big.

We are re capitulating history. Silent Cal Coolidge, Herbert Hoover had for their Secretary of the Treasury one of the country's richest men: Andrew Mellon. He pushed through the Mellon plan, which made fortunes for the richest and pushed the nation into the great Depression.

So here we go again.

It's a free country. People like Hacker and Pierson can tell the truth, can organize it, write about it, but other people, like Rush Limbaugh and Mitch McConnell and Mitt Romney are free to drown out the truth speakers.

And in a nation where money is speech--well, we get what we pay for.

Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder

2012-01-14T16:56:00.004-05:00

Okay, Okay, I admit it. I am only minimally conversant with 21st century social networking, interneting and blogging.

Invoking the image of speaking to nobody at Hyde Park Speaker's corner, I closed this blog in November.

I had no reason to believe this was an action anyone noted.

But, suffering from a congenital syndrome of verbal incontinence, I let loose two subsequent screeds, and, mysteriously, I got emails saying, "Glad you are back." Multiple emails. Some from, Australia. (Go figure.)

There is probably a way of knowing how many people actually click on and read this blog, but I have never figured it out. All I know is despite the lack of "members" or comments, apparently, the number is not zero.

This sounds like a scene from "Contact." Even one contact can sometimes make a difference.

Reminds me of the famous story of the comic who wrote Groucho Marx letters, daily, for years. Never a reply. Eventually, he became a fairly successful comic--Buddy Hackett. One day he sees Groucho in a restaurant and summons up the nerve to go over to his table and blurts, out: "Mr. Marx. I'm a huge fan. I've learned so much from you. My name is Buddy Hackett."

Groucho looks at him for a moment and says, "So why'd you stop writing?"

Any way, I will keep postings short. One thing which I learned during my vow of silence is, there really is no shortage of political commentary and one voice is never missed from the chorus. There are some, like Stephen Colbert, who are really different and inventive. I'm not in that elite stratum. But U.S. Grant did some valuable things, not through brilliance but with persistence. I can aspire to that.

Today's simply is to suggest a modest proposal: Let's spend a little cash to print flags, T-shirts and hats with the American Pie graph shown above. Let us make it our T Party reply.

We will have to think about the label: Republican Pie. Or maybe, American Pie, Republican Division Technique. Or maybe, Republican Pie, Divide and Conquer. Or, Republicans: Let Them Eat Pie.

That's the first contest. Suggestions will be accepted.

The next is what to name the Splinter faction; Democrat 99 percenters. Or, American Pie Party. Or, Bong Hits for Billionaires. Just a few to get you thinking.

Mr. Romney calls this the politics of envy.

I call it class defense. His class has been torpedoes and full steam ahead, sink the rest of us.

The rich accused FDR of class warfare. It always is class warfare when you want to tax the rich, or change the rules so they do not automatically win.

For the Video Conference

2012-01-08T09:19:00.005-05:00

I know I promised to keep my mouth shut.

I did this because I accepted, in the marketplace of ideas there are winners and losers, and like any businessman, when I saw there were no customers for what I had to say, I accepted the verdict of the marketplace, I spoke, and no body responded, so I shut up.

But I have now been invited to join a TV link to Vice President Biden, with a group of Hampton Democrats to talk about the upcoming election and our local efforts to help re elect President Obama.

I’ve been to things like this before and I realize, even if the camera is on you for ten seconds, it’s a pretty unsatisfying opportunity.

So, I will use this space to be there, in spirit.

With that pre amble, here’s what I’d like to tell Vice President Biden on January 10, 2012:

Mr. Vice President, you are asking local Democrats to work hard for the re election of President Obama, which we would be willing and eager to do.

But, and here’s the big “But,” I for one am tired of doing the heavy lifting when I do not see that effort matched from President Obama.

Why should we, at the local effort, work harder for his re election than he is?

For three years now, I have been talking to my neighbors here in Hampton, saying the tough, sometimes unpleasant, sometimes offensive, sometimes combative things which need to be said in response to the Republicans and for most of those 3 years there has been nothing similar coming from President Obama, who has remained “above the fray” (a kind way of putting it) or afraid to throw a punch, presumably out of fear of looking partisan.

Ronald Reagan was not afraid of throwing a punch. The Republicans of this era from top down throw punches. Mitt Romney says President Obama is leading class warfare, trying to replace the American work ethic of ambition with a socialist ethic of envy. And that is the kindest remark coming from their would be presidents.

The spokesmen for the Democrats are an embarrassment. Every night on TV we see that Casper Milquetoast with his wispy voice and his hunched posture, the eternal apologist, Harry Reid fulfilling the Republicans’ image of the typical Democrat: an effete wuss who has no backbone, no conviction and no fight and Mitch McConnell and John Boehner eat him and the rest of the Democrats alive—they eat Democrats not because they make more sense but because they sound as if they believe what they are saying and they always have a marketing phrase to throw out there: Estate taxes become death taxes; end of life planning become death panels; government insurance programs, which citizens have paid into for years become “entitlements,” as if you are somehow not really entitled to the benefits you have contracted and paid for.

I give my neighbors a few deep thoughts, but if they do not hear this from President Obama himself, they tend to not give it much credibility.

So here’s what I would like to hear President Obama say, himself, not through you or through surrogates:

I agree with the Republicans government is not the solution; it is the problem. This is true whenever the Republicans have any part in government, on any level. The Republican party is a poison pill for government. They don’t believe any good can come from government. That’s why they all jumped on board when Republican Paul Ryan put forward a bill to convert Medicare from a paid for insurance program into Coupon Care. And all the Republicans voted for this killing of Medicare, trying to kill Medicare under the pretense they were voting to save it. This is the height of dishonesty. This is the typical Republican tactic: Do something that hurts the people and call it good medicine. Try to fool all the people at least some of the time.

I am less afraid of Big government than I am afraid of Bad government: And it is bad government the Republicans want to give us, when they are willing to give us any government at all. Medicare is Big government. I make no apologies for Medicare. I want to improve it. It can be frustrating. But the Republicans want to kill it. The Republicans see Medicare as a yellow lab with a big appetite, and rather than put it on a diet, they just say “Let’s kill it.”

Social Security is Big Government. It’s something people pay into. It’s true, people have no choice. The government makes them plan for their own future in this case, because we have learned something about human nature, which is people tend to solve the problems and pay the bills right in front of them and they tend to not plan for the future unless you make them. We learned that during the Great Depression and we decided to set up a system to save people from homelessness and starvation called Social Security and it’s worked well. The Republicans have tried to kill Social Security. They say they just want citizens to have more choices, to be able to do better and make more money than what Social Security can provide. They want to shunt all those dollars to their rich friends on Wall Street. They look at all that money and they say, we want that money for our Wall Street contributors, the people who have bought and paid for the Republican congress. Can you imagine what would have happened to your retirement if it depended on the stock market? You don’t have to imagine that now. The whole idea of Social Security is it is secure. No matter what happens to the stock market, you have this safety net. May not be as much as you might have if you took that money and went to Las Vegas and gambled it, but at least you know it’s there.

The Republican party is now a hard right to life party. Most of its candidates are now saying they would not allow a woman whose pregnancy occurred from rape to have an abortion. They would not allow a woman whose blood pressure is rising, whose kidneys are failing to have an abortion to save her life, even if the chances are both she and her fetus would die together. I am not for infanticide. I do not know anyone who really is “for” abortion. Pro choice people are not happy about abortion. It’s always a sad choice. But, sometimes when you have two bad choices, you have to make a choice. Ethics is about line drawing. To my mind, and I think most of my fellow citizens are with me, there is a difference between that potential life which is eight cells and a human being. I agree that a 28 week fetus is close enough to life, I would not intervene. Then you are faced with a different choice, but we cannot give the same rights to an eight cell conceptus we give to a 28 week old fetus. We have to have the courage to make hard choices. Mr. Paul is very consistent about this. He says life begins at conception, at the two cell stage. But if you believe that, then you will eliminate birth control pills, IUD’s, and virtually every form of contraception except the less reliable barrier methods. Absolutists can always be consistent, but they are often wrong.

5. I am not a socialist. Nor am I a “crony capitalist.,” as Mr. Romney has said.

Of course, if I suggest government has a role in health insurance, I’m a socialist to some people. If I suggest we need to step in and prevent a 1929 stock market crash, if I suggest we need to invest in solar energy, as other governments do, even as China does, then I’m a “crony capitalist.”

I was not born in Kenya, or in Indonesia or on Mars. Of course, like most people, except perhaps, Rick Santorum, I cannot actually remember the day of my birth or know exactly where it happened. But I was told by a reliable source, my mother, it was Hawaii. Last time I heard, Hawaii is as much a state as Alaska. And yet, the same people who want to believe I am an alien, would love to vote, and did vote for an Alaskan.

6.The Republican party is and has been for the past 3 years living in a state of delusion and fantasy. They would rather hallucinate than see the real world. They would rather repeat history than study it. The ghosts of 1929 do not visit the Republican party because the Republicans willfully refuse to see that a government which does nothing is the problem, not part of the problem but the larger part of the problem. Mr. Paul would have us do nothing with our military. I share his concern about putting American citizens to war. But we fought Hitler and we should have done that. There are times we have to defend ourselves. Mr. Paul would not have killed Osama Bin Laden. Mr. Romney would have put that task out to bid, maybe awarded the contract to Hallburton. But I used the power of the federal government to strike a blow to protect the American people, to protect the American people. I was well aware when President Carter failed in his attempt at a secret mission, he paid for that with his job. But I was willing to take the risk. Republicans are always saying the rich are rich because they are risk takers. What risk does a man who grows up rich take in life? He fails and he’s not homeless. He’s got a house on a lake, another in town and condo somewhere else. Well, I took a real risk and I did it because I was trying to protect my country.

7. The Republican party says Democrats have no guts. But people often accuse others of the failings they perceive in themselves. The Republicans, I imagine, want good health care for the nation. But they are afraid to take the steps which would make healthcare a calling and a public utility rather than a commercial enterprise. So they refused to allow a government option which would have introduced true competition into the medical marketplace—they were afraid of that—and now they are trying to kill even the watered down compromise affordable healthcare act., which they call “Obamacare.” They use that name as a pejorative. Well, I welcome that. Better Obamacare than Nomorecare or Coupon Care.

8. We have a choice between the Democratic Party which will give you some government, government where it’s needed, and the Republican Party, which would kill government. The Republican Party wants to live in a world of their imaging rather than the world which actually exists. The logical extension of the philosophy of Mr. Paul and Mr. Santorum would be life off the grid, where no man cooperates with his neighbor but simply builds a fence. The world of Mr. Romney is the world of businessmen on the top, the one percents, distributing cake crumbs to the bottom 99% and the world of Mr. Gingrich, well that’s a moveable feast. I cannot keep up with Mr. Gingrich’s visions, they are too fluid.

This November, the American people will have to make a choice. I hope they choose wisely.

But know one thing, there is no point at all in voting for me in November if you return Republicans to Congress. That would be nothing more than what we’ve had for the past two years. A Congress which invests a debt crisis rather than facing the real problems of this country.

And we need enough Democrats in Congress to be able to push past the George W. Bush Supreme Court, which, in it’s arch conservatism, has transformed free speech into nothing more than a commodity with it’s bizarre Citizen’s United decision. They may very well thwart the will of Congress, weak as it was, by over turning Obamacare. We need enough Democrats in Congress and in the state legislatures to deal with this third, increasingly deranged branch of government.

I have nothing to offer you but action, trial and toil. I can only echo Benjamin Franklin’s wisdom as my guiding principle: We had better all hang together, or surely, we will all hang separately.

This is Just Too Rich

2011-11-03T14:13:00.008-04:00

I know, I know. I've taken a vow of silence.
But, I'm not saying anything.
Really.
This video speaks for itself.
This is a Republican star.

Link to these youtube videos of Rick Perry. The first is unexpurgated and is a single click; the second, with the brevity of wit is Jon Stewart, requires a right click and open.

Do not deny yourself this pleasure.

You cannot make this stuff up.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLi83CSaNBA

or the Daily Show:

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-october-31-2011/indecision-2012---ruh-roh-edition

Okay. enough.

Speakers' Corner: On Conversation in the Digital Age

2011-10-22T11:50:00.003-04:00

At Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park I once heard a man, standing on a box: He held forth on the topic of what could induce him to speak about important topics of the day. He said, "I refuse, on principle, to stand here on the cusp of one of the world's foremost exchanges of ideas and speak tofewer than 100 people." He carried on like this, with great earnestness, for some time, and I listened, enthralled, until I finally caught on to the joke. Nobody gathered a
crowd of 100 at Speakers' Corner. There were a dozen speakers that day, none of whom had more than a dozen listeners. This speaker was a street performer, with no real intent, other than to entertain, and that he did well, holding me for a good twenty minutes, while he elaborated on the lack of value of speaking to small gatherings.

Another story, this one likely apocryphal, from medical school. A four year old child was brought to New York Hospital and admitted for aphasia, inability to speak. He had hit his developmental milestones normally, and spoke quite normally until he stopped, and this turned out to be an important point, nobody in his family could quite agree or date exactly when he stopped talking.

He came from a family of eight children, a boisterous, rollicking Irish family, and he had three younger siblings, age 1, 2 and 3 and four older sibs, the oldest 12 years old. He was evaluated by a medical student, an intern and finally a neurologist, who could find nothing amiss on the neurological exam, all reflexes and findings normal.

Toward the end of an hour, the neurologist asked him why he thought he could not speak. The child shrugged. Would you like an ice cream from the cafeteria? The child nodded. What flavor? "Chocolate chip," the child replied brightly. The jaws of the medical student and intern dropped and the neurologist smiled and asked the child, "Why have you not been speaking?" The child did not look up from his shoe tops, and just shrugged.

"Does any one ever listen to you?" The child shook his head.

And that was the diagnosis. This was a well loved child. His mother was, as you can imagine, quite distressed, but the child stopped talking simply because he had concluded there is no point to talking in a family where everyone is always talking and nobody listening.

Which brings me to the point of whether or not it is sheer petulance to refuse to continue to post diatribes, if the free market of ideas has shown no indication these ramblings are of any value to anyone. One or two random comments from kind readers are simply not enough.

Mad Dog has heard from editors of magazines, political scientists, relatives, friends with words of encouragement and their kindness has been appreciated, but that is not, Mad Dog has finally realized why he writes. The point of a blog is conversation. Mad Dog says A, and some person in Indiana says, well yes, A, but really not A so much as B, and then Mad Dog says, "Ah, you have enlightened me. I had not thought of that."

But postings, even the 300 postings on the Gail Collins Opinionator blog do not constitute a conversation. Perhaps there is no way to have a conversation among 300 people.

I do not understand what "Followers" are. I suspect they somehow get Mad Dog's posting automatically and are perhaps more likely than others to respond.

But as a Mad Dog, I have certain rights. And one of them is to say: I have, what? Over 50 posts to this blog and I refuse to speak to less than 25 people. If I have fewer than that many followers than the blogosphere has voted with its feet, or it's keyboards or whatever the appropriate image is for cyberspace.

I am at Speakers' Corner and I refuse to speak to fewer than 25 people.

So there.

Of course, if one of them is Gail Collins or Stephen Colbert, that is quite enough.

But, failing that, you have heard the last from Mad Dog.

All those of you who have come to Church and not put anything in the tray, well you can just go home and watch the Republican debates, heaven help you.

Blogoshere Instructs Mad Dog

2011-10-20T16:44:00.004-04:00

I am new to blogs and, some would say, a neophyte in the new world of on line exchange.

But I do have this blog, so I'm trying.

Yesterday, I discovered Gail Collins has a blog with David Brooks and the way they do it is to post a back and forth between them and then you, as the reader can respond in this little box called "Comment."

I typed in my comment and used a friend's name and then...nothing. A little pop up said I'd get an email about my comment having been accepted. Nothing, so I typed in my comment again and seeing nothing in my email, gave up.

Later, I checked and found my two identical submissions among 90 others. A day later there were almost 300 comments, most of which made exactly the same points. There was no real exchange of ideas, no back and forth among the respondents.

But there is voting!

This confused me mightily. The first comment got 400 votes. You vote by checking a box called "Recommended." By around comment 100, nobody was getting any votes; Presumably very few people were reading past comment 100.

But then, a new discovery: One reader's comments were highlighted in blue as being judged particularly thoughtful, the explanation said. Who thought it was thoughtful was never explained. Gail Collins? David Brooks? Or some intern assigned to blog management?

The comment did seem to summarize many of the points made in about 200 of the submissions.

Yes, I did read through all the comments.

It was an mind numbing experience.

It has made me wonder: Why are we all doing this?

We are talking at each other, not with each other.

It reminded me of Samuel Johnson's question: Why is it there is so much writing, and so little reading?

I will have to think again about my own blog.

Is It The American Spring Yet?

2011-10-20T15:27:00.006-04:00

From left: Ellen Schultz, Mad Dog, Gail Collins

"Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men...Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers."

--Franklin Delano Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address

"Corporations are people, my friend."
--Mitt Romney

"I'll believe corporations are people when they execute one in Texas."
--Sign in the Occupy Wall Street crowd

For change to come in a republic like ours, enamored of the illusion of the independent man, living off the land, dependent on no man, we need a strong dose of truth and reality to slap the dreamers in the face and get them to open their eyes.

For years now, Joe Sixpack and countless of his fellow citizens have been working two jobs, telling themselves and their buddies they are going to make it, because in America all you have to do is work hard, play by the rules and if the government doesn't give it all away to undeserving welfare queens, why then, you will get rich; you will ascend to that promised land where the 1% live.

Gently, for some time, Gail Collins has been shaking them by the shoulders, trying to get them to see the full package of dreams the Republicans sell is simply the opiate of the masses. She has been telling them about Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann and each of the Republican snake oil salesmen, and most especially about Mitt Romney and his unfortunate wind whipped dog.

Here I must take the time to digress--you will allow me a personal note. As you can see from my updated picture, I have a personal stake in the discussion of crates strapped to the tops of cars, and, by extension, water boarding and other forms of abuse, and I can only thank Gail Collins for keeping this important issue front and center.

But back to the illuminators. Ms. Collins has given us some unsettling details about who these Republicans really are, but we needed details on how their patrons have amassed the wealth to pay for these Republican office holders.

Now, Ellen Schultz has detailed the ways in which companies like General Electric built up huge funds of cash which was held in accounts which the companies initially said were for the pensions of their employees, but which executives depleted and diverted into their own personal accounts. This allowed these executives, who walked away from their companies with tens of millions of dollars to divert half a million here and there to buy elected represenatives to pass the legislation they needed to stay out of jail.

Of course, all this robbery was perfectly legal--the one percenters made sure the congressmen and senators they owned took care of that with legislation--but that does not make it right.

So now we have pie charts which show 80% of the American population as such a thin slice you can hardly see it. And in that 80% are the policemen, the soldiers, the teachers, the pediatricians and primary care doctors, the air traffic controllers, the Coast Guard guys who jump into perfect storms to rescue fishermen, the guys who weld steel girders thirty stories above the ground, the steel workers, the people who build cars and bridges.

In the upper 1% are the people who move money, the "money changers" as Roosevelt called them.
Roosevelt chose that language deliberately. These are the money changers in the temple against whom Jesus raged. And what is the modern version of the temple? I would submit, the hospital, the factory, the roadways and bridges, the steel mills, all the work places where fruitful, necessary work which benefits the community is done. We are told none of these places could exist without that top 1% arranging for the financing. I have no way of knowing whether or not this is true, but I suspect those money changers could do their work for 1/10 of what they pay themselves and still live very well.
And standing steadfastly for this 1% are Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and Bill O'Reilly.

If the best disinfectant is sunlight, then someone has to shine that disinfectant on these guys, individually, systematically, until people even in New Hampshire know their names and why they should resent what each of these guys is doing.

Right now, from my own informal survey, which, if I called it a poll David Brooks would no doubt accept instantly as received truth, New Hampshire folks by and large do not know the Republicans in Washington; we do know Rush/Glenn/Sean and Bill because they are on the radio up here.

But it's time we shined the light on those guys and Washington who are hurting us. And while we are at it, let's include Kelly Ayotte and Frank Guinta, two soul mates of the Republican choir.

Let's take one small step for New Hampshire, and, hopefully, a giant leap for mankind.

Ellen Schultz and Class Warfare

2011-10-19T11:01:00.008-04:00

Double click on the Green chart to enlarge.

Do not double click on Ellen Schultz( She looks good enough already.)

Every time Democrats have raised the idea of taxing millionaires. Mitch McConnell, John Boehner and all the Republicans raise the cry "Class Warfare!"

Of course, the Democratic response has been, the only class warfare has been by the rich on the poor, trying to kill Social Security and Medicare and every program Republicans say we cannot afford and the poor do not deserve any way.

But now we have an unlikely knight in shining armor, a woman who is clearly outraged, but not raising her voice, just telling us the facts, just the facts ma'am.

She is a Wall Street Journal reporter, and she's written Retirement Heist, in which she documents just exactly how the rich have pilloried the poor. There has been, she says, a massive transfer of wealth over the past two decades from the great mass of retirees to a small number of executives, who have enriched themselves, all apparently quite legally by helping themselves to the accounts which had been set up to pay retirees pensions.

The rich simply helped themselves to the pensions of the less rich, and left the average workers to fend for themselves, stripped them of the pensions they though they had worked for all those years.

Schultz says, "The plans were in fact significantly overfunded. They had more than enough to pay every dime for every person employed and already retired." But those funds were looted by executives for their own golden parachutes or their own retirement funds at blue chip companies like General Electric.

The result is the re distribution of wealth evident in the green pie chart. Republicans have been chiding Obama for wanting to have the government redistribute the wealth, and now we can see why they were so irate about the prospect of social engineering. They have been doing some secret social engineering of their own, and they have been laughing at the poor suckers who put in years at all those wonderful companies to fund the retirement and grand life styles of the rich.

Think the 99% would be interested in this story? Isn't that what those incoherent crowds have been shouting about? The underlying complaint is that they believe the rich have gotten their gains as ill gotten. "Behind every great fortune, there is a crime," sort of thing.

Or as someone holding a sign on Wall Street said, "I'll believe corporations are people when they start executing them in Texas."

The Difference Between Fair and Just

2011-10-19T07:53:00.006-04:00

DOUBLE CLICK ON PIE CHART TO ENLARGE

Judge Learned Hand (his actual name) bid good-bye to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. as Judge Holmes left New York to take his new job on the United States Supreme court.

"I wanted to provoke a response," Judge Hand said, "So as he walked off, I said to him, 'Well, sir, goodbye. Do justice!"

Holmes replied, "That is not my job. My job is to play the game according to the rules."

This distinction between what is legal and what is moral has arisen in sharp relief throughout our nation's history. It was once legal to forbid Black Americans from using a Whites Only drinking fountain, or a Whites Only bathroom or Whites Only swimming pool. Legal but immoral. It was illegal to refuse to be put in a position where you had to kill Vietnamese peasants. The war in Vietnam was legal binding on every draftee, but that didn't make it morally correct to fight there.

Now Ellen Schultz, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal,( that's right, Rupert Murdock's right wing rag,) has written a book, Retirement Heist, in which she documents how large corporations have raided their employee's retirement funds, which only two decades ago, in aggregate, had a trillion dollars excess, to pay for golden parachutes and severance pay and retirement boondoggles for their chief executives, or to pay for mergers and acquisitions, all perfectly legally, all within the rules.

So the little guys at General Electric discovered their pension plan had evaporated. GE had not put one red cent into its pension plan since the mid-1980's; it used assets from the plans to pay for other things.

"The plans were in fact significantly overfunded," Schultz says. ""They had more than enough to pay every dime for every person currently employed and already retired." Meanwhile, the companies were crying Wah Wah, they didn't have enough to pay unexpectedly high health care costs or pensions for all those undeserving retirees, who had planned for, paid into and expected support from these pension plans.

So, the private sector, the great white knight on the stallion of economic drive and innovation, our only hope for the average American in this recession, as the Republicans remind us ad nauseum, the entrepreneurs and captains of industry who are the only people we can rely on to save our nation from its financial quagmire, have been robbing the average American blind all these years.

And the Republicans point their fingers at the government as the source of all misery and wrong doing. Oh, the nasty government with all those regulations!

Wouldn't those GE workers have been happy for a little more government regulation?

Just look at that pie graph. See how, playing by the rules, the rich in this country have raped the other 80% of this nation.

The rich can play by the rules, because they've bought and paid for those rules, bought and paid for Congressmen and Senators, who were either alseep at the wheel and did not know what they were voting for (the generous reading of history) or happily complicit in the rape, because they were getting paid, kept in office and flown around on private jets to nice golf courses.

The New York Times this morning has an article about President Obama's new strident, or as they put it, "caustic" tone, saying he risks alienating the part of the public which looked to him to end the partisan bickering in Washington, but instead he is playing Harry Truman and running against Congress and sounding all angry.

As if anger is never appropriate. As if moral outrage is somehow a disqualifier for public office. As if our delicate psyches just cannot take so much discord.

One might ask the New York Times, what do you think is the appropriate response to the vitriol which daily spews from Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, virtually every Republican on Capitol Hill?

Bickering is a tango; it takes two.

Yesterday, Mitch McConnell in explaining why he was voting down the jobs bills used one of those h down home quips, "There's no education in the second kick of the mule." By which he meant, if you didn't learn the first time you were kicked, you're not going to get much more enlightenment from the second. He was saying the first stimulus package Congress votes through did not help, why try again?

Of course, what he didn't say is actually the first bill would have worked, had the Republicans not wounded it so badly by cutting it down from a size which would have had the power to jump start the economy. The battery needed 400 volts and the Republicans would allow only 100 volts.

But even as diminished as that first try was, a lot of economists believe had it not been for that first stimulus bill and some other maneuvers by the Fed, we would not be mired in a recession today, we'd be in full blow Depression.

So maybe Mitch McConnell needs that second kick in his behind.

And when President Obama delivers it, I hope he is not smiling and cooing and sounding non partisan. I hope President Obama is channeling Harry Truman and Franklin Roosevelt. Neither of these guys were afraid of a little outrage.

The 99%

2011-10-18T08:35:00.005-04:00

Some weeks ago Mad Dog wrote about some really amazing pie graphs which showed in a very visually striking way the astonishing reality of wealth distribution in the United States.

Now we have the 99% crowd, apparently motivated by the same images, in streets from New York to Boston and beyond. What exactly brings them to the streets is not so easy to discern, but clearly, a common theme appears to be outrage at the few how have so much, while the many have no jobs and no prospects.

Last night, on The News Hour, a man from a "conservative think tank" said that if you really think about the 99%, they are objecting to the fact that some people make only $500,000 a year, by which he meant in the upper 10-20% of the wealthiest Americans there are people making that much but they do not make it into the upper 1%.

Nicholas Kristoff floated another figure in the New York Times: the 400 wealthiest families in the USA own more wealth than all the wealth owned by 90% of the population.

Different ways of looking at who owns how much.

For the conservative think tank guy, he is very smug about how you slice and dice the numbers, but if you look at those pie graphs, there is no real argument. This looks worse than the distribution of wealth in Marie Antoinette's France, and smug rich conservative Republicans can say "Let them eat cake," all they want to, but they ignore what everyone else can see and they do it at their own peril.

Those pie graphs ought to be printed on T shirts and handed out at super markets by Democrats here in New Hampshire and everywhere around the country. They ought to be on bumper stickers. Don't explain too much, just put up those pie graphs and let people ask you about them.

And while we are printing up T shirts, let's print a few with Got Medicare? Thank Democrats on the front and Got Social Security? Thank Democrats on the back.

And when we get closer to November 2012, Frank Guinta, Medicare Killer. Kelly Ayotte, Medicare Killer. (I know she's not running but maybe we can shame her into resigning. Hey, Republicans live in a dream world, why can't Mad Dog?)

If the 99% movement means anything, it's that class warfare should be alive and fed and nurtured. The only class warfare we've had thus far has come from the rich against all the rest of us.

FDR, Obama and the Tearful Wah Wah Republicans

2011-10-18T08:25:00.002-04:00

One important quality of leadership is the ability to recognize when you can reason with your opponent and when you cannot, when you have to stop talking and hit him between the eyes.

Even our greatest President was guilty of not realizing when his opponents had stopped listening. Listen to his first Inaugural Address given when seven states had already seceded. No cannon had fired on Lincoln's Fort Sumter, but every Southern voice was rife with rancor. And Lincoln's response? "Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection." And he appeals to "The better angels of our nature."

Sounds like President Obama appealing to John Boehner to come by and play a round of golf, to Mitch McConnell to drop by the White House, while McConnell, lips dripping with the venom of contempt, says from the floor of the Senate his first priority is not healing the nation's economy, but his first and highest and only mission is to remove President Obama from office.

Consider how another great President began his First Inaugural Address: "Our distress comes from no failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts...The rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods have failed through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence...Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men."

Was this President Obama speaking? If only. No, this was Franklin Roosevelt.
Look how skillfully he alludes to the Bible, the plague of locusts, the money lenders in the temple. He doesn't have to thump his Bible, he knows his Bible, and he brings the weight of morality into play.

Oh, the class warfare!

"Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers."

Again, look at the imagery of these phrases. The Republicans are tearful, weak, wringing their hands, sobbing that there is nothing they as elected government officials can do--only the private sector, those mysterious, fabled, unseen captains of industry and commerce can rescue us; we cannot take action ourselves to help ourselves. We need to await the arrival of white knights on horseback to slay the dragons of recession and unemployment. This describes John Boehner and Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell and Eric Cantor as clearly and precisely as it described their Republican ancestors. They are all cut of the same pin striped cloth.

"Restoration calls, however, not for changes in ethics alone. This nation asks for action and action now."

Well, here we do hear something familiar. Finally, Obama begins to echo Roosevelt. Pass my jobs bill and pass it now.

"It can be accomplished in part by direct recruiting by the government itself, treating the task as we would treat the emergency of a war, but at the same time, through this employment, accomplishing greatly needed projects to stimulate and reorganize the use of our natural resources."

Hear an echo in this chamber? Has Obama not re invented this particular wheel with his hope for jobs in the green sector, jobs in clean energy, jobs to rebuild infrastructure?

"Finally, in our progress toward a resumption of work we require two safeguards against a return of the evils of the old order; there must be a strict supervision of all banking and credits and investments; there must be an end to speculation with other people's money."

No, that is not Obama speaking. Were it only. That's Roosevelt in 1933.

If those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it, have we not found ourselves sliding down that path to a repetition of the Great Depression, with the Wah Wah Republicans crying great howls of protests about government Regulation, Roosevelt called it "supervision." Regulation got us into this horrible Recession the Republicans all wail, from Susan Collins to Olympia Snow to Rick Perry, they all read from the same hymn book. Oh, government's the problem.

But listen to FDR, and let us hope, President Obama catches some of his fire.

The Numbers Don't Lie

2011-10-17T08:47:00.003-04:00

I'd like to know where Nicholas Kristoff gets his numbers.
He says:
1. The 400 wealthiest Americans have a greater combined net worth than the 150 million Americans who make up the bottom half.

2. The top 1 % of Americans possess more wealth than the folks who make up 90% of the nation.

I've tried finding this from the IRS website, but the IRS is more concerned with income, which, of course, especially in the case of the really rich, does not tell you much about "net wealth," which includes things like the value of stocks held, real estate and other stuff I can hardly imagine.

But if it's true, that should make quite a pie chart. That pie chart should be printed on T shirts and handed out by Democrats at super markets.

It might make some sense of the Wall Street protesters, or maybe not. Right now, I can't really quite understand those protesters. I remember protests from the sixties which looked a lot like this Kumbya crowd, but there was never any doubt what brought all those people to the national Mall in the 1960's--there was this thing called the Vietnam war. There were always people in the crowd who were vegetarians, save the planet, save the tiger, save the whales , but there was one unifying theme: Get out of Vietnam. These guys, not so much.

This protest of the "99%" reminds me of the guy in that movie who throws open a window and leans out and shouts, "I'm mad as Hell, and I'm not going to take it any more."

He could be a mad as hell Tea Party guy. You have to say what you want changed.

A depression era fighter (Raging Bull?) was asked about the pounding he took in the ring, and why he went back in, time after time. He couldn't make a living outside the ring, given the massive unemployment, but making a living in the right was brutal. Didn't he feel it was ultimately pretty discouraging, and he replied, "At least in the ring, I know who I am fighting."

Which was the problem in the Depression and now, you cannot understand who is hurting you. At least in the ring, there is clarity.

But if you have 1% or even 10% owning as much as everyone else combined, no matter how they got that wealth, something is wrong, big time.

Elizabeth Warren, Bless her, is saying what Democrats should all be saying--Okay rich guys, you 1-10% you got your wealth through a system the rest of us gave you, with our sweat. You transported your goods using our roads; you found your customers on the internet the government provided; you used the money our government prints, for Pete's sake.

Pay your share.

And, oh yes, remember it was the Republicans who repealed all those laws which were passed after the Depression to prevent another Depression, and they damn near succeeded in causing another Depression. You know who to punch out for that.

Wah Wah Republicans Enter the Twilight Zone

2011-10-14T18:38:00.002-04:00

This is really getting fun. Rick Perry just came out with his plan to revive the ailing American economy: It turns out the disease is a pestilence called the Environmental Protection Agency and all we have to do is to kill the EPA and look right below our own feet for the wealth which lies there to make us all rich.

And, Governor Perry tells us, this plan of his, drilling in the Artic, drilling offshore, drilling baby drill will create 1.2 million jobs! Yikes. Why didn't anyone else think of this?

Actually, his job plan will create only 9,432 jobs.

How do I know? Where does that number come from? I know that number because I just now made it up, just like Rick Perry did.

These Republicans, they always have some number, usually a very big number, to throw at you. Where do they get those numbers from? I used to wonder. I don't wonder any more. I know. They get it from where they live--in La La land. They live in Fantasyland.

As T.S. Eliot observed: Humankind cannot stand too much reality.

The other problem with reality is it's damn hard work figuring out how it really works. Engineers know this. Doctors learn it, in spades, because when they don't understand reality, they watch people die right in front of them. If you are a doctor, it just doesn't work to just claim something is true and to really really have faith in it. If you are wrong, all the faith and dreaming in the world won't help.

Now, you are wondering when I am going to get to Herman Cain. He at least presents a real plan: He's going to tax your groceries at 9%, which will be added to any local tax. In New Hampshire, that's usually zero. But it means that a sales tax finally will come to New Hampshire after all we've sacrificed to avoid one. So you go spend $100 at Shaw's and your bill is $109. You buy a $1000 TV and you give the government an extra $90, a $10,000 car and you throw in $900 for "Tax and Tags," in addition to whatever you pay your state.

This actually does not bother his Republican audience, because, let's face it, for most of them, those 9% add on's are chump change. And if they see their income tax go down from 34% to 9%, they come out ahead.

It's only the family trying to live on $40,000 who really feels that hit. David Brooks says that Herman Cain's 999 plan raises taxes on the middle class by 32%. There you go with those numbers again. Trot out a number and everyone nods his head, docilely. Oh, you have a number, must be true.

Give me that old time Fantasy any time.

I could learn to love Republicans. It's like going back to the sixties, smoking hallucinogens, feeling really groovy.

Now, if they could just come up with some good music.

Romney and the Dog

2011-10-13T10:54:00.005-04:00

It may not be the most pressing question of the 2012 campaign, but I have to ask: Just how did the story about Romney tying his dog to the roof of his car come out?

Gail Collins, who is reliably droll, sane and a writer of great restraint, cannot restrain herself. It just keeps bubbling up from her primative cerebral centers, and it seems to come out of nowhere and she just cannot stop it. It appears in nearly every column, no matter how unrelated to dogs or cars or travel or even taxes or the economy.

I mean, there is only one possible source I can imagine, unless a policeman stopped him and created some sort of record.

But short of police involvement, or a some really improbable person with a cell phone camera, the only source for that story could have been Romney himself or someone in his family.

Any way you slice it, the fact the story came out at all is the really bizarre part.

I know I could look this up on the internet, and likely, some day I will. But right now, reading Gail Collins about this is just too much fun.

In fact, every discouraged Democrat ought to simply link to Gail Collins and Paul Krugman and start each day reading them. It's almost enough to make one believe there are well springs of truth, virtue and reality still percolating up through the scum and muck of the Republican vituperation and disingenuousness which passes for thought on the right.

Wah Wah Republican Follies

2011-10-12T09:02:00.003-04:00

I missed the candidates' debate last night. Detroit was playing Texas. But I heard the headlines and the sound bites this morning.

It seems they all agreed on the big issue: The economy is in the doldrums because--one guess now, and remember these are Republicans talking: Oh, yes! It's the government!

Not just the government, the federal government.

Forget about those bankers making loans to deadbeats and people who were well meaning but incapable; forget about those Wall Street sharpies who were selling securities using those really worthless mortgage loans as security; forget about the European union implosion; forget about, most of all, those two big whirlpools over there called "Iraq" and "Afghanistan" where we spent in one week what it would cost to fund healthcare for every American for about a year.

Naw, none of that even exists--can't hear about it, can't see it and sure cannot talk about it, because Republicans stick to the script. Have been doing that since they discovered a guy named Reagan who was just great as long as he stuck to the script. And ever since then, they all do.

Except maybe for Chris Christie, who is, as Mara Liasson tells us is, "Authentic." Which means he does stray from the "Government is bad. Government is the problem not the solution. Government regulations are the problem killing the economy. Government is discouraging the almighty Job Creators." Sometimes he says something that doesn't sound as if it came out of the Republican/Fox News word processor, something you haven't heard on Rush or Glenn or Sean.

Speaking of which, did you know Elizabeth Warren is a parasite who doesn't care about her host?

That is, as opposed to all those parasites who are quite considerate of their hosts.

And here I thought Ron Paul was the designated authentic Republican.

But I'm not done with Mara Liasson. During the last presidential campaign I listened to NPR every day and whenever Mara Liasson came on I kept thinking my radio had somehow jumped the dial to Fox News. Her reports had sixty second sound bites from Sarah Palin (you remember Sarah) and a three second snippet from Barack Obama sounding as if he was choking on a biscotti. She is the great stealth bomber of the Fox News crowd. Apparently, she has the zealotry of the convert: In high school, growing up in Scarsdale, New York (fertile Fox News spawning ground) she helped form the Scarsdale Alternative School, which sounds like some kind of Hippie response to the button down privileged elitist environment of Scarsdale, but what's in a name? Then, after Brown, where they actually have a transgender dormitory, she shipped out to San Francisco, where she was, one can only imagine, traumatized by the liberal scene in Haight Ashbury and so flipped out she ran right over and joined Fox News and hasn't looked back since. Somehow, I suppose in some guilt ridden attempt to add "Balance" to NPR news,NPR hired her back which is like Abraham Lincoln hiring Jefferson Davis as his press secretary after the war, in an attempt at "Balance." Anyway, Mara thinks Chris Christies is "Authentic." That's like calling snake oil "Natural," and you know, natural is always healthy and good for you.

One thing which was really fun was hearing Michelle Bachmann tell Herman Cain that a 9% sales tax would lead to a value added tax, which came out of the same orbit as her friend who told her HPV vaccine causes mental retardation. Mitt Romney, ever the centrist, said the simple 9-9-9 formula is, in fact, simplistic, and simple answers to complex problems are often ineffective. Now that, coming from a Republican, is news.

How about the simple answer: The problem with the economy is the government. Just get the government off the backs of the people and we don't have to do anything else. Is that not the Republican line? Very simple. Joe Sixpack can learn that right quick. We don't want to stray to that Democratic quamire called "Complexity," now do we?

Here's a simple formula: Vote for Brain Dead Republicans, they may be zombies, but there is very little batch to batch variation and you know what you are getting.

Wah-Wah Republicans: Given 'Em Hell, Barry

2011-10-11T08:30:00.003-04:00

Here among my friends in New Hampshire precious few know the name Eric Cantor. Which means, of course, too few follow Jon Stewart or the essential Stephen Colbert.

So, I will have to make an introduction: Mr. Cantor is a Congressman from Richmond, Virginia--you remember Richmond, capital of the Confederacy, then once the feds regulated them out of slavery (the 13th and 14th amendments), they turned their entrepreneurial spirit to the cultivation of tobacco--anyway, he is the latest attack dog for the Republican party.

Yesterday, on the Squawkbox, an insufferable morning show with an officious right wing host who has all the qualifications of a right wing agitator, good hair and a pugnacious style, Mr. Cantor inveighed against President Obama's road trips around the country during which the President brings attention to Republican senators and congressmen who refuse to tax millionaires and who have targeted Medicare and Social Security as public nuisances.

"Stop the campaigning. City after city, yeah. Listen, there's no question that that's what happened. Immediately, the next day after the speech was given, he came to Richmond, my district, and then that bridge in Ohio. Right. It's like somebody going around the country picking a fight. The country doesn't need that. I mean people are angry in this country. Middle class does need to see leadership in Washington. It's not inflaming division but instead focusing on solutions, that's what we're trying to do."

This amounts to what Paul Krugman has called, "The Panic of the Plutocrats," i.e. the politicians and right wing talk show hosts who reliably serve the interests of the wealthiest hundredth of a percent. Mr. Cantor has attacked the Wall Street protesters as mobs who are "Pitting Americans against Americans," and he invokes, as do all Republicans any complaint about not taxing millionaires as "Class warfare."

Stephen Schwartzman, chairman of the Blackstone Group, compared an Obama proposal to close a loophole that lets some millionaires pay absurdly low taxes to Hitler's invasion of Poland.

And George Will inveighed that Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic contender for the current Republican senate seat in Massachusetts, has a "collectivist agenda." Rush Limbaugh went one better, as he called her "a parasite who hates her host. Willing to destroy the host while she sucks the life out of it."

I defer to Mr. Limbaugh and his Republican cronies, who are the experts on sucking the life out of their hosts.

These are the people, Krugman observes, who are not Steve Jobs. They invented nothing, made nothing. They got rich by peddling complex financial schemes that brought us the wonderful world of financial collapse, and they paid no price. They are like the spider wasps, who suck their host dry, then move on. "Their institutions were bailed out by taxpayers...They continue to benefit from explicit and implicit federal guarantees--basically they're still in a game of heads they win, tails taxpayers lose...This special treatment can't bear close scrutiny--and therefore, as they see it, there must be no close scrutiny. Anyone who points out the obvious, no matter how calmly and moderately, must be demonized and driven from the stage...So who's really being un-American?"

Honor, Duty, Country

2011-10-10T21:36:00.005-04:00

"Stand with anybody that stands right, stand with him while he is right and part with him when he goes wrong."
--Abraham Lincoln

"My country...right or wrong."
--Stephen Decatur

"A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it."
--Henry David Thoreau

"You're not supposed to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who says it."
--Malcolm X

So, I have opposed these wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, just as I opposed the war in Viet Nam, and for many of the same reasons: A war fought for a bogus reasons, with a "Mission" at best ill conceived and at worst, phony.

Actually, I was less adamantly opposed to Afghanistan at first because I was willing to suspend judgment given there was a plausible, if not fully believable story that Osama Bin Laden, who may well have been the instigator, if not the operational commander of the attack on 9/11, may have been sheltered there.

But once the man was killed, I saw, and still see no reason to risk the loss of a single American life in that land.

Certainly, we have no business trying to build a single school or library, no business trying to change those people in any way. They live by their own rules and they suffer the consequences, and we have no business trying to whip any American values on them.

I can understand the psychology of winning. But that does not mean I'm blinded by it. In a previous posting I said my brother was not downhearted about our loss in Viet Nam, having served there. He has since corrected me. He was unhappy about that outcome. He developed no abiding affection, apparently, for the Cong, who fired rockets at him. It's tough, apparently, to remain objective about the motivations of someone who tries to shoot you. He knew and served with people who had died there and it disturbed him their deaths were in a losing effort.

I was arguing however, about Marvin Kalb's punditry in which he echoed that absurd narrative that our country behaved as a defeated man, confidence shattered, head down, never the same man again. Baloney. Our country is too big, and there were as many reactions to that outcome as there were people. Fact is, there were never any vital American interests in Viet Nam and we could simply walk away from that bad mortgage with no damage to our credit.

One of my best friends--I was best man at his wedding--is a career naval officer and he's done several tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. I can't really talk to him any more about my opposition to those wars. He thinks the effort is FUBAR (Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition.) He has the grunt's eye view: Stupid orders from stupid people who don't understand as the grunts on the ground what needs to be done. But he wants to continue the fight. Because, as Slim Charles says in The Wire, "That's what war is, you know. Once you in it, you in it. If it's a lie, then you fight on that lie. But you got to fight."

I don't feel that way. I never got my own nose bloodied in Viet Nam or Iraq or Afghanistan, and that gives me, I submit, an opportunity to be a little more objective. I can understand once you are bloodied, you have to be pulled off your adversary. You are no longer thinking dispassionately. In fact, you stop thinking, once your blood is up.

But somebody has to pull Sonny Corleone off the guy he's wailing on. Someone who has a cooler head has to be in charge. Sonny flies off and gets ambushed at the toll booth. He's volatile. He's easy to predict, and thus easy to defeat. A leader has to remain cool, to calculate, to be subtle, when it's necessary.

For me question is, how does this war help America?

The answer, once Osama is dead, is then there is no way anything else over there should interest us.

We should be out of there, yesterday.

And don't give me that stuff about denying "them" a safe haven. We could wipe Iraq and Afghanistan off the face of the earth and there would still be Somalia, and Indonesia and some apartment in Berlin or some hotel in Florida or some farm in Oklahoma where Al Queda can train and plot and launch an attack.

Beyond the loss of life, beyond the ruined lives of the amputees and the brain injured, there is the cold hard calculation of the damage these wars have done our economy.

That is where Osama had his real success. He may have killed three thousand on 9/11, but his greatest victory would be he knew his adversary. He knew George II would come out with both guns blazing and George would shoot his own country not just in the foot, but in the gut, and send the economy to the intensive care unit on life support.

We have to be smarter than that.

We have to serve our country with our minds, not as wind up wooden soldiers, but as thinking, smart grown ups.

Or, as Stringer Bell would say, "We got to start acting like businessman. Sell the shit. Make the profit. And later for that gansta bullshit."

Eric Cantor: The Aroma of the Right

2011-10-10T14:24:00.005-04:00

"What kills a skunk is the publicity it gives itself."

--Abraham Lincoln

Eric Cantor was on Squawkbox this morning. They asked him about his opposition, the opposition of every Republican from Kelly Ayotte to John Boehner to the tax on millionaires.

He said, "We've got a terrible wealth disparity situation in this country we have to address."

Hey, I'm with him so far. He can say things like that and then smile brightly as if he just got made Speaker of the House. Yes, I agree with this Republican, we do have a huge wealth disparity in this country. One percent of the people own 20% of all the nation's wealth, and 20% own 80% of all the wealth. I'm with this guy for even acknowledging this as a problem. Haven't heard any Republican do this before.

But wait. He kept talking: "The answer is not to go and take from the one who is successful and give it to everybody else. We want everyone else to be successful."

Well, yes Congressman, we would all have to agree we want everyone to be successful.

"Republicans are for both the man and the dollar, but in case of conflict, the man before the dollar."
--Abraham Lincoln

And then the Congressman swings into why we should not tax the millionaires:
"Here's my response to that. We've got to fix the problem on the debt. We've got a debt crisis. And we know what the problem is. The party and the president refused to do that. So now you have a situation where you want to raise taxes and haven't fixed the problem, much. It's like throwing good money after bad."

I must have missed something. I was looking for the part where he explains why it is a bad idea to tax millionaires. If we have a debt problem, by which I think he means a deficit problem, that would mean to most people, we need to find some money to fix it, and as Willy Sutton once said, you go where the money is, But then Cantor flies off, saying we cannot go where the money is, but we ought to go back to blaming the Democratic party and the president for refusing to fix the deficit. But the President says we are going to find money to fix the problem, and some of that money should come from millionaires.

Am I missing something?

And how did he get from taxing millionaires to throwing good money after bad. That expression usually has to do with investing money in a business which is going to fail anyway. The next cliche which usually follows is, "Cut your losses," which is clearly what Mr. Cantor should have done.

But no, he continues, "What is the point of bringing it up other than demagoguing the issue for electioneering and political purposes to start 2012 early in November?"

Oh, those Democrats, trying to get a jump on the political process early in November. We've had what? A hundred Republican debates ever since the fires started burning in Texas, but that was just honest discussion, not politicking.

And he is most indignant about the President giving the Republicans Hell about their unwillingness to tax the millionaires. "Stop the campaigning. City after city, yeah. Listen, there's no question that that's what happened. Immediately, the next day after the speech was given, he came to Richmond, my district, and then that bridge in Ohio. Right. It's like somebody going around the country picking a fight. The country doesn't need that. I mean people are angry in this country. Middle class does need to see leadership in Washington. It's not inflaming division but instead focusing on solutions, that's what we're trying to do."

Oh, I must have missed that, too. I kept seeing the Party of No. Every single Republican stamping his or her feet, saying, "NO! There is nothing the government can do to help the economy or create jobs. Only the small businessman can do that. The job creators! And the government, oh the government and the president, they are so bad and nasty."

So, I would have to infer Give 'Em Hell, Obama has got their attention. Maybe doesn't have the attention, yet, of Joe Sixpack, but one thing you know about the Republican Party, they all attend the same meeting and they speak the Party Line, from Mitch McConnell to Olympia Snow, they use the same phrases, "Anti-business, Tax and Spend Democrats, regulatory burdens, Job Creators. "

So when you hear Eric Cantor complaining about Obama attacking Republicans for being in the pockets of millionaires, you know the whole Republican clique has got together and fumed about it. Wah, wah, wah. These Republicans, they can dish it out, but they cannot take it. What wusses.

Or, as one Republican President once said, "These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert, to fleece the people."

Abraham Lincoln, in case you did not guess.

Not hard to guess how Honest Abe would react to what he hears from today's Republicans.

The Shadow and the Tree

2011-10-09T08:43:00.003-04:00

"Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing."
--Abraham Lincoln

There's a wonderful story line in The Wire, which concerns the newly elected Mayor of Baltimore, Tommy Carcetti, who has to choose between getting five million dollars for the crumbling Baltimore schools, which would come at the price of personal humiliation, because he would be taking it from a Republican governor, who would free the funds but only on the condition the state would control their use, saying the Democratic city government could not be trusted to use it wisely. Carcetti spurns the money, to the disgust of his most valued aide, Norman Wilson. Later, Wilson drinks in a darkened bar with the former chief aide to the mayor Carcetti and Wilson had defeated. Wilson finds a sympathetic audience in his former rival and counterpart. "No matter how good they look at first," the aide tells Wilson, "They never stay that way." Wilson agrees, "They will always disappoint you."

Life is imitating art with the presidency of Barack Obama, as he has to make choices which disappoint his followers.

You can hear Lyndon Johnson on the phone if you listen to the Johnson tape explaining to his good friend, Georgia senator Richard Russell, why he is pushing so hard on the Civil Rights Act and on Medicare, so early in his term.

You're going to burn out, Russell tells him. Let things build naturally.

No, Johnson tells him, he's seen this in presidents before, when you are new to the job, you haven't made all that many enemies, but with each decision, you lose more and more friends. You have to get the most important things done first, because each thing becomes harder and harder, as you pile more boulders on your back with each new decision.

Bill Clinton should have listened to Johnson--he started with gays in the military. A just cause, no doubt, but not the most important thing he had to accomplish.

Obama began with heath care, which showed great judgment. He might be a young president, but he got the most important decision right: Start with the most important thing. Health care costs are dragging down American industry. Other countries take that burden off the backs of their private sector companies. General Motors runs its race with Toyota carrying a hundred pound back pack of health care costs for its workers.

Eventually, you have to get to the other things on the list and Afghanistan and Iraq are not even in second place. In terms of getting re elected, it's the economy, stupid. And in terms of remaining a military power, it's the economy.

But eventually, you have to deal with Afghanistan and Iraq. It's not urgent, true, but it's important. It's not urgent because politicians learned the Viet Nam lesson: You can rape another country, and you can send your own youth off to die, but you cannot do it with a draft. As soon as you involve the uninterested, parochial, ignorant folks who live in all the villages across the land, once you start reaching into the homes of mothers whose only real interest in life are their own children and homes, well then you unleash the furies.

The best way to wake insular American citizens to the harm their country is doing in some far off place is to pluck American children from American homes, from their automobiles, their first jobs, their girlfriends (and now boyfriends) and to send them off and return them in flag draped coffins. Then, those mothers who could not name the speaker of the house, or the senate majority leader, or the secretary of defense, then these blissfully ignorant people become a force and a movement.

So, the government has done the shrewd thing: They've made patriotism a financial proposition--fight for your country, join the military and you've got a steady income, the GI bill for education and housing once you're out, and all you've got to do is take a risk, a big risk, the risk of death in the field, but the body counts have been low. Ten years in Afghanistan and we've lost only a tenth of what we lost in five years in Viet Nam.

According the Marvin Kalb, in today's New York Times, Obama "would occasionally slip into an aide's office, lean on his desk and wonder aloud whether he was making the same mistakes Johnson had made."

As well he should.

A recent National Public Radio piece on girls in Afghanistan prisons brings home the problem. A thirteen year old girl's brother runs off with a neighbor's daughter. The neighbor is outraged, fires shots into the girl's house, stalks the family of this boy who ran off with his daughter. The girl's father offers the girl in marriage to this irate neighbor. The neighbor is placated. He may have lost his own daughter, but now he can acquire a sprightly young wife. But the girl runs away with her boyfriend, not wanting to marry a man who has grandchildren, a man who has terrorized her family, not exactly a potential soul mate. The girl is captured, and sent to prison. Her father shows up and tells her she has disgraced her family by refusing this husband who was selected for her. But she has a surprise for him. She has given birth, in prison, to her boyfriend's baby. He replies, she can still come home, but only if she kills the baby.

There's honor for you, Afghan style.

This is but one of many stories which illuminate why the United States of America has no business in Afghanistan. Maybe we did once, to seek out Osama, but that was a mission we could have done without building schools and libraries for the Taliban to blow up. And once Osama was dead, then we should pull out that strike force and come home and do it within weeks not years.

So why does Obama not do that? Why is he keeping our troops in country at a rate of 70,000 still in Afghanistan even after the 30,000 scheduled for withdrawal in December?

It can only be the Tommy Carcetti calculation. He does not want to be humiliated. Lyndon Johnson said he would not be defeated by a "Raggedy-ass, little fourth rate country." What he did not realize is you cannot bomb a country back to the stone age when they are already living in the stone age.

You have as a mission remaking a country in our own image, whipping a little American industry on them, as George Carlin would say. Problem is, you can build schools and other buildings, but you cannot change culture; you cannot change values for all the money and bombs in the world.

Obama and our generals now talk of "The Mission" in Afghanistan. Well, sure go ahead and tell us what that mission is. Do you re-educate that father about what he ought to do with his daughter? And are the lessons given in English?

Kalb tells us of Viet Nam "The defeat was a humiliation, and it stripped the country of its illusions of omnipotence. From boundless self-confidence, Americans descended into self-doubt."

I know history is one long argument, but I lived through those years, and so it's not history book history to me. I remember all that. I did not feel at all humiliated. I did not see America slink off in a funk and not go to work or not create an Internet or computers or a satellite system or GPS. I went on with my medical training, with great relief. Like all doctors in 1973, when I graduated I knew it didn't matter what my lottery number was. They drafted every single intern the day his internship finished and sent him off to Viet Nam. I was, with all my friends, on the launching pad.

But then the whole thing collapsed. The nation building was wrecked by the invading North Viet Namese army and helicopters lifted the last Americans off the Saigon embassy roof and I jumped for joy. I would not have to go to Viet Nam. My self confidence took not a blow. I never felt omnipotent.

Who are these people who lost self confidence? My brother served in Viet Nam. He never struck me as someone who felt omnipotent. When he returned, and Viet Nam collapsed, he did not skulk around. He was delighted. He was delighted to be home, alive, all limbs intact. He went out and led a very productive life.

In The Way We Were Robert Redford talks about how the passions of the moment wash away, once economies start asserting themselves. "Twenty years from now, we'll be giving them jobs and money and they'll take it because they will need or want the money, and nobody will even remember the way we were."

Our military may have felt humiliated, but I was, at best, just a fan. I was not in that fight. I had no dog in that fight. Like Muhammad Ali, I could say, "I ain't got no fight with them Cong."

Whenever you see words like "Humiliation," or "Honor" or "Self confidence," or "Reputation," your antenae ought to start flashing like a neon light: Bogus.

Nobody ever died of humiliation or lost honor.

Listen to those Lyndon Johnson tapes sometime. Johnson on the phone with Richard Russell, who sounds like a true Georgia cracker, accent so thick and slow he sounds brain damaged to the average New Englander. And Johnson asks his old, best friend, what he ought to do about Viet Nam. He doesn't want to be the first president to lose a war. And Russell, drawls, "Well, you know, Mr. President, them Cong is going to be there forever. They ain't got nowhere else."
"I know, " Johnson says.
"And we got to come out of there, eventually. We don't want to stay there."
"I know."
"Well, thing is, Mr. President," Russell drawls. "They know that too."

Dead Seals

2011-10-05T08:45:00.004-04:00

Every morning, at first light, my dog and I walk and run along the beach at Plaice Cove. For the past few weeks dead seals have been dotting the sand. At first it was small seals, infants, I guessed, less than two feet long. There were also more dead gulls, five or six every few days, washing about in the surf.

Today, we found a four foot long adult seal, halfway down the beach. It was high tide, and he had washed up right next to the big boulders protecting the houses above, and he was the color of the boulders, and it was still dark, so when Tug sniffed at him, I thought it was just a boulder some dog had marked. Then, I realized it was a full grown seal, his coat dappled like the rocks around him.

We walked down toward North Hampton, and near the North Hampton line, beyond that last flagpole, lay a six foot fish, at least 250 lbs, I don't know what kind of fish. Tuna maybe. It's fins and body had been chewed. Birds, maybe. Maybe sharks, but smaller bites, birds more likely.

Seals have been washing up from Maine to Massachusetts and the New England Aquarium is doing necropsies to figure out what is killing the mammals. So far, no answers.

This being a political blog, I suppose I should point out that citizens at times like these, turn to their government for answers. There's no profit in doing the labor to figure out what is happening to the seals. But as citizens, as human beings, we want to know. and personally, I'm happy to think of my tax dollars going to pay for some marine biologists to figure out these things. But this is a digression, really. This event transcends the Tea Party dolts and the right wingers who bleat daily about what is wrong with the world. This is so much more important than their stupid, ignorant anger. The seals don't care about Job Creators or big government. They just live their lives out there beyond the surf, not bothering us or even letting us know they are out there.

It's depressing, but why is it depressing?

Drowning polar bears are depressing, but that you can say is depressing because we can feel guilty about the polar bears if we, as human beings have played a causative role in their demise.

The seals, so far, are not our fault. It's possible, like the dead birds Rachel Carson tied to insecticide in The Silent Spring, mankind may have played a role in the death of the seals, but so far we are not prime suspects.

The seals are just washing up with no explanation.

Whatever it is, it's not just mammals affected. Those dead gulls and that enormous fish attest to a cross species event. I thought it might be something to do with a bad storm at sea, but my wife assures me fish do not die in ocean storms, seals maybe, if they cannot catch a breath, but not fish. Maybe she's right.

There is always the possibility they are a harbinger--like the dead rats which precede outbreaks of the plague, the Black Death, Yesina Pestis.

But even if it's not anything ominous for humankind, the dead seals thing feels wrong. It's as if nature is out of whack.

I don't know why I don't like it. But I don't like it.

QED: Republican Voodoo Economic

2011-10-01T08:43:00.005-04:00

"These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert, to fleece the people."
--Abraham Lincoln

This morning the Portsmouth Herald carried a letter from Patrick Abrami who is a delegate to the New Hampshire House of Delegates for Stratham, Exeter and North Hampton. Mr. Abrami argues to over ride a veto of a bill called "Right To Work," saying that the American People have voted with their feet, by leaving states which do not have a Right to Work law and resettling in states where such laws exist. He then spiffs up his otherwise lame argument with a Latin maxim: Quad erat demonstrandum, which means "We have proved the proposition we set ou to prove."

I am guessing he's a Republican.

How could I know he's a Republican?

Because he engages in that pathognomonic (from the Greek) behavior of Republicans to draw their conclusions not from whence their data leads them but from their own fantasy of how life should be and then to search out data, however bogus or irrelevant to "prove" they are right. (Pathognomonic in medicine is a sign or symptom of the disease so characteristic, it makes the diagnosis.)
This is the classic case of True/True/Unrelated.
But first, let me digress. One thing you have to admire about Republicans is their capacity for naming. The tax on the wealthy which claims back for the society a portion of wealth which society helped the individual create is not called "The Estate Tax, "but Republicans call it "The Death Tax," as in, "This tax is the death of the economy," or the "Death of the Republic tax."
Now to Mr. Abrami's argument: He sets out in detail which states lost population and thus Congressional seats in the last census, and because 11 states with a Right to Work law gained seats and only one state which had rejected this type law gained, while 10 states which reject the law lost seats.

Then, triumphantly, Mr. Abrami exults: QED, I have proved my point! People moved from Non Right to Work States to Right to Work states and voted with their feet.

Of course, he makes the classic mistake the uneducated man makes: He fails to look at other possible explanations for the migration. He so badly wants the reason each of those families migrated to be his reason, he is blind to all other explanations.
Let's look at those states: People moved away from Louisiana, New York, Massachusetts, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Illinois, Ohio.

Can you think of any other reason people might have left Louisiana? Can you spell Katrina?
Michigan, well there's this thing called the auto industry which, had the Republicans had their way, would have totally imploded, but for the action of the Democrats (which gave rise to the Republicans derisive name Government Motors--oh they are so good at names.)
Then there are those "rust belt" states, which have been ravaged by the shift of manufacturing from the USA to China, well before the economy tanked, a trend which dates back decades through good times and bad.

And, oh yes, there's Massachusetts, which, if anything should give Mr. Abrami pause, it's a state where the economy has been relatively untouched by the hard times, but people are still fleeing pockets of poverty.

Let's look at the states which are growing: Texas, ah yes, Texas. Rick Perry is currently claiming his shining state is drawing in workers like a giant job magnet. Of course, 25% of Texans have no health insurance and most of the jobs there are low wage jobs for the desperate, many of them the flooded out victims from New Orleans.

Then there are the rest of the states, all Sun Belt states in the South or Southwest, to which people have been streaming dating back to the Carter administration and beyond. The reasons for this migration have been the subject of academic theses and fodder for PhD's for decades. Explanations have ranged from the better weather to places with low cost of living and attractiveness to retired people, who are not likely to be much concerned about whether or not unions or Right to Work laws exist there.

Fact is, some people do follow jobs, but the reason jobs went to the Sun Belt is the factories in the North and Midwest closed down as America lost manufacturing to Asia, not because unionized workers made companies uncompetitive but because nobody could compete with the slave wages paid in China, India and Indonesia.

What Mr. Abrami does not touch upon is what exactly the Right to Work law means: I cannot claim to know its details. I have to confess to judging it mainly by knowing Republicans like it so it's probably bad for the common man. I suspect it's an attempt to eviscerate the unions, probably by saying to prospective employees, well you don't have to join the union, we have both types of workers in this factory. But, of course, you know which type of worker we want to hire.

What really strikes me is the nature of Mr. Abrami's mind, as revealed by his argument. New Hampshire is a state of roughly 1.3 million people. For this small state, there are 460 members of the House of Delegates, who represent roughly 3,000 citizens each. One would think those 3,000 citizens of Exeter, Stratham and North Hampton could have come up with someone better educated than Mr. Abrami. Someone who has some clearer understanding of cause and effect.

Then again, I live in Hampton and our House of Delegate representative once explained at a meeting of citizens his plan to solve the budget crisis in New Hampshire: He would lower the cigarette tax. See, what this would do is it would lower the cost of a pack of cigarettes, so people would buy more cigarettes and the state would make more money. Why, he exclaimed, people from Massachusetts and Vermont would flood across the border to buy our cheap cigarettes and we could solve our fiscal crisis quickly.

Then someone asked: So you want to solve our money problems by exporting cancer to Vermont and Massachusetts? And what about New Hampshire smokers? Don't we have to pay for their lung cancer? Well, no he explained, only in Massachusetts does the state have to worry about paying for its citizen's healthcare. But, he responded brightly, what's the problem? Cigarettes are legal. We might as well profit from the trade.

Talk about having lost a moral compass. But then again, in the world of commerce, where the Republicans live, maybe a moral compass is not something they much need.
In the end, this Republican said, "Look the voters have spoken. They sent us to the legislature to cut taxes, pure and simple and we are going to do that."

There you have it: cause and effect. He knew what those votes meant. Everyone else is still trying to figure out what that vote meant, but he knew what he wanted that vote to mean and that's his story and he's sticking to it.

Pathognomonic.

Bill O'Reilly And the Big Bad $16 Muffin

2011-09-30T11:17:00.002-04:00

Bill O'Reilly and some of his friends at Fox News jumped all over the latest example of government wasting money: He claimed a conference for Justice Department "Nitwits" spent $16 for each muffin eaten by the conference attendees.

This was based on an government audit done by the office of the Inspector General.

Actually, it turns out, the 5 day conference, like most conferences I go to, provided coffee, fruit and soft drinks during breaks between lectures and the cost per person for all this was $14.72, which is 2 cents over the allowable Justice Department limit.

But O'Reilly didn't bother to wait for the response from the hotel's accountant; this was just too good a story, a Heaven sent example of how government "nitwits" live it up on his dime and your dime and mine. Oh, we are just supporting these welfare Queens with $16 muffins, while we slave away at our TV stations. This story is "About a federal government that doesn't give a hoot about how much money it spends," and "President Obama wants more tax money to buy more muffins."

Now, you might expect O'Reilly would be a little abashed, learning the truth, but no.

This is a classic event--and Rush Limbaugh is the king of this sort of disinformation. You get the headline, erupt in righteous indignation, proclaim this just "proves" you have been right all along about that big bad federal government and that evil, foreign born President Obama, and move on to the next story without a shred of shame.

Fact is, Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Hannity, Beck--none of them has ever really put himself on the line for his fellow citizens. They are the yell leaders. They are wimps, every last one, without even enough mental rigor to check out a story. They so want the story to be true, they cannot bear the thought that more investigation might undermine it.

That's how they do.

The Dangers of Warm and Fuzzy

2011-09-29T19:13:00.003-04:00

We had an edifying session among Hampton Democrats the other night. One of us played a Bill O'Reilly, Newt Gingrich, you name it, the generic Republican, spewing forth the Republican Party babble: "Democrat Big Federal Government Regulations are discouraging the Job Creators from creating new jobs, and wasteful government spending is killing the economy and driving up the deficit which our grandchildren will be paying for," and so forth, and various members of the Democrat club tried to respond to this tripe.

At one point, someone said, "You know, when I hear this sort of stuff, I know it's just no use. That person has made up his mind."

Another said, "It is just so demoralizing, I feel badly just having to reply to this."

But that is when I thought, "Qui Tacit, Consentit." He who remains silent, consents. Or, silence implies consent.

Someone pointed out, when Clinton was President, he had George Stephanopolis on TV refuting every one of these insipid Republican talking points, point by point, and firing back with aggressive assertions of his own, and eventually, the accepted truth was not simply the Republican truth, but people began to question all of this Rush Limbaugh braying.

It's exhausting, but it's necessary. It requires persistence, but it's essential.

And it requires a taste for confrontation, which some people simply cannot stomach. But that's what war is.

I heard Newt Gingrich tonight and I listened to Bill O'Reilly and if I closed my eyes, I could not tell one from another, the Republicans have read so long from the same prayer book.

One of them, maybe Bill O'Reilly, was talking to Jon Stewart about $16 doughnuts ordered for a meeting of government "nitwits." (It turned out this dunce had it wrong, the $16 per person covered breakfast, the rental of the room etc., but when has reality ever mattered to demagogues?) And he went on about how he wouldn't mind paying higher taxes, a 40% tax rate but he knew the government would waste his money on $16 doughnuts.

And Jon Stewart pointed out that even if that $16 a person was wasted the total cost came out to about $800 and how much did those Wall Street wild men, those champions of the private sector, who the Republicans so admire cost us?

O'Reilly pointed out he employs dozens of people and if he stopped working, all those people would be unemployed.

Stewart, patient, methodical, confrontational demolished each absurd thrust. Are you really saying you would simply stop working because you would take home not $3.5 million but only $3 million?

That reminded me of an interview I heard with a professor from the Wharton School of Business who was talking about the Republican line you hear constantly that small businesses are the main drivers of employment. Most jobs are created by small businesses (who, the Republicans say are afraid to hire because of federal government regulations.) But, asked the professor, how do you define small business? Below 500 employees. Well, that's a pretty big factory, he said. And then he observed the real small business is a doctor who has maybe five employees, and he cannot hire more, not because of regulations, but because the size of his income stream cannot sustain more employees.

And real innovators, a business start up with ten employees, fail with great regularity, so they are not job creators but job destroyers. They create briefly, then destroy. So that image of the small businessman swamped by government regulations is a false image.

Who exactly are these small harried businessmen? They are always a single person Michele Bachmann met while campaigning in New Hampshire who told her a story, right after the lady who told her the story about her daughter being struck with mental retardation after a government mandated vaccine.

They are the imaginary friends of each of these Republican dupes.

We have to confront the monster.

We have to man up.

One of the Democrats at the meeting told of her brother, who does not read the newspaper, but goes to the bar or turns on the radio and listens to Rush Limbaugh, and he repeats what he hears there and she has to confront each assertion with reality, and it's draining.

But, as unpleasant and draining as it is, it is work that has to be done.

And we can't be too nice about it.

Obama tried that, until he discovered the people he is opposing don't play nice. They see nice as a sign of weakness.

And we should be aware of this. When I hear a story about reforming the prison system, and I hear an advocate start talking about moving prisoners from state penitentiaries to local jails so they can be closer to their families and to rehabilitation facilities, I just shake my head.

That woman's brother who listens to Rush is thinking, there ain't no way to rehabilitate these low lifes. He has no sympathy for them and as soon as you show you're sympathetic you are a bleeding heart.

What you can say is we cannot afford to keep non violent offenders who were locked up for drug possession in state penitentiaries.

Let's stop advocating for the needy, who Joe Sixpack thinks are undeserving. Let's just attack and attack and attack again. We cannot afford being seen as being too sympathetic. The Republicans base their appeal on their own lack of sympathy. We have to show we are just as hard hearted, but we are smarter. We know government is necessary and can be a positive force to rescue us from economic disaster.

We hav e to show it is the Republicans are the wimps because they are paralyzed, unable to do anything. They keep waiting for the phantom small business Job Creator heroes to magically appear and rescue us all. Democrats are the active champions who say, move ahead or move aside. But if you can't lend a hand then get out of the way.

Or, as the bard once said:
Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled.

Portsmouth Herald Showcases the Republican Song and Dance: Susan Collins Style

2011-09-27T12:23:00.003-04:00

Yesterday, the Portsmouth Herald published a 20 paragraph, two columns letter from Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) with some surprising news: Over-regulation by Washington is the reason we are having economic problems.

I wonder where she got that novel insight?

This does sound familiar, as you hear it ad nauseum from virtually every Republican, as if they are reciting Hail Marys.

Why did she feel compelled to repeat these flabby canards?

I was under the apparently mistaken impression our economic woes had something to do which a more complex morass of what was happening in the world wide economy. (Perhaps Senator Collins has not heard of a certain little brouhaha in a place called Europe, and Greece in particular. ) And mixed in that brew are two wars (led by her own party) and a financial meltdown visited upon us by a lack of regulation.

And I seem to recall there a little problem with greedy bankers and stock brokers who sold rotten mortgage backed securities which caused both the housing market and world markets to crash?

If this is true, perhaps the Senator is confusing the disease (greed, and its fellow traveler, unscrupulous behavior) with the therapy (vigorously enforced regulation.)

But now we have a United States Senator, who people have been fond of describing as a "Moderates Republican" screaming about regulations holding down the economy. (Maybe this is like one of those fraternity stunts you have to do to be taken into the club. You know, like running around the quad in your underwear in the snow, shouting, "Beware the Sky is Falling!)

Senator Collins certainly sounds as if she knows: “Crushing new regulations,” are on their way: More than 4,200 new rules 845 affect small business with economic impact of $100 million each costing 90,000 American jobs. Wow! And Senator Collins has been talking to “businessmen” and “Job Creators” who tell her “Uncertainty generated by Washington is a big wet blanket on our economy.”

Perhaps, if she had listened more closely, she’d have realized the kind of uncertainty they are talking about is the kind created when her own party, the Republican party, initially refused to allow FEMA relief payments for flood victims in Vermont and elsewhere. When the Republicans try to control and regulate—no FEMA payments until we cut something from government programs —well that’s just responsible government action. And talk about uncertainty: Let’s spend the summer closing down the government by dreaming up a problem (as if we don’t have enough already) called the “Deficit.”

I keep looking for the specific regulations which are dragging down our economy and Senator Collins offers only two examples: Walnuts and boiler emissions.

Let’s take the case of walnuts; it’s something I actually know about. Senator Collins says, “Washington claimed the walnuts were being marketed as a drug, so the government ordered the company to stop telling consumers about the benefits of nuts.”

Oh, bad government! Down boy! Good walnut sellers. Good boy.

The problem with the Senator’s argument is there are no persuasive, double blind, controlled prospective trials to confirm any of the claims made for walnuts (avoid heart disease, improve blood sugar control in diabetes.) There are lots of claims made for a variety of foods, but these are studies which leave a lot to be desired, scientifically. How many walnuts do you have to eat a day to raise your HDL cholesterol? Is the effect transitory or sustained? Does this actually result in an outcome we care about, like reduced heart attacks? Or do people simply gain weight and start smelling like walnuts?

But the lack of evidence never stopped the walnut purveyors from making those claims. This is part of the culture of commerce, which in this country trumps the culture of science every time. If you have a "scientific claim" which can be turned into cash, the Republican Party and the folks in the money chain are rooting for you, whether or not the claim is phony. Every day I see on TV advertisements for FRUIT LOOPS as being good for your child’s health because of their fiber content! Imagine if the government tried to stomp all over those Job Creators at the Fruit Loop Company for deceptive advertising.

But deceptive advertising is nothing that bothers Ms. Collins or her party. They do it all the time.

Just consider the case of her partner, across the river, Kelly Ayotte who voted to kill Medicare and then claimed the Republican party was not trying to kill Medicare, it was just “Improving” it. Improving it, by converting it into a coupon care program. So you would get, say $8000 a year to spend on whatever your little heart desires for medical care, and you’d save the government a bundle of money and help keep the big bad Deficit away. Of course, if you needed a coronary bypass that year, the bill would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $200,000. But, hey, $8,000 is a start. Your children can chip in. And you could sell your house.

I don’t know much about boilers, but the Senator from Maine tells me the regulations had something to do with the Environmental Protection Agency, which her party believes to be a Democratic anti business machine and the EPA is at it again, regulating “emissions” from these boilers which will cost 90,000 jobs. I don’t know, maybe she’s right. Whenever she trots out big numbers, you know she must know what she’s talking about.

But then again, think about those walnuts.

Republicans: The Anatomy of Hate

2011-09-24T21:58:00.002-04:00

My wife remarked I would have lasted about thirty seconds as a psychiatrist. Coming from her, this was a compliment. During her nursing training she had to do a rotation on psychiatry, in a very famous psychiatric hospital, Payne Whitney, in New York City and she said it was all she could do to stop herself from just slapping some of her depressed patients. "Man up," she wanted to say. "Just stop whining and pull yourself together."

So ours is not a household given to a lot of psychobabble.

On the other hand, when I look at the Republicans who are most prominent, from Rush Limbaugh, to Rick Perry, I cannot help but notice a few shared characteristics which one might describe as a syndrome of the hater.

Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, all very poor students. All, presumably, told at some tender age they were not the sharpest blades in the drawer, and you can just see them trying to prove all those doubters wrong. You see them struggling to change that past of humiliation.

And Rush, one has to admit, is a man with some pretty obvious reasons for self loathing. He is, after all, grotesque, physically. This is not a kind or socially correct thing to point out, but it's sort of the 800 pound gorilla when it comes to Rush, and for that matter Glenn. Pretty obvious insecurity and inferiority complexes just lighting up like neon.

Rick Perry, ditto. Not because he is physically grotesque. Not because he knows he is not going to walk out of the bar with a woman and he's over compensating for physical unattractiveness, but he was, as he freely admits, a dimwit in school. He tries to get past this by joking about it, as if to say, having been a dunce, well that doesn't mean your not smart, because, obviously, I've written this book which displays just how smart I am. I can see Social Security is a Ponzi scheme and ought to be executed, Texas style.

Rush Limbaugh hates the undeserving poor, the welfare queens who want to rape the system and free load off the hard working American Taxpayer. Mitch McConnell shares that hate and so does Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann. All the Republicans do. They hate the poor who are poor because they are undeserving and trying to live like parasites on the American taxpayer.

They are not simply derisive, they actively hate these fellow citizens. They hate criminals who commit heinous crimes and they want to kill them. Rick Perry has never lost sleep over killing prisoners on death row. And he is dead certain (excuse the pun) he has never executed an innocent man, that's how sure he is of the Texas courts.

In his certainty, Rick Perry shares this characteristic with all the big time Republicans, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Paul Ryan, Glenn, Rush, Sean, Michele. In fact, it is a source of some fascination and wonder to Democrats about just how sure these Republicans are of everything.

But there is nothing new in this.

Just after World War II, Jean Paul Sartre looked at the anti Semite. "Anti Semitism is a way of feeling good, proud even," Sartre observed. "It is not unusual for people to elect to live a life of passion rather than reason." The hater does this out of a "Longing for impenetrability. The rational man groans as he gropes for the truth; he knows that reasoning is no more than tentative, that other considerations may intervene to cast doubt on it...The Anti Semite has chosen hate because hate is a faith."

Democrats over the past three years, have agonized over the inability of Democrats, of the President in particular, to come up with a coherent, cogent and simple response, a catchy little catechism like the Republicans have: "Regulations, tax and spend, driving up the deficits for our grandchildren to pay. Government is not the solution; it is the problem."

Why don't we have a catchy little riff like that?

It's Bertrand Russel's plaintiff question: Why is it the stupid are cocksure, and the intelligent full of doubts?

Well, I guess the answer is, because the Right is always sure it's right. And the Left, well, they are pondering.

But Democrats have got to get beyond all this.

We may not have all the answers, but we do know this: The Republicans, for all their surety are wrong. They stamp their feet and throw tantrums, but what they are really saying is, "We cannot and will not do anything! No!" They are saying government cannot help. No. We will not allow it!

And Democrats, from the time of Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression know that government will fail, but it will try again, and it has to try and keep trying until something works. And eventually, something will work. And we call the successes Social Security and Medicare and The Interstate Highway System and the Internet and the Atom bomb (heaven help us) and a dead guy called Osama Bin Laden.

If you keep trying, eventually, something works.

Democrats Build Bridges; Republicans Build Riches (For Themselves)

2011-09-23T12:19:00.003-04:00

We really need some marketing in the Democratic Party.
The Republicans are so good at this: They turn Estate Taxes into Death Taxes.
They turn a recession into an Obama Recession.
They turn Affordable Healthcare Act into Obamacare.

Well, you get the drift.

And then, in the best tradition of advertising and Mad Men, they all pick up the chant and keep hammering it home so whatever they say becomes received wisdom.

They could decide the earth is flat, and the world was created in 7 days and sell that.
But wait, they already did that.

And evolution is just a theory like creationism and everyone deserves to carry a concealed weapon and if it weren't for government regulation and taxes on the rich, the Job Creators would make a new world in six days and rest on the seventh and create all the jobs in the universe and all the creatures and Sarah Palin would be President and Michele Bachmann the Secretary of the Departments of Education, Health and Human Services and State; but wait, there would be no Department of Education and no EPA either. And Rick Perry would be Secretary of Defense because he looks so good with that six shooter.

And Mitch McConnell would be Senate Leader and John Boehner would be Speaker of the House and President of Congressional Country Club.

What a world we would have then.

It just makes me so excited and rapturous to think on it.

So there's a bridge between Kentucky and Ohio which carries 3% of all the nation's GNP, and it connects all the truck traffic from Michigan to New Orleans and it backs up for miles every day and we just cannot fix it because, Doncha Know? The Deficit! We cannot spend money to do this because we have to live within our means, and we cannot and will not raise taxes and it's all these government regulations which keep us from doing anything at all.

We are just paralyzed.

And we are just helpless, helpless, helpless because we are under control of the Republicans.

Rapacious Republicans. Selfish Republicans. Tea Party Republicans. Tax anyone but the rich Republicans. Medicare killers. Social Security killers. The party of hate and fear.

And just when you began to think, well, they're not all so bad--Susan Collins and Olympia Snow, after all. But look at them. Those two women vote just as John Boehner and Mitch McConnell tell them to vote and they will campaign for Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann.

And nary a one of them is loyal to the United States of America. They are only loyal to the Republican Party.

Congressman Paul Ryan Instructs

2011-09-22T20:48:00.002-04:00

Some times you got to love National Public Radio. Today Michele Norris asked Congressman Paul Ryan why he so opposed increasing taxes on the rich and he said, as Republicans now all say whenever they get the chance, the rich people are not rich people, they are "Job creators," and if we annoy them with taxes and hamstring them with "Regulations" they will simply stamp their feet and refuse to hire any of the poor people who need jobs and who the government should definitely not hire to do any sort of work (because that would drive up the dreaded deficit.)

And here's where it got good: Ms. Norris asked him, very politely, well, if keeping taxes low on the rich "Job Creators" is the secret to getting the Job Creators to hire, why had they not been hiring after years of some of the lowest tax rates we have ever set for the rich--currently at 32% for the top incomes. We have had eras when tax rates were much higher and unemployment was much lower, so why were those rich Job Creators willing to hire when they were paying higher taxes then, but not now?

Representative Ryan responded that actually the tax rates for the richest Job Creators once reached a low of 28%, a non sequitur about which, sadly, Ms. Norris did not press him.

He went on to recite the usual cant about how those magical, unspecified "Government Regulations" were keeping rich Job Creators from feeling secure about the future, and how the deficit, (which Republicans created with low taxes and high war expenditures) was making the JC's unwilling to risk hiring. It was all the fault of misguided Democratic Party policies.

He described himself as a policy man.

We all remember his most famous policy: Replace Medicare with a coupon system. You get an $8,000 coupon every year to put toward your medical expenses. That ought to just about cover the anesthesiologist's bill for your by pass. So they can put you to sleep but not fix your heart, because the surgeon has a bill and the hospital, too. But that coupon system sure would save the government a lot of money.

So now this is the best the Republican party's best policy man, their chairman of the House committee on budgets, monetary policy and all things financial, can come up with.

I couldn't help thinking, as I was listening, who exactly are these Job Creators? I mean, is there a directory of Job Creators? Do they have a convention? Do they all belong to the same country club? Do they have a Face Book page? Does Paul Ryan have them over for a prayer breakfast every Monday?

And what, specifically, are those frightening, stultifying "Regulations" which have so paralyzed these Job Creators they have simply refused to hire their fellow citizens?

I had some very good friends in Washington, DC who ran a real estate development company with about thirty employees. They bought up parcels of land in Silver Spring, Maryland, intending to develop it but then a huge corporation made them an offer for this land they simply could not refused. Every one of the three partners became a multi milloinaire overnight. One of them cashed in and moved to horse country, Virginia, retiring at the age of 45. But two others kept the company going. And when I asked one of them why he hadn't simply bought himself a country estate and started traveling and riding horses in hunt club events, he looked at me, a little surprised. "Well," he said. "We've got thirty people depending on this company for their jobs. And they like developing projects, building homes and offices and shaping the future. This is a company, well, I'm not running it for me. I'm running it for them, for the people who work in it and for the people they are going to put in homes and in communities."

This guy, remember is very rich. Doesn't have to work. And he's a freaking Communist! Warren Buffet if not the only rich dude out there with a conscience and a sense of doing socially responsible work.

I would venture to say, this guy is the real patriot in the house.

You may be wondering who those kids in the picture are. They are kids from a middle school in 1927, and most of them lived in tiny apartments with their parents and didn't know they were living in poverty because everyone around them lived about the same way. And some of them, probably most, grew up to own big houses and cars and send their kids to college because a rising tide raised their boats, as the country went through the Depression and the World War and they were part of that community which hung on together and got the country through it all and built a future for themselves and their cohort. They paid their taxes and never complained.

Michele Norris asked Mr. Ryan about his claim hat President Obama was engaging in Class Warfare by suggesting we increase taxes on the rich. She said, actually aren't you the one who is engaging in class warfare by asking the question, by making the issue of spreading the tax burden more evenly into a class question?

He just laughed and said he didn't see that at all.

Check out Congressman Ryan's hairline. That simian look may tell you something about him, and about those who travel with him in that right wing party on Capitol Hill.

Let's All Kill Grandma

2011-09-22T10:52:00.003-04:00

So let's talk about Medicare and Social Security.

These are things we call "Entitlements," or as the Republican Party says, "Government sponsored Ponzi Schemes."

We really cannot afford to pay for either, because we insist on government living within its means.

And we cannot live within our means, especially if we have no means because means means taxes, and as Republicans WE ARE AGAINST TAXES.

So when Grandma gets to the hospital, unable to breathe and we are told she needs a heart bypass procedure, which costs somewhere between $100,000 and $200,000, we would have to sell her house and get a second mortgage on our house and would grandma really want that?

We can't ask her because she so short of breath she can't answer.

But, we can use the coupon for $8,000 which Paul Ryan gave us and that will bring the cost down to well, $192,000, so that will help.

Well, maybe she can make it without the surgery.

But there's another problem. If we take her home and she does survive, that Social Security check isn't coming any more, because you know, we had this problem with the deficit.

And I know that was a big problem because my brother is over in Iraq and he tells me he can see where all the money is going. And he says his buddies in Afghanistan say it's even worse over there--they are just exploding money over there, literally.

But Kelly Ayotte is all for spending over there, because, well she's a patriot. And she looks so sweet.

Now Mr. Guinta is on the same page as Senator Ayotte. She got to vote against Medicare and he's just sorry he didn't have the same chance.

He is pretty happy though, because he's now a finalist in the Joseph McCarthy look alike contest.

Frank wasn't really sure who Joe McCarthy was, but when he was told Joe was a Republican, he liked him immediately. Joe was one of the best Republicans at finding bad people in the federal government. He had lists of bad people, and he kept changing them and updating them. He hated government spending, too. So he and Frank are sort of soul mates. Actually, they all are, Joe and Kelly and Frank and Mitch, all separated at birth, but now reunited under that great big Republican circus tent.

Makes you sort of proud to be an American.

The Bridge to Somewhere

2011-09-22T08:42:00.007-04:00

The Brent Spence Bridge connects Mitch McConnell's state of Kentucky to John Boehner's state of Ohio and both connect to our state of New Hampshire in one very important way, and that is through the great state of mind of Herbert Hoover: Government cannot be the solution.

The bridge carries a stunning percentage of the load of truck traffic from the upper midwest but there are back ups lasting hours as the huge volume of traffic in trucks and passenger vehicles try to squeeze through a structure meant to carry less than an half the traffic it now bears.

Now you would think, well this is a no brainer, build a new bridge or at least expand this one.

Then again, consider the brains of the Republican senator from Kentucky and the Republican Representative, and Speaker of the House, from Ohio.

The people on both sides of the bridge cry out: "Build a bridge," and the Boehner/ McConnell braintrust says, "No taxes."

The people upstream from the bridge, in Wisconsin, Michigan and Indiana say, "We are strangling, build a bridge!" And McConnell/Boehner say, "Government is the problem, not the solution."

"Our businesses are withering on the vine because we cannot get our goods to market," cry the small business people who want the bridge. "We must make government live within its means," say the Republicans.

Now, I suppose you might argue, okay build the damn bridge, without taxes, let the private sector build it.

That's been suggested for roads. Sort of like the railroads--sell the private companies land cheap an let the barons of industry profit. Trouble is bridges for profit mean tolls and the whole idea is to keep traffic flowing, not holding it up, so, in general, bridges tend to be non toll structures. They are things which connect us, and so Democrats like them on an existential basis and Republicans, who are more fond of moats and walled communities and country clubs where the rich can hide from the hoi polloi and not sully their manicured fingernails with the dirt of the land, well, Republicans really don't like bridges much, existentially speaking. They are not bridge builders.

Actually, as in most things, there is symbolism and there is nuance.

When it comes to bridges, even Republicans can sometimes see that government spending may not always be bad. In fact--I cannot believe this story, but it was on the internet so it must be true--Rand Paul is flying to Kentucky on Air Force One with the President, (despite the cost to the Treasury of the airplane feul, )and he says he's doing this to lobby the President to spend some money on building a new bridge.

Imagine that! He says if the President can lobby the "Democrat party" for the funds, he'll lobby the Republicans.

Of course, if I were at the President's elbow I'd whisper into his ear: "Tell him you'll lobby for the bridge if he can say 'The Democratic Party' three times." I mean, the man is asking for help and he still can't bring himself to say Democratic.

These Republicans, once upon a time they could not pronounce "Negro" and said "Nigrah" instead. Now they take great glee in referring to their opponents as "The Democrat Party" rather than the name the Democrats use. These are the same guys who kept calling Muhammed Ali Cassius Clay. They never understood Howard Cosell, when he said, "In this country a man has a right to be called by whatever name he chooses for himself."

But back to the bridge: When Republicans want something, well maybe there is a place for government. But for jobs, the environment, the middle class, healthcare, Social Security: We have to live within our means; No taxes; cut spending is the only answer to jobs, the economy and the deficit.

We are for the private sector, the Republicans say. Let the private sector do it.

But the reality is, when the public sector builds a beltway around Washington, DC, the private sector booms. When the public sector builds a subway and light rail system, wherever a subway station pokes its nose through to the street above, the small business spring up.

If you build it, they will come.

But the Republicans have decided we cannot do anything here in Congress, other than cross our arms and stamp our feet and shout "No!" (Except for bridges in Kentucky.)

No to Medicare, Kelly Ayotte says. It costs too much. No to bridges, if that means spending money.

What ever happened to, "It takes money to make money?"

I guess that's a concept which is a bridge to nowhere.

The Bully Pulpit: The Playground Bullies

2011-09-21T12:46:00.007-04:00

Mitch McConnell, Rush Limbaugh, Rick Perry, are the classic playground bullies. They are, for personal reasons, not entirely sure of their own manhood, so they puff themselves up and spout out the sort of tough sounding stuff which attempts to substitute braggadocio and in your face for real courage. Theirs is a sort of substitute courage, the loud mouth.

And of course, from the time we first got to know him, Barack Obama is the perfect target for the playground bully, who looks for the kid they can wale on,--he so obviously will not hit back.

So, President Obama proposes a jobs bill and McConnell says it's a poor substitute for leadership.

Rick Perry says he never lost sleep over any of the record number of prisoners he's sent to the Texas death house. Why should he? He's a tough guy. Of course, the governor of Illinois stopped executions in his state once he realized through the efforts of the Innocence Project, which revealed, using DNA evidence, the innocence of so many people on death row the governor had to admit, our jury system is so flawed we should not be killing people if there is any doubt at all.

Today a prisoner will be executed even though the witnesses against him have recanted their testimony.

You see a movie like "Conviction" and you see how courts and police make mistakes and would rather than admit it, they'd put an innocent man to death.
Then there's the sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, who parades prisoners in pink underwear through the streets and some of these guys have not even had their day in court. But the sheriff is a real tough guy. He's real tough when he's surrounded by armed deputies, you understand.
But then, that's the essence of the bully. He is never going to stand across the mat and face off against another man, who could take him down. He's only tough when he's safe, rich and Republican.

Talking Past the GOP: Memo to the WhiteHouse

2011-09-19T22:06:00.002-04:00

Okay, I realize the President gets a lot of advice, but this is coming from the state of New Hampshire, so I just know he's going to listen.

Up here, if we don't have a Presidential contender over for coffee more than once, he can forget about getting our vote. What we got up here is retail politics.

So, what can we expect in the way of conversation as the election year begins?

Of course, we will, as Democrats have to point out that the Republicans pushed us over the precipice just before they left office and Obama and the Democrats caught us just before we hit the rocks and splattered all over the bottom in a real honest to goodness Depression.

They got us there through a combination of wars they had no plan for paying for (which they now call Obama's wars) and dismantling regulations and laws which had protected us from the kinds of shenanigans on Wall Street which got us into the last Great Depression, and they saddled us with a huge deficit caused by those wars and by Republican laws to cut taxes for billionaires, which meant we could no longer collect taxes to keep the government running and just for good measure they tried to kill Medicare and Social Security and damn near, well virtually did, kill health care reform.

When we bring all this up, they will say, "I'm for allowing concealed weapons so every citizen can defend himself at school, in the restaurants and bars of his home town, and in his home."

And what can we say to this?

And when the Republican, in the candidate's debate asks the President how he feels about forcing sweet innocent twelve year old girls, who have never had a thought about sex or boys or rock and roll music to have an injection of a vaccine to protect her against HPV virus, and what do you think about that, Mr. President? How do you feel about government mandated injections of twelve year old virgins?

Then you say, "I am not your daughter's physician, and that question is meant to distract everyone from the real issue of jobs, which your party is killing."

And when they reply, "Well, how about gay marriage, how do you feel about that?"

Then the President says, "Gay marriage questions are not about jobs and the only reason you raise the issue is to hide behind it so you don't have to talk about how Republican trickle down economics has killed off jobs."

And when they say, "Well, how do you feel about job killing taxes which shackle job creators and how about regulations which stifle innovation and investment?"

Then the President says, "No taxes ever killed job creation and regulations do not stifle innovation half as much as unfair taxes which make the millionaire's secretary pay more tax, proportionately than the millionaire. What we need is more jobs not richer millionaires. We need to turn unemployed workers into taxpayers; We do not need to turn millionaires into billionaires."

And when they say, "Well, how do you feel about the Death Tax?"

Then you say, Mr. President, "I think families who receive five million dollars are well taken care of, and for estates more than that, well those estates got that big because this country helped create that kind of success and it's time for give back. And we can exempt farmers, by the way."

And when they say, "Your talk about taxing the rich is just class warfare."

Then you say, "The only class warfare I've seen over the past three years has been against the middle class and it's been waged by Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Paul Ryan and Lindsay Graham leading the charge and every other Republican politician charging behind them."

And when they say, "We've got to get government to live within its means," then you say, "If that means we cannot do anything to get this country moving again, then I'd say, we can acquire the means now and live within them once we have people back to work."

And when they say, "You are part of Washington, and the federal government and that's what's keeping this country and this economy down."

Then you say, "It's not government, or even big government that is the problem. It's bad government that is the problem. And every time the Republicans win an election, which is easier to do if all you have to do is point to the problems rather than to the solutions, every time the Republicans get into office, they drive this country to near ruin. They turn government surpluses into deficits and then blame the Democrats for letting them do it. They are the classic case of the son who kills both his parents and then complains he's been made an orphan."

And when they say, "What about a Mosque at Ground Zero? What about bringing terrorists here to the homeland to have dangerous trials? What about protecting our borders against all those illegal immigrants?"

Then you say, Mr. President: "You're just dodging the real issues, trying to hide behind these social smokescreens, those hot button burn down the barn questions so you can be all self righteous and sanctimonious so you don't have to talk about how we got into this horrible economy and how we can get out."

You can, in fact, say, "You know, for three years, seems like thirty, I've responded to your phony party line talking points, but now I've realized you never had any intention of having a real conversation. All you want to do is to insult, deride, and pose as some sort of savior of the real America. But in fact, you have no idea what the real America is. You live in that part of America only 1 percent of the population knows. And you are bound and determined to protect that 1 percent from the other 99 percent, and that's all you really care about."

And if the Republicans win after that debate, well, at least you can feel better because you know at least everyone has seen them, however briefly for what they really are.

The Dismal Science

2011-09-18T18:55:00.002-04:00

When John Boehner gave his speech the the Economic Club of Washington, DC, he distilled the Republican dogma of the last 80 years into the catechism: 1/ The problem is the government 2/ The people, that is the businessmen will lead us out of our economic miseries by creating jobs, innovating and riding on on horseback.

The problem with his economic analysis is the problem with economics, which has been called "The Dismal Science" as a proposition: Economics is not a science at all.

In science, you propose a hypothesis: e.g., Government cannot create jobs. And then you test that hypothesis with an experiment. And then you publish your results so everyone can see how exactly you did your experiment and everyone argues about it until the next trial.

But economics does not have laboratories; about the only things economics has is history (which is one long argument) and mathematical models, which stupefy most people and which lend some credibility to economics as a learned profession, because, after all, they have all those numbers.

The closest thing we've got to a laboratory in economics is an individual state, like say, Michigan, where they can try ideas out and see how they work. Of course, if the idea doesn't work in Michigan, you can say, well that's just an isolated state with all sorts of problems peculiar to Michigan, and just because the idea didn't work there doesn't mean it won't work in say, Texas.

But it's the closest thing we've got to a laboratory.

Now Jennifer Granholm, former governor of Michigan has published her report on how she responded to the economic crisis in that state when she was governor: She cut taxes, cut spending, cut government jobs. And what were the results of her experiment? "We did everything that people would want us to do, and yet it didn't work. Laissez-faire, passivity, tax cuts, hands-off does not work. And, really that's the lesson from this laboratory of democracy which is Michigan."

About the only thing that helped was when the federal government stepped in and bailed out General Motors--which the Republicans in their typically snide, cynical way, immediately dubbed, "Government Motors."

Of course, the Republicans say the reason cutting taxes didn't work was she didn't cut them enough.

Dismal science indeed. Not much science. But pretty dismal.

Nattering Nabobs of Negativism: Rick Perry and the Republican Frontal Assault

2011-09-18T17:06:00.005-04:00

The indispensable Gail Collins has a wonderful piece in today's Times about Rick Perry, but she could just as well be writing about Frank Guinta or Kelly Ayotte. She alludes to a piece which appeared in the Texas monthly in which a local observer remarked: "The problem is...that the energy in the Republican Party today is not directed at how to make government work better. It is directed against government." (Italics mine)

Whenever today's leading Republicans think about the federal government it is always as "A sinister force that can be identified as the villain when anything goes wrong."

Collins notes, "More than a quarter of all Texans have no health insurance whatsoever. During the first presidential debate Perry blamed that fact--as he has in the past, back home--on Washington."

The excuse for any failure attributed to the Republican Party is always the federal government.

From Herbert Hoover on, the federal government was seen as grasping to control the "Minds and the souls" of good decent Americans, who would otherwise be hard working and successful, but for the intervention of the feds.

So while America burned, while the bread lines lengthened and the factories emptied and the roads and bridges crumbled during the 1930's, the President and the Congress sat on their hands and told everyone there is nothing the federal government could do. The solution had to be small business and big business had to come to the rescue, as John Boehner has said, "As it always has."

Except when it hasn't.

Capitalism has failed before. In the 1920's and 1930's when the catastrophic failures in Germany and across Europe led to the rise of Hitler and world war.

In America, Franklin Roosevelt was elected President and started spending money and regulating banks and started trying things. And the Republican Party has never forgiven him. And in 1937, he finally was overwhelmed into pulling back on federal spending by the same Republican Party, and the economy went back into a tailspin.

If those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, then we are all in deep doo doo.

Obama is no FDR. He doesn't have the fight in him.

Maybe he'll learn and start to channel Harry Truman and start giving the Republican Party what it so richly deserves, which is to say: Hell.

Here's hoping, because we need our government again.

We need to remember Medicare, the Internet, the interstate highway system, the wonders of clean rivers and an untainted food supply, the Center for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, the Coast Guard which rescues more people every year than any Republican governor or senator, the Seal Team Six, which found and killed Osama Bin Laden, and all the other successes of the federal government.

It's no surprise there are stupid, ambitious people out there like Michele Bachmann (who hears a mother blame the HPV vaccine for her child's mental retardation and Michele accepts this as received Gospel) or Rick Perry, who thinks other people are guilty of treason for doing their jobs, whereas he can advocate secession from the union and is not at all treasonous, or Kelly Ayotte who votes to kill Medicare, or Frank Guinta (well, you just pick your quote from that man--anything will do.)

What is puzzling is how idiotic can the voters in this great country of ours can elect these low life and elevate them to national office.

John Boehner: A Herbert Hoover for the 21st Century

2011-09-16T12:49:00.005-04:00

Speaking to the Economic Club of Washington, DC Speaker John Boehner sounded for all the world like Rush Limbaugh channeling Herbert Hoover.

First, there was the frank acknowledgment our economy is in trouble.

Then, as Limbaugh and all Republicans are so adept at doing, there is the demonization, the creation of the villain and the bogeyman.

Can you guess who is at fault for our economic woes?

Is it those wild, unregulated Wall Street types, who, out from under any kind of government regulation or scrutiny, sold stocks which were essentially mortgage boondogles, which in turn had been created by even more unscrupulous miscreants who bamboozled ignoramuses into mortgages they had no hope of paying? No.

Is it the Republican Congressmen and Senators who have voted the very rich such enormous tax breaks that billionaire pay less income tax than their secretaries? No.

Is it the European Union which had its economy poisoned by the same stockbrokers and mortgage men who poisoned the US economy? Of course not.

No, it's the GOVERNMENT.

It is most certainly, Mr. Boehner hastens to add, not the innocent, hard working American people (whom the Republicans love and who should love the Repbublicans) or those "job creators," (who the Repbulicans really love) the captains of industry, who would hire lots of people and create jobs if only they were not so terrified of those GOVERNMENT regulators!

"Micromanaging, meddling, manipulating" government bureaucrats (and who doesn't hate bureaucrats?) are getting all up in the faces of God fearing good rich job creators.

The perfect example, Mr. Boehner cites, is Boeing aircraft, which got tired of having to pay a living wage to its union employees in the state of Washington, so they opened a plant in South Carolina, where they don't believe in no commie labor unions, and the federal government, those meddling bureaucrats, had the temerity to charge Boeing with attempted union busting.

Why nothing could have been further from the minds of those Boeing job creators!

It's just that Boeing executives looked around the world and decided making airplanes overseas might not be such good press right now, and so they found the closest thing to Hong Kong they could find right there in South Carolina, where people are so uneducated and desperate and Republican it would never enter their minds to form a union. Why, in South Carolina, they don't even know how to spell UNION. Union has been a dirty word in South Carolina since they fired on Fort Sumter.

Boeing did of course consider Arizona, where they have the Maricopa County re incarnation of the Gestapo hunting down all those illegal immigrants who want to work. And of course, Texas was in the running because in Texas they execute all the troublemakers at such a rate you can hardly keep track. But South Carolina will do just fine, for the job creators, the non union kind of jobs Boeing loves to create.

Mr. Boehner knows the government cannot create jobs: "I can tell you the American people--private sector in particular--are rattled by what this town has done over the last few years."

And what has Washington, DC done? Close to nothing, except argue about the debt ceiling.

Just before the Great Depression, Herbert Hoover sounded the same warnings: "Bureaucracy is ever desirous of spreading its influence and its power. You cannot extend the mastery of the government over the daily working life of a people without at the same time making it the master of people's souls and thoughts."

John Boehner and Rush Limbaugh have been channeling Hoover ever since.

"No country can squander itself into prosperity on the ruin of its taxpayers," Hoover told us.

So, Hoover sat on his hands, refusing to interject the government into anything, while the country slid into Depression with 25% unemployment, bread lines, massive internal migrations, until enough people were starving and desperate enough to finally understand what horse manure this Republican line amounted to.

They voted in Franklin Delano Roosevelt, FDR, who said simply, the federal government has to do something when the private sector fails. So he introduced the NRA (National Recovery Act) and a whole alphabet soup of federal government programs, which created "make work jobs," putting people to work building bridges and roads, painting murals, most of which still survive to this day.

The Boehners and Limbaughs of his day all cried this was the end of America, and they were especially outraged over Social Security and they have been trying to kill Social Security and what was left of the New Deal, and trying to kill labor unions and trying to redistribute the wealth from the middle class to the wealthy (with great success) and trying to convince the slow witted American public, ever since, the real villains are those big government, tax and spend, death tax liberal pinko Democrats.

And you have to think of that last scene in Animal Farm, where you look around the room, and you cannot tell the pigs from the rich people who have enough money to control all the animals in the country.

The Tea Party: I Am Become Death

2011-09-15T12:32:00.003-04:00

We are still reeling from the epiphany which occurred when Ron Paul was asked at the Tea Party Republican debate what he would do with the 30 year old man who winds up in the hospital, at death's door, without health insurance and the audience, good Tea Party stalwarts all, shouted out, "Let him die!"

That was one of those moments when every day reality, such as I saw daily when I was in training at a city hospital, rubs up against the delusional state induced by people who harbor an absolute Truth which guides every aspect of their life.

If the TRUTH is "Freedom trumps all," including the freedom to die because you were foolish enough to not have a PLAN B for disaster, then your freedom to have no plan, becomes some else's problem.

The problem is actually no longer your problem, when you are comatose. The problem become the problem of the doctors at the hospital when your panicked family brings you in, desperate.

Can the doctor at the hospital say, "Well, actually, he had the freedom to choose not to have health insurance, and he chose that, so now we are going to just let him die" ?

That's the way it happens, time and time again, every day, at every hospital in the land. Lots of tough guys who chose freedom, and their families present the problem to the hospital, which is to say, ultimately, the government.

It's very much the parental role: You have this stupid child who cannot be bothered to be inhibited by caution or prudent planning now you have to pick up the pieces and solve his problem.

Of course, that is much of what motivates members of the Tea Party: They simply do not like their neighbors or even their own family enough to be willing to spend their own money or time or effort to save them from their own fecklessness. The Tea Party faithful loathe welfare because the undeserving poor are helped by taxes coming from the hard working Tea Party folk.

Even if you give them the choice: Okay, you and your parents and your children will be taken care of, but to do this, we will also take care of the unworthy, slothful, shiftless poor who refuse to work, well then the TP folk say, "NO! I'd rather have my parents and children and myself go down the tubes than help those reprobates."

And that's why they hate the mandatory part of the new health insurance bill--because the heedless unworthies will be forced to take care of themselves.

Actually, what really bugs the TP folk is this punctures the fantasy that we can each decide to live off the grid and not be part of the larger community, as we drive down government built roads, talking on government invented internet based phones, across government built bridges, running by clear lakes and streams which were cleaned up by government environmental protection laws after free market private sector industry poisoned the waters.

And those fantasies are so important. Michele Bachmann doesn't want to have young girls vaccinated against sexually transmitted diseases because this means we are planning ahead for the day when at least some of those girls will become sexually active (maybe even before marriage, Heaven For fend) or maybe some of those innocent young girls will be virginal at marriage, but their husbands have had sex before marriage and they bring their brides this gift of HPV, which causes cervical cancer which kills the woman Michele thought was too frail, innocent and pure to have a vaccine. And Michele says the vaccine causes mental retardation because some mother in a crowd told her so.

Just how ignorant and clueless is Michele Bachmann?

Oh, there is splendid science. I heard it from the mother. So now it's true and that means, as President, no girls will get the vaccine.

She heard, of course, what she wanted to hear, and she endorsed this fantasy, this nightmare fantasy to support her underlying resentment against premarital sex.

Of course, maybe she was just trying to distinguish herself from Rick Perry, who approved of giving Texas girls this vaccine to prevent them from getting cervical cancer.

But then again, Rick Perry is on record as opposing telling boys about condoms.

So just how enlightened is Rick Perry?

Heaven forbid little boys use condoms, because if they don't use condoms they'll give HPV to little girls who will then die of cervical cancer.

And if these girls do not have health insurance, well they had it coming to them, according to the Tea Party Republicans.

Is this a great party, or what?

Republican Death Panels

2011-09-14T20:05:00.002-04:00

Great Moment in the Republican debate the other night. Hope you saw it.
They asked Ron Paul the question I've been dying to ask him, Rick Perry and all the Republican candidates who are screeching about how requiring free born red blooded American citizens to buy health insurance when they may not want to buy health insurance.

Suppose a 30 year old doesn't want to buy health insurance. He's healthy and he doesn't want to spend $250 a month on health insurance he doesn't think he needs. Then he gets in a motorcycle accident, and winds up in the hospital, in a coma, uninsured. What would you have us do? Let him die?

And the audience, hand picked Tea Party faithful all, screamed out, "Yes!"

And that's the essence of the problem. You have people who want to take a risk, as Ron Paul says, and that's their right. But their right to not plan ahead and to take a risk runs up against our right to not have to pay for their mistake when things go bad.

And the thing is, as Americans, we find it difficult if not impossible to simply leave that guy on the street or say to him, "Well, if you're not insured, I'll just let you die."

That's the problem for the rest of us, your bravado turns into our burden.

We, once upon a time, had charity hospitals where the uninsured could go, but those have pretty much disappeared.

The myth of the man who can live his life off the grid, unbeholdened to the rest of the community is so starkly exposed by this need for the community to do something when that rugged individualist gets into trouble.

What happens is the family shows up, all pathetic and you have to do something or you cannot live with yourself.

We used to try to send people home to die, with their family, and the family would bring them back within a day or two, completely panicked, unable to watch their loved one die at home. (This was in the days before hospice.)

Ron Paul was a GYN, and never had to deal with these sorts of problems--so he's all strident about just allowing people to suffer, to live or die with the consequences of their own decisions.

Just another instance of the Republican delusional state.

Beautiful People

2011-09-14T12:42:00.002-04:00

It warms my heart to look at these two lovely ladies. I can just imagine living next door to them, seeing them in their kitchens, cooking cookies for the kids, getting the carpools organized and handing out treats on Holloween.

They just look so wholesome and, well, American, especially with the flags in the background.

But the really sweet looking one on the right voted to kill Medicare the first chance she got.

Yes, she had a son in uniform and she loves New Hampshire and the US of A, but she voted to kill Medicare.

And the lady on the left is in the unfortunate position of finding herself on the left of Rick Perry as well, which she is very angry about and she is working hard to never find herself to the left of anyone.

But Rick Perry is saying Soical Security is a Ponzi scheme and has to be killed.

Oh, well, Soical Security and Medicare are for the old folks, and that shouldn't bother me, not yet being 65.

But, the thing is, if my parents lose Medicare, they will wind up bankrupt the first time they need hospitalization and guess who they will move in with if that happens? For a while, I thought, well, at least I'd have somebody home to walk the dog, and their Social Security checks will help out with the grocery bills.

But, wait a minute, there will be no more Social Security checks.

The thing is, I have a picture of Rick Perry somewhere, and he looks just as nice as these other two Republicans.

They all look so nice. And they sound so nice.

But they do such awful things.

It's like, what can you depend on nowadays, if you can't depend on how folks look, whether they have a nice smile and nice kids?

It just hurts my brain, to have to think about it.

It's a Beautiful Life

2011-09-12T21:08:00.005-04:00

Okay, you have to admit, these are beautiful people.
Well, mostly.
And they tell such a beautiful story, you could read your kids to sleep with it: There once was this wonderful, beautiful country, where even the poorest child could grow up to be a princess or a prince.
And all that child had to do was to work hard and play by the rules and think clean thoughts and it would all happen: You will be rich some day, and live in a beautiful house and drive a beautiful car and have a beautiful mate and have beautiful children.

But there's this bad monster called The Government, which tries to give away everything you earn to the undeserving thugs who won't work for a living, the welfare queens and immigrants and godless communists, socialists and atheists and other unwholesome types. And the bad Government, which has black helicopters and bad taxes, tries to take everything from the hard working boys and girls and give it to the lazy, shiftless, unworthy, undeserving poor.

And you can tell these people who tell such stories are good people who would never tell a lie because they are so pretty and believable and they sound so nice.

And they say Social Security is just a big Ponzi scheme and they will kill it with their wonderful clean swift swords of righteousness. And they will kill Medicare too, already tried and voted for the law which would have done it, but the bad Democrats in the Senate stopped them.

And they say the most important job in the world right now is not to provide health care, or to get people jobs, or to help people who are poor and want to work to catch a break, or to protect the rivers and lakes from pollution.

No. The most important job is to prevent the re election of President Barack Obama, who has a nasty foreign sounding name. His middle name is Hussein, you know. And he wasn't even born in America. And he didn't want to wear the American flag lapel pin because he really doesn't love this great country the way you and I do.

But just remember, and keep believing this: You're not going to be poor for long. The Republican Party will see to that.

Why over the eight years they had the White House and the Congress, they made the rich so rich that the top 1% of the richest people in the country now own 40% of all the wealth of this country and they are never going to give that up as long as the good Republicans have any thing to say about it.

It's just so beautiful.

And when you die, you might be reborn into a rich family and then you'll be glad you voted for these nice, pretty people.

Disloyal Opposition: Rick Perry, Mitch McConnell and the GOP

2011-09-11T16:02:00.003-04:00

It is true that people often accuse others of what they are most guilty of themselves. So, when Rick Perry accuses Ben Bernanke of "Treason" he knows of what he speaks. He has suggested, more than once, he would like Texas to secede from the union if the federal government does not change its tax policy.

Perry is not an anomaly in the Republican party on this line--Mitch McConnell announced, forthrightly his top priority in the just finished Congressional session was to ensure the defeat of Barack Obama. Eric Cantor and John Boehner chimed in.

The remarkable thing is nobody in the press or even in the Democratic Party batted an eye, or expressed any outrage that the Republican leader of the Senate would say that his main purpose, his main job was preventing President Obama's re election. Nobody said, "Wait a minute, is that why the voters of Kentucky sent you to the Senate? Did they not want you to create jobs, improve the national economy, improve the security of the nation, prevent terrorist attacks, make the country stronger, the people healthier and create opportunities for the nation to flourish?"

The whole concept of a loyal opposition is what makes a government of a democracy work: You can disagree with the approach of the majority party, but you put the nation first, and you work to make things better for the four years between elections, not work to make things worse so you can blame the ruling party for the mess you helped create.

Of course, the Republicans have a problem in that their tax code has resulted in the staggering statistics which keep coming out about wealth distribution in America: The top 1 percent of the population now receive 1/4 of all income every year; that top 1 percent controls 40% of all the wealth--an even greater percentage than the income they control. This is the result of GOP tax policy, pure and simple. They whine about "Death taxes" but that is only because they are bought and paid for by people with estates.

Of course, you can't blame the Republicans for trying. If they can sell this notion that you are poor now but there's pie in the sky--one day you'll be rich and then you'll be happy we have made things so good for you, well, then more power to them. If the American public is so tied to that delusion, well they get what they deserve.

And the deficit, which the GOP wails and gnashes teeth over--it's just the hammer of our national undoing, until you start talking about reducing that deficit with taxes on millionaires, then you hear the worse thing you can do would be to alienate the "job creators," who have held on to their huge profits and not hired any body much.

These are the real traitors. They are loyal to only their class--the country, that is the other 99% or the other 80%, however you want to slice it, well, they are not really deserving. The nation ought to belong to those who own it. That's the capitalist way.

And if our fellow Americans are stupid enough to vote for Kelly Ayotte and Guinta and Rick Perry and John Boehner and Eric Cantor and yes, even Scott Brown and Susan Collins and Olympia Snow, for any Republican, then they have embraced the Cyborgs and all those who care more for the riches of the few than for their country or their countrymen.

And in a democracy, or actually in a plutocracy, a nation governed by the privilege few, well all's fair.

The Undeserving

2011-08-31T12:55:00.004-04:00

How do you explain the "What's the Matter With Kansas?" phenomenon? This question, the title of the famous and insightful book, asked how it could be so many people vote against their own self interest, vote Republican, when the Republican party, clearly, is dedicated to keeping the rich rich and the poor in their place.

The two most likely explanations are: One, Joe Sixpack, who works hard to make $40,000 a year believes, has to believe, someday he will be rich. He believes he is only temporarily poor.. That is his pipe dream and he gets nasty and hostile when you try to disabuse him of this delusion.

The second explanation is the Republicans simply fool enough of the people enough of the time. They tell you you are not making it because the Democrats are spending your money, and it's not your fault: It's the Democrats robbing you blind.

Of course, the truth is just the opposite: it is the Republicans who are robbing you blind, who always have, who have stacked the tax code to keep the rich rich and the poor poor. It is the Republicans who want to destroy public education because they don't want to pay to educate the poor, especially if the poor might learn to be critical thinkers, in which case the Republican party is really cooked.

If the poor realized the Republican tax code means Warren Buffet pays less income tax than his own secretary, they might get pretty angry at the Republicans. But all the Republicans have to do is say, "No, it's the Democrats who have screwed you with taxes.

It's the old truth that a person often accuses others of the sin of which he himself is most guilty.

The Republicans can propose killing Medicare by turning it into Coupon Care, where you get a fixed amount, say $6,000 a year, to cover your medical expenses and then you find out your coronary by pass surgery will cost $250,000.

Tough luck, sucker.

But the real hard core of Joe Sixpack's resentment against the Democrats is his bitterness about how hard he works and how the Democrats are willing, and have always been willing, to give away money to slackers who simply will not work and who live on welfare, or depend on Medicare or Social Security.

Somehow, the message that Democrats, under President Clinton, and guided by Daniel Patrick Moynahan, changed welfare. There are no more welfare queens, driving Cadillacs, dripping in diamonds, sitting at home collecting welfare checks.

Actually, there never were such queens--the Welfare Queen was the most potent fictional character ever invented by the Republican party.

But there was, once, a very toxic welfare culture, a culture of dependency.

I saw it first hand in a clinic I did in Washington, DC, when a fourteen year old girl came in pregnant and I asked her how she intended to support this baby.

She shrugged her shoulders, looking at the floor and said, "Welfare."

It was a pattern I saw all the time in that clinic: Have the baby, hand it off to grandma, who was herself on welfare, sitting at home at age 40, taking care of her grand daughter's baby and taking care of her daughter's baby, and the daughter was working as a part time clerk and as a part time prostitute. The grand daughter went back to school,l where she got pregnant by three different boys, three more times before she finally left school. And all this depended on the arrival of the welfare checks.

That toxicity poisoned those it supported, but more important, it poisoned a generation of Joe Sixpacks who hated the Democrats for being so soft hearted as to give away the dollars Joe paid in payroll taxes and income taxes and gas taxes to these free loaders.

Democrats have to face this legacy of bitterness head on. We have to say, "We are against taking your money and giving it to people who don't deserve it."

On the other hand, when I asked people, "Suppose you had only two choices: Number One, you get all the healthcare and retirement money you need, but some people who are not working, who refuse to work will also get the same or, Number Two, you do not get any of that healthcare or retirement money, but the people who refuse to work get nothing."

Amazingly, there are people who chose number two.

That is a truth Democrats have to face.

A Revelation

2011-08-17T13:00:00.006-04:00

DOUBLE CLICK ON THE GREEN PIE CHART TO ENLARGE

You can always learn something new.

I was so stunned by the pie graphs Paul Solman showed on the PBS News Hour (shown in pretty poor reproduction to the left)

I showed them around the office.

The top pie shows how wealth is distributed in Sweden, and the bottom pie shows the United States, with the yellow slice showing the proportion of all national wealth owned by the top 20% in the nation, the wealthiest 1/5 of the country; the blue slice is what the next most wealthy 20% owns; the magenta slice shows the next 20%'s slice of the pie and so on, down to the lowest 40%, which owns less than 1% of all the wealth in the USA, but in Sweden the poorest 40% owns roughly 25% of all the weath.

So I did what Paul Solman did on the News Hour: I asked people in my office which country they would rather live in, Sweden where the wealth is distributed more evenly or the USA where they wealth is so uneven, where 84% of all the wealth is owned by just 20% of the people.

Of the three coworkers I asked, two said, immediately, they like the Swedish distribution, although not speaking Swedish they would not want to live there.

But one of my coworkers looked at it and said, "Well, to get that distribution, the Swedes had to tax their wealthy. It's a socialist system. I'd rather live here."

When I pressed her she said, she did not make enough money to pay taxes and she had a lot of relatives who don't want to work for a living and she doesn't want to pay taxes to support them.

Floored me.

But it does finally reveal why some people support the Tea Party, and the Republican Party.

There really are people who are offended by the idea of supporting their neighbors, even their relatives. They'd rather have less themselves, just to be sure the undeserving do not get a bigger share. The idea that the richest 1/5 of Americans own over 80% of all the wealth does not disturb these people. Even if the rich do not deserve their wealth, in the sense of not having earned it, that does not disturb my co worker.. What bothered her was not that the rich may not deserve their wealth; what bothered this lady is that someone who does not deserve a hand out may get that support.

One interesting thing about this woman: She is a devout Christian.

Wowser!

Where do you begin with this?

Wealth Re Distribution, Republican Style

2011-08-17T10:02:00.003-04:00

This is a pretty dim photograph of a very vivid pie chart from Paul Solman's Public Broadcasting System website, (Google Paul Solman, PBS, Wealth Distribution).

But it's clear enough. The Yellow part of the pie is the wealth owned by the top 20% of Americans. The Blue slice is the wealth owned by the next most wealthy 20% and the Red and Orange slices show the wealth owned by the next three quintiels, i.e. the lower 60% of the country.

Even with the dim graphics, the effects of the Bush Tax Cuts which the Tea Party and the rest of the Republicans are so eager to preserve and defend are starkly visible.

See that tiny little wedge of the pie owned by 60% of our population? Not easy.

This is what the rich get richer plan of Republican voracity has got us.

Is there a more brutally honest way of seeing what these sanctimonious Americans have wrought?

Common Sense

2011-08-15T21:00:00.006-04:00

President Barack Obama spoke to the good folks of Cannon Falls, Minnesota about the Republican opposition to raising taxes on billionaires, "Think about that. I mean, that's just not common sense."

Gee whiz, actually, it makes perfect sense.

As usual, President Obama did not name names, so the greedy and the guilty remain faceless, nameless abstractions. They are the guys at Wall Street firms and at banks who played with everyone's money but their own, took no personal risks but reaped huge personal benefits on security back mortgages and things called derivatives and on other financial arcanea and they walked off with millions in their bank accounts, while the rest of the country lost their homes, their jobs and their self respect. Obama said he did not want to go after these guys. He's just too polite to speak ill of anyone. He may be too polite to lead, for that matter.

The Republican party is bought and paid for by billionaires and millionaires and people who are deluded enough to think one day they may become billionaires and they do not want to pay taxes when that happens. These are the poor, deluded souls who in another age would have cried out lustily, "God save the King!" as if the welfare of the king had anything to do with their best interests.

As one great Republican President once said, "You can fool some of the people all of the time."

And the Republicans have taken that to heart.

So they create these phony Reischtag fires and they ride to power on them. You remember the Reischtag fire. Well, maybe not, but the Reischtag was the Capitol building of the German Parliament and the Nazis set it ablaze and blamed the Communists and Hitler, newly elected, used this attack on the parliament as an excuse to pass The Enabling Act which gave him a lock on power. The Nazis created a phony "emergency" to justify seizing power, to "save" the country.

Sound familiar?

And now, the Republicans (Mitch, John, Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor and all those who sail with them) are, as they always do, singing a song in chorus and it goes like this:

Oh, we are the saviors of the Republic,
We are the ones on whom the nation's life does depend.
We will save the country from the Deficit and from Bankruptcy,
From those nasty Democrats who want only to tax and spend!

Millions are unemployed, uninsured, and at their wits' end,
But we will save the billionaires first,
By slipping the knife into Medicare, and making the Democrats bend
And cutting Social Security at the jugular
So we can finally put the New Deal to an end!

And our pitiful President goes to the heart land and says, "It's jut not common sense."
Golly gee, fellas, act nice.

It makes perfectly good sense, to cut taxes for the millionaires, if they are the people who put you in office. We have the best Congress money can buy.

As a great Democratic President once said, "A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who has never learned to walk forward."

The same man observed, "Over ninety percent of all national deficits from 1921 to 1939 were caused by payments for past, present and future wars."

And, if he were alive today, that President would observe that our deficit today was caused by Republicans who got us into Iraq and Afghanistan and by the tax breaks they gave their rich patrons.

And it was this same Democratic President (not President Obama) who said, "Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to the ability to pay. That is the only American principle."

So here's hoping our present day President will man up and give 'em hell, President Obama. It's only common sense.