For the Video Conference

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:

1. 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.

2. 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.”

3. 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.

4. 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

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

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

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?

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

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

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.