A Republic, If You Can Keep It

Emerging from the Constitutional Convention in 1787,  Benjamin Franklin was stopped by a woman who famously asked, "Well, Doctor, what have you given us--A Monarchy or a Republic?"
To which Franklin replied, "A Republic, madam,  if you can keep it."

Today, I voted in the primary for the nomination for governor from the Democratic party. Apart from my wife, I saw only one other person in the voting booths. Across New Hampshire, voters were few and far between.  At work, I asked if any of my co workers had voted, intended to vote, had any idea there was an election or who was running. None did.

We have Free Staters who have taken over the House of Delegates, who believe public schools are an anathema, that food stamps are the equivalent of feeding stray dogs, which is a bad idea, because they breed. We have a Congressman in Washington, D. C.  who wants to end Social Security and Medicare. We have a US Senator from New Hampshire, who smiles sweetly as she extols the virtues of a  sheriff from Arizona who rounds up Mexican looking people off the street and throws them into open air concentration camps.

And we take our kids to day care, to school, and we go shopping at the malls, and we remain blissfully detached and unconnected.

There was a wonderful scene in The Band of Brothers, where Private Webster, bursts into a bakery in a German town, to seize bread for  concentration camp prisoners he has just discovered outside town. The baker objects to the soldiers commandeering his bread, and Webster, who speaks German, pulls out his sidearm and shoves it into the baker's face. 
 "Don't shoot!"  The baker begs. "Ich bein kein Nazi.  Nicht Nazi." 
And Webster screams in his face, in English,   "Not a Nazi? That camp can't be more than half a mile from this bakery. You had to smell it, when the wind shifted. Don't tell me you're not a Nazi. If you didn't know, it could only be because you didn't want to know!"

And that's us, right here in picturesque New Hampshire. Not knowing because we don't want to know.  Or because we are too busy with our doggy lives. 
Not that we are Nazis, but if there were any around, we wouldn't care to find out.

Republicans and the Reichstag Fire Down Below

Once upon a time, there was a nation, struggling to have a democracy and they built an admirable edifice, a building to house their representatives, where the business of government could be done. But then, men who wanted to seize power, to steer the government in only one direction, the direction they saw as imperative, burned the building and pointed to their opponents as the ones who had set the fire. 

And the rest is history.

And this fairy tale repeats itself in every nation which is afflicted with amnesia. Not global amnesia, mind you, but selective amnesia.

So when you have an economy built on debt backed by rising housing prices, which are, after all, an illusion, because your house is not worth more than you paid for it until you have sold it, then you have a sense of wealth, which is, in essence, an illusion, and when you have termites in Wall Street firms eroding the essential value of mortgages--which is the arduous process of verifying the credit worthiness of mortgage holders--then you have a very sad history.

But ask the man in New Hampshire whether he remembers the role played by deregulation of the markets, by the repeal of Glass Steagel, and he says it was all the government's fault. What he remembers is the Federal Government through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac made banks make loans to the undeserving and Clinton and the Democrats voted to repeal Glass Steagel, which had since the Depression separated the world of banking into the banks which made mortgage loans and business loans in the community and commercial banks, which were allowed to create whatever risky schemes they desired.

So memory, like history is one long argument.

This is why eyewitness testimony in court, often rendered with great conviction, is such a problem. It seems so real, so undeniable, and it is often so wrong.  You have people who are so sure of what they saw, and who they saw do it, and it is only with cross examination you have any hope of showing how uncertain their recall, that reconstruction housed in neurons and drenched in a bath of prejudice and unstated belief and self interest, really is.

So the Republicans want you to believe Medicare is burning and Social Security is burning and only they can "save" either one, by destroying both.

And our fellow citizens stand up and raise an extended arm, locked at the elbow and shout, "Hail Blue Eyed Leader! Only you see clearly into the past and into the future."

And the blue eyed leader tells the story of his mother, who, after his father's early death, got on a bus to Madison, Wisconsin, so she could go to the  state college and earn a degree, rode 40 miles a day, five days a week,  so she could learn new skills and start her own business. Now, of course, what he doesn't remember is the bus, the road, the public university which taught her those new skills were all government products. He only remembers his mother's individual effort, not the group effort which helped her, which was just there, the way a mother is just there for her child, or the way a father just gives his son a car. That son remembers the 40 mile trip, the individual perseverance, not the group will, which is so big as to be invisible.

No income tax. No sales tax. Cut taxes and the deficit will shrink. Drown government in a bathtub. Live Free or Die. 

Let us sit in our rocking chairs around the wood stove and admire the rich and denigrate the poor and talk about the weather, a safe subject about which every opinion is equally valid. 

Getting Real The Dems Come Out (Finally) Swinging

John Kerry said, "Why don't you ask Osama Bin Laden if he's better off now than he was 4 years ago?"

Bill Clinton said a lot of things, and he sounded like he knew what he was talking about, because he can use numbers without putting people to sleep--and he can slyly put in front of people the chutzpa of Paul Ryan, who attacks President Obama for cutting "to the dollar" the same amount Paul Ryan had cut from Medicare.

But most of all, the President himself finally swung into high gear and said, "They want your vote, but they don't want to you to know their plan. And that's because all they have to offer is the same prescription they've have for the last thirty years:
'Have a surplus? Try a tax cut.'
'Deficit too high? Try another.'
'Feel a cold coming on? Take two taxes cuts, roll back some regulations, and call us in the morning.'"

These are the lines we can use around the water cooler the next morning with our co-workers, who are quoting Rush Limbaugh.

"If you reject the notion this nation's promise is reserved for the few, your voices must be heard in this election."
"If you reject the notion that our government is forever beholden to the highest bidder, you need to stand up in this election."

I also like the phrase, "Trickle down tax cut pixie dust." 

So, okay, now we've got a gun toting leader who knows what it takes to play the game. 

NPR this morning was all about the potential political effect of the disappointing unemployment numbers which came out  after the President's speech. You would think the speech was not news, only the jobs report.  But the President, speaking here in Portsmouth, put today's report in perspective. When he took office, 800,000 jobs were being lost every month.  Today we have a report of 95,000 jobs being added in a month, and that's supposed to be devastating news.

One wonders what they are thinking at NPR, or if they are thinking at all. Probably, they are simply wimping out, afraid the Republicans will be angry at them and try to cut their funding again, as if by showing fear, NPR can tame the bully.

But President Obama is doing better now, in the late rounds. For the first half of the fight, he was simply covering up and taking punches. Now, he's starting to bounce off the ropes and throw a few combinations. 

PBS: With a Whimper

I saw the very first New Hour on PBS, some 30 years ago, with Jim Lehrer and Robert MacNeil. They were still trying to figure out what to do with a full hour of news. They played with "Postcards," which were pictures of scenes from around the country, to fill that yawning 60 minutes.  Eventually, they got it right and after you got accustomed to The News Hour, all the other news programs looked like shameless news-entertainment hucksterism. 

But the years do take their toll, and now we've got the hoary pundits of Mark Shields and David Brooks who are so wrapped up in their own images as pundits, they simply cannot see the forest for the trees--in fact branches and entire trunks are crashing down on their heads and rendering them brain injured.

Last night Rahm Emmanuel joined Shields and Brooks in the sky box above the convention floor and these two aging journalists did not just embarrass themselves, they embarrassed this erstwhile fan and the viewing public. 

Shields was so intent on demonstrating how even handed and objective a true, professional journalist he was that he asked Emmanuel how the Democrats could complain about the Citizens United case, (which allowed a few very rich people to buy up all the television air time to air their own commercials, espousing their own self serving moneyed interests) when President Obama was the one who ceded the "moral high ground" to the Republicans in 2008 by refusing to accept public funds for his campaign and he was able to outspend John McCain two to one.

The statement/question was so breathtakingly stupid it caught Emmanuel, who is rarely at a loss for words, off guard and he simply, appropriately ignored it. 

He did not answer because the answer would have had to go something like this:  1.  Candidates were not legally required to accept government funding for their own campaigns and Obama did the simple calculation that he could air more TV ads using contributions acquired from millions of $25 contributors than if he took a lump sum for the government. 2. Using the internet, millions of voters contributed typically less than $100 to fund Obama's messages. 3.To compare using the contributions of millions to the contribution of a precious few rich men--the Koch brothers, Mr. Adelson (the casino magnate) as being morally equivalent , in a democracy, is so insipid as to raise the question of whether or not Mr. Shields should be sent immediately for a CAT scan of his brain.
In the Citizens United case a reactionary Supreme Court said monetary contributions are a form of speech, protected by the First Amendment, which was written in the 18th century, before there was television, radio or PBS. Justice Scalia started preaching about "original intent" and the sacred concept of cleaving to the parchment, as if he was talking about a stone handed down from God. 
What Emmanuel and many others have been saying is when you have a huge crowd in a stadium, in  democracy, each voter has a voice. And each voice should be of equal importance. But when you give a microphone and a huge sound system and a podium and a place on the stage to the Koch brothers, then their voices are heard above all others, then their speech is more equal than any other.
Now, Mr. Shields, that, you might think would be immoral. 
But is it immoral for a candidate, faced with Sarah Palin's frothing rants to say, "I will not accept half the air time, half the attention I can be given by millions of eager contributors, so we can pretend we have public financing of national political campaigns?"
Would the moral high ground have been to honorably lose to Sarah Palin and a man who has subsequently revealed himself to be less honorable than we thought he was--a man who has been seen on Jon Stewart saying the Constitution guarantees America will be  a Christian nation?
Who is Mr. Shields to define "moral high ground?"
Where did Mr. Shields ever get the idea he could put "higher moral ground" in the same sentence as "political campaign."
Now you will say, good for the goose, good for the gander, but Citizens United is a bird of a different feather.  This is a decision by a Republican Court to limit speech under the rationale of protecting free speech.
Rather like protecting the integrity of the election by disenfranchising  as many likely Democratic voters as you can with voter ID laws.
When Mr. Ryan shows himself indifferent to facts, hostile to truth telling, where is the moral high ground comparison?
Then David Brooks swoops in for his "Gottcha" moment, asking Mr. Emmanuel how the Democrats can say Mr. Ryan and Mr. Romney want to kill Medicare when they would allow current recipients to keep their current coverage and to phase in the Coupon Care Medicare over 15 years? 
How much insight does it require to know that the Republican Ryan bill, voted for by every Republican in Congress was a bill not to change Medicare, not to save it, but to kill it?  
What is the definition of disingenuous? What does the dictionary have a picture of David Brooks by that word?
Emmanuel, of course, simply replied there is a difference between a guarantee of payment for all costs of medical care and a coupon.  He might have said, a coronary bypass operation costs $250,000 and Mr. Ryan's coupon would cover $8,000 of that. Do you really think Mr. Ryan is "saving" Medicare with his coupon?
Emmanuel looked from one to the other much as the animals of Animal Farm looked around the table and could not distinguish the people from the pigs.

Deval Patrick et al: Finally, Some Punches

"Mitt Romney talks a lot about all the things he's fixed. I can tell you that Massachusetts wasn't one of them."

"He's a fine fellow and a great salesman, but as a governor he was more interested in having the job than doing it."


"Republicans have made obstruction itself the centerpiece of their governing strategy."

"I will not stand by and let him be bullied out of office--and neither should you."

"All that today's Republicans are saying is that if we just shrink government, cut taxes, crush unions and wait, all will be well. Never mind that those are the very policies that got us into recession to begin with."

--Deval Patrick, Governor of Massachusetts

"Mitt Romney has so little economic patriotism that even his money needs a passport. It summers on the beaches of the Cayman islands and winters on the Swiss Alps."
--Ted Strickland, Former Governor of Ohio

Well roared, Lions.

         --Mad Dog

Pledge Politics

Jackie Cilley, who says The Pledge is a pledge to raise property taxes

Grover Norquist Who Wants to Drown Your Government In His Bathtub

When you think about it...But who ever really thinks about anything in governance now?
But if you do think about it, every Republican and every Democrat who has taken this asinine pledge to NEVER PERMIT AN INCOME TAX in the state of New Hampshire, has actually taken a pledge to raise property taxes.

Jackie Cilley did think about it and she said, "No."

Only two things are certain: Death and Taxes. 

If we are going to have a government, we will have taxes of some sort.

Unless, of course, you agree with Grover Norquist that the government we ought to have should be small enough so Grover can drown it in his bathtub, but even then, you need taxes.

And if we have taxes, then if you make one tax smaller, or eliminate one tax, then all the other taxes have to, do what?  That's right, Einstein, the others must GET BIGGER!

So if we say no sales tax, no income tax, no this tax, no that tax, what has been left to taxpayers in New Hampshire is the property tax. 
 As taxes go, the property tax may seem like a "progressive" tax, that is, it falls more heavily on those with more valuable property.  Problem with this simplistic thinking is, it really does not fall most heavily on those with the most disposable income, those whose bank accounts get bigger every year. It falls most on those people who have owned property, their homes, for the longest and they have seen the value attributed to their homes and land rise. Of course, this is imaginary value. Your home and land is worth nothing until you sell it, but you pay rising  taxes on that imaginary value every year you do not sell it. So if you are retired, living on your Social Security and your 401 K, you watch your "rent" you pay the state of New Hampshire on your paid off home rise, while your income does not rise.

When I ran a small business I paid: Federal income tax, income tax to the State of Maryland, self employment tax, Alternative Minimum Tax, Social Security tax, Medicare tax, Maryland and county property tax, state personal property tax, Auto Registration tax.  And those are just the taxes I can remember. I had an accountant who kept track of all the taxes I had to pay. 

Of all these, I hated the income tax most because it required me to keep all sorts of records and receipts, which even after 30 years of collecting and filing these things, I never felt I got right. And it made me play games with what was a reasonable deduction:  I could deduct the miles I put on my car driving to certain locations but not to others, if I kept a log of where I drove. Driving to my office parking lot was not deductible. Driving to a hospital parking lot was deductible. It was intrusive, frustrating and I knew others were gaming the system where I was not.  People like Mitt Romney didn't have "ordinary income," so they paid only 1/3 of what I was paying.  Friends bought Expeditions and Excalibers, very large SUV's because they could deduct most of the cost of these behemoths, while I drove my economy car. Friends put their malpractice insurance on credit cards, because they could deduct payments made by credit cards and that paid air fare for London vacations. People gamed the federal income tax and I resented the whole game.

So I hate income taxes.

But the state income tax was a straight fraction of whatever you paid the feds. It was less obnoxious.

I wouldn't want a state income tax, but I might prefer it to higher property taxes or to a tax on my car or on my parking at work. 

But what I really find obnoxious is a pledge some sleazeball like Grover Norquist popularizes telling me what a third rail, an electric fence in the state of New Hampshire ought to be.

American Taliban: The Republican Party

Jeff Daniels as Will McAvoy in The Newsroom

             

The Newsroom has been savaged by some reviewers, both from the political right, which is predictable, and from the left, for the usual reasons of stupidity posing as intellect, but I wound up watching all ten episodes, and was not at all put off by the preachiness. In fact, its writer, Mr. Sorkin, does pretty much what George Bernard Shaw did in the early 20th century--he writes plays of ideas, in which speeches are made and ideas vigorously presented. For doing this, Sorkin is criticized for not writing what the critics expect from TV. He is criticized for being preachy, which is apparently not allowed in television drama. It violates somebody's rule.

Apart from its place in literature, the show is useful as a platform for ideas. It summarizes with great clarity the great issues of the day, and its last episode lists the 12 characteristics of today's Republican/Tea party, after a nifty observation about what the Republican Party is now all about, summarized in a quotation from a Republican office holder explaining why he did not support any of the government's social programs, like Medicaid, Social Security or Medicare:

"My mother told me not to feed stray animals. Because, you know why? They breed."

This of, of course, is what I've been describing as the Republican view of the poor and disadvantaged as "the undeserving poor."  If you are not rich, it's because you have not worked hard enough or you are too stupid.

So here is the profile of the dirty dozen characteristics. You'll have to watch the show for examples of each, but I'm sure you can supply your own. I've supplied a few:

1. Ideological purity (Mitch McConnell saying his only job in the Senate, and the only job of Republicans is not to govern but to deny President Obama a second term.)

2. Belief that compromise is weakness (Paul Ryan stomping out of Budget negotiations with President Obama.)

3. Fundamental belief in scriptural literalism. (Teach creationism not evolution.)

4. Denying science (Vaccination causes mental retardation. Abortion causes breast cancer. Birth Control pills cause prostate cancer. Deny global warming. Rejection of evolution.)

5. Unmoved by facts (President Obama is responsible for the downgrading of the US credit rating--when Standard & Poor's, who did the rating specifically said it was the Republican "political brinkmanship" that moved them to downgrade. Ryan calling Obamacare "government controlled health care," when in fact it is a private insurance company boon and the government option was thwarted. Ryan saying President Obama hurt Medicare by funneling $716 billion away from it--when in fact that very number was in Mr. Ryan's own plan.  This list goes on--see the NY Times 8/31/12 for a list under "Facts Took a Beating in Ryan's speech.")

6. Undeterred by new information (Always)

7. Hostile fear and demonization of education: (See anything by Michele Bachmann, or see the testimony of the New Hampshire Tea Partyers who call it "government education, indoctrination and socialization.")

8. Need to control women's bodies.  (Do we really need to elaborate here?)

9. Febrile xenophobia (Ditto)

10. Intolerance of dissent.

11. Pathological hatred of the United States government.

12. Tribal mentality.

There is Jon Stewart and there is Stephen Colbert. There is Paul Krugman and there is Gail Collins. And now there is Alan Sorkin. 

And then there are the women I work with every day, who do not know any of these people and have never watched The Daily Show, the Colbert Report, or The Newsroom. They do not read newspapers. They do not listen to TV news. 
And, they vote.

But their husbands do listen to Rush Limbaugh.

The question for us, between now and November is: How do we change this?