Lincoln Our Contemporary

“If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won't amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, then ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.”

Oh, Maud.  I've just seen the movie. I cannot recall when two and one half hours passed so quickly.

I have sometimes fantasized about time travel, and how I'd like to meet Lincoln, (and Emily Dickinson, Thoreau, Grant, Sherman, Sheridan) but tonight I had to remind myself I was not watching the actual man.

I am guessing your second man was Secretary of State Seward.  I had not realized how important or righteous he was. He is depicted as even more--a man who could see the genius of what Lincoln was doing, and he could change to accommodate it.

Of course, Thaddeus Stevens is a wonderful character. He really did hate the aristocracy of the South, and all they stood for, and his remarks in the kitchen to Lincoln about what he had planned for the South, the way he would do Reconstruction, comported well with all I've read about him. He wanted to lay waste to the whole region, and rebuild it from the ashes as a totally new place, with new values, if not new people. He wanted to humble the arrogant slave owners.  But Lincoln, as he told Grant in the movie, wanted no such revenge.  He understood you could not change the hearts of men with guns.

I was most relieved that Spielberg did not ruin the movie with his hallmark sentimentality--he always has one scene which is so sentimental, emotionally overwrought and false and obviously pitched to the tear jerker crowd, he can spoil a movie with it. But in this case, he got done with it  in the first scene, with all the soldiers reciting the Gettysburg address, and somehow it worked and was over quickly enough.

But the hard headed decision to focus on the passage of the 13th amendment, and the politics,  was a great one.  I have not read A Team of Rivals, but I have read President Obama has.  If you look at what Mr. Obama has heard from his own supporters (myself included) that he has not been strong enough, not willing to fight for his convictions, not willing to vilify his opposition, as they so richly deserve, you realize Lincoln had to navigate the same waters. That wonderful scene where Lincoln tells Thaddeus Stevens, who has accused him of having no moral compass, "Well, a compass tells you true north, but it doesn't help you to get where you want to go, if there is a swamp in your way. You have to navigate around the swamp." 

In a previous post I said that by 1862 all meaningful opposition to slavery in Congress had left town, but obviously I did not know what I was talking about.  I assumed that without knowing that.  Clearly, the Congress was, like some of the rest of the country, willing to fight to preserve the union without embracing the idea of freedom for the slaves. 

Of course, one of the pleasures of the movie is listening to Lincoln's stories, trying to figure out where he is going, and in the end, the point is always to the point, even if the on screen characters (especially Secretary of War Stanton) cannot see the point. 

The George Washington in the outhouse story really is priceless.

I loved the decision to end the movie with that famous Second Inaugural address--although I wish they had included more of it, especially the part where Lincoln outlines the history of the war, how most people wanted a result less drastic, how, in the end, slavery turned out to be the cause of the war.  

I was also hoping to see in the party scene that wonderful encounter between Lincoln and Harriett Beecher Stowe, where Lincoln bends over to shake the hand of the diminutive author of Uncle Tom's Cabin and says, "So this is the little lady who wrote the book that started the great big war."  Of course, that might not have happened in 1865, and the film makers were cleaving to historical accuracy--except for the soldiers reciting the Gettysburg address. 

So here is a movie without any sex, no female love interest, no chases, no explosions, no shootings, no gun fights, (well, almost none, except for a brief battle scene) and yet it kept me enthralled for 150 minutes. That's quite a feat.

Fairness in Income Tax Rates

Grover Norquist, who wants to shrink your government down to the size he can drown  in  his bathtub

For many years, Mad Dog ran a small business with two employees and paid personal income tax, which Mad Dog loathed for many reasons. Because Mad Dog was self employed, he paid a "self employment tax" and he also paid an "Alternative Minimal Tax" and he paid state income tax and property taxes on his home and sales tax and all that, but the income tax was really loathsome because it forced Mad Dog to keep records, checks, files, so he could deduct the expenses of running his business, the phones, the rent, the various insurances. To take advantage of something called a Simplified Employee Pension ( SEP, a sort of 401 K pension plan) which allowed you to salt away money which got subtracted from your gross income, lowering your taxable income, Mad Dog wrote checks of $30,000 every April 15th.  He also paid "estimated income tax" quarterly and could never seem to find a tickler system to remind him to send in a check on the odd dates they were due, so Mad Dog awoke in a cold sweat many a night,  trying to remember if he had paid his estimated tax. 


Mad Dog felt invaded, having to show how he spent money, and always felt he was doing something wrong--either taking a deduction which might not be kosher or failing to identify a cost which he'd be foolish not to claim.

And every March, Mad Dog looked at a special bank account he had been accumulating all year, growing to healthy levels and he felt successful, until April when that account was nuked and he was back to zero, feeling a failure and impoverished.

On years when, after all the deductions for his business, for his mortgage interest payments, for his SEP retirement plans brought his income, his "Gross Adjusted Income," down to a level of $250,000, he paid $97,500, leaving him $152,500 to live on, and he felt impoverished.

Now, this was before Mad Dog moved to New Hampshire (and became an employee) and you might think, how spoiled was Mad Dog having to living on $150K?  But where mad dog was living, in an affluent suburb of Washington, DC, that put Mad Dog in the lower half of incomes of his neighbors.  Mad Dog's house was small, and his automobiles just as modest.

So Mad Dog can understand and sympathize with the letter from Mr. John Tucker of Greenland, New Hampshire, which appears in the Portsmouth Daily Herald complaining it is not fair to make people making more than $250,000 pay higher rates of income tax.  "Right now, the producers who earn the most pay the most in actual dollars and in percentage of income," Mr. Tucker points out.  "I breathe the same air as the man down the street, drive on the same roads, and enjoy the same protection from our military and police force. So it would seem to me that what would be "fair" would be I pay $100 and my neighbor pay $100."

We get the same benefits from our government; why should I pay more? What is "fair" about that?

Mr. Tucker has never understood or accepted the argument for a "progressive" vs a "regressive tax."

And he would be correct, if we really all did begin at the same starting line, played by the same rules and if life were really a baseball game.

Kings and royalty were asked the same questions in the 18th century: why should you be rich, have so much when the rest of us are so poor? 

It is God's Will, they replied, which shut everyone up. Nobody wanted to have lightning strike their homes and families, questioning God's Will.

But now, here in the USA, we've got this thing called "democracy" and a "republic." And we can say, look, nobody in this country, or in mammalian life makes it on his own. If you have worked very hard, and sacrificed heartily in this nation,  you will have realized benefits you can get in a country with an economy like this. You could have worked just as hard in Haiti, in Somalia, in Liberia,Laos, in Thailand,  in Bolivia and all that effort and sacrifice would have got you a leaky roof and a motorbike.  You have a great house, a nice car, good schools for your kids, enough money to travel, go on vacation,  because you live in the USA and there is a huge superstructure of economy, government and education working hand in hand to support your efforts and magnify and multiple your productivity.

Republicans like to portray themselves as the independent man, the cowboy, living off the grid, riding the range in Montana. But consider that cowboy on his horse, in his leather saddle, Winchester rifle at his side to ward off predators, human and bestial: Did he make that leather saddle? No, he bought it with greenbacks provided by his federal government, in an economy supported by that government. Did he make that rifle? No, it was made by the Winchester company, along with the bullets with their brass casings and gunpowder, in a factory in Connecticut, which had running water, access to roads and railroads and stores and greenbacks. 

You might make the argument the Comanche, on that cowboy's trail was the independent man, living off the grid. But even the Comanche was born helpless, suckled, nurtured, taught. Although he made his own arrows and captured his own horse, he was taught how to do that by a community and a family. The Comanche did not whine about having to support his tribe. He was proud to support his tribe. 

The fact is, living off the grid in this nation, on this continent, as a mammal, is something only a few whackos in Idaho or somewhere in the Dakotas even try to do. And when they do it, they take a lot of manufactured goods with them (including rifles) into the wilderness.

Mr. Tucker has not done this. He has chosen to live in Greenland, New Hampshire and if he is asked to pay income tax, he ought to stop whining about it.

It would be completely fair and appropriate for Mr. Tucker to spend time and effort looking at how the government spends the money he worked so hard to send their way. Why should some people get to shelter their income in the Cayman Islands or pay only 15%  because their income comes from non-ordinary income?  Why should a doctor who buys an $80,000 Excalibur Cadillac truck get to write off his payments because somebody got a law passed to give a sweet deal to people who buy such gas hogs?  

But one man's boondogle is another man's necessity:  Why should my sons, who are renting apartments in New York City, not be able to deduct 39% of the cost of that rent the way I can for my mortgage payment? Is there anything "fair" about 90% of the deductions and "loopholes" in the tax code?

Typically, these sweet deals have been passed into law because rich people had Congressmen in their pockets and paid for this special treatment which allowed them to subtract a great deal of their gross income and bring down what they actually paid taxes on--their Gross Adjusted Income-- to a mere $250,000. Then they are left with only $150K to spend, after they have spent at least that much on their big cars and their multiple homes, which the government has subsidized and in effect, paid for them. 

The reason the rich pay higher income tax rates is we all realize, on some level, the rich have bought themselves sweet deals throughout the the tax code and the tax rates are meant to balance out that advantage. Presumably the self employment tax was passed with the same idea--we know you are snookering us somewhere, and this will make up for that.

Is that fair, Mr. Tucker?

The Status Quo Election

Good Ol' boys in a Southern courtroom. They lynched a Nigra, and they know the jury is laughing with them. They fought for the status quo.

One Republican after another is trotting out the line, "This is a status quo election."
They must have decided they liked the sound of that during one of those meetings at the K Street office of Grover Norquist, where they sit around and try out phrases on one another, all smug faced and smirking.

Jim DeMint says, "The President says he as a mandate. He has no mandate, this was a status quo election." Of course Jim DeMint also said, "If someone is openly homosexual or if an unmarried woman sleeps with her boyfriend, then that person shouldn't be allowed in the classroom." That is a very status quo type remark. (Status quo for say, 1950.) 

Of course, from the point of view of the radical right Tea Party Republican party, this status quo thing is a good outcome: No change.  They might want to take us back to the eighteenth century, but no change will do.

As far as Mad Dog is concerned: Give me more status quo elections in which Democrats increase their numbers in the Senate and defeat most of the Tea Party candidates nation wide and put a wonderful Democrat in the White House. Mad Dog likes the status quo, too.

So let's just try that chorus from Grover's office one more time:  We have a deficit. We have to fix it. We have to fix it by cutting spending. We will not increase taxes on the job creators in the upper 2%. We must cut spending. Spending is bad. Spending on the undeserving poor and the feckless jobless is bad. Let us cut spending. Let us shrink government to the size we can drown it in our bathtub. Cutting spending means eliminating public education. Public schools are simply indoctrination camps which inculcate socialistic values in our impressionable youth.  Government is bad. Grover Norquist is good.

Jim Demint is good. He is smart, too. His idea of public service is to serve until he gets a better offer. He is leaving his Senate seat which pays $174,000 a year for a job with the Heritage Foundation which pays $1.7 million a year. He is very smart.

 Ayn Rand would approve.

Strip Searching: Baring the Kinky Side of Officialdom

(Adapted from The Phantom Speaks blog 12/5/12)

What is fascism?  Wikipedia, political science professors, may all have their definitions, but for the my money, it is a form of government which places the highest priority on authority, order and control. One might also mix in, it allows for a certain kinky variant of sadism, voyeurism and outright state sanctioned groping.

In the opinions written by the Supreme Court in Florence vs the Board of Freeholders, the four liberal justices  joined an opinion written by Justice Breyer, who noted that American citizens arrested for driving with a noisy muffler, driving with a faulty headlight, failure to use a turn signal, riding a bicycle without an audible bell, violation of dog leash law have been strip searched, not just by some wayward deviant police officer, but systematically, in jails.

What is a strip search?  You are required, if you are a male, to strip naked, to lift your scrotum, to squat down and cough, to expel the switchblade knife or dirty bomb you may have concealed in your rectum, all this after an officer has examined your ears nose mouth hair scalp fingers hands arms armpits and other body openings.  Then you get a shower with a delousing agent. If you are transferred to another jail, you undergo the whole process all over again. The ACLU shows a video of a strip search in prison, to which prisoners are subjected after every visit from a relative, after work details, for a wide variety of activities. Watching this is an odd experience, because the woman being searched is apparently some sort of police officer who is volunteering for this "instructional video." This adds a certain bizarre tinge to the viewing experience.

A quick google search under "strip searching in jails" or "strip searching in prisons" yields videos which expose the psychological underpinnings of strip searching.  You can see that the various probings, ogling, visualization of spread labia, spread fingers can add nothing of any value to security in the jail, but it clearly contains some sort of personal turn on for the jailer. Any physician who has done physical exams can look at any of these videos and see there is no diagnostic value to most of what these policemen or jailers are doing. They are, simply and baldly put, aroused by what they are doing to their prisoners, if only from the sense of power they have over their victims. It is a training video in the psychopathology of sadism. 

It all brings to mind that character from "Boardwalk Empire," a federal prohibition enforcement agent who self flagellates after he has sex with prostitutes and he ogles a photograph of a woman he says he wants to save from hell fire. He has that same officious, censorious expression these jailers have--I am mistreating you because you've been bad. I'm going to spank you.

Justifying all this,  Justice Kennedy noted "People detained for minor offenses can turn out to be the most devious and dangerous criminals." He noted newspaper articles about dangerous men who were stopped for minor traffic offenses; two turned out to be terrorists and one turned out to be a serial killer.

So now the Supreme Court of the United states justifies official abuse by an attitude of guilty and dangerous until proven innocent by rectal and vaginal exam. You never know when a serial killer is going to walk down the street with his dog off the leash, or ride a bicycle with an inaudible bell.

Justice Roberts, perhaps sensing this may be a slippery slope, goes off in another direction, saying that even if 99% of those arrested are not terrorists or serial killers, "Some detainees may have lice, which can easily spread to others in the facility, and some detainees may have diseases or injuries for which the jail is required to provide medical treatment."

So now Justice Roberts says the strip search is for the arrested citizen's own benefit, to diagnose and treat occult illness, infestation, infection and smelly armpits.

And never mind the point if you are going to force a delousing agent and a shower on a person, you don't need to examine that patient for lice: You have already decided to treat. Finding lice would not change your treatment. It might titillate you, however.

As Maud has noted, this is like saying the Inquisition's rack was just an archaic version of a Pilates exercise--a little stretch is good for you.

If patriotism is the refuge of scoundrels, then assertions of health benefits must be the refuge of the guilty conscience.

The fiscal cliff is a theoretical problem.  Working the kinks out of Obamacare is an important task.  But reasserting the primacy of freedom from abuse by own government has to be obvious to anyone who has the guts to confront this reality.

Every news conference with every public official from mayor to US Senator to President ought to begin with a question about what these officials are going to do to reverse this single decision to destroy the trust in government of the average citizen.

Remember, the first thing they did in the concentration camps in Poland and in Germany was to strip naked the people getting off the trains.   And then, they sent them to the "showers."  

I always asked, "How could these people have gone to the showers, like sheep?"
I might ask the same thing of Americans today.

Here is a link to a youtube video. I'm not sure whether or not this is a real policeman "examining" a real prisoner, or whether this is simply some youtuber's fantasy about what it might be like to be in the position of the policeman. Either way, it graphically illustrates the 800 pound gorilla in the room none of the justices or jailers are willing to talk about: These "searches," by their nature, have a sexual content and that over rides any security value they may offer. But looking at the policeman,  demanding the woman spread her fingers, one is struck by how uninformative this exam is--it is simply an exercise in "I am in total control of you."  I mean, what is he looking for between her fingers? 

Here are two links which might work.  If not, you can google your own.
The first is simply the jailer and his pouting prey, instructive for how obvious the charade is in his "examination."
The second is the ACLU clip, with what I think is a prison guard demonstrating the proper technique for a strip search as she spreads her own labia, squats, bends over.
The real question is: Would you want your daughter in the hands of either of these two characters?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvPf8cPitHc

http://www.aclu.org/prisoners-rights-womens-rights/prison-strip-search-sexually-abusive

Seabrook Nuclear Plant: Perception and Reality

Today, at 12:30 PM the sirens will sound from Massachusetts down the New Hampshire seacoast to the Piscataqua River, and they will be heard across the river, in Maine, at the Portsmouth Naval Yard. 

These sirens are placed to alert all those living within a 10 mile radius of the plant they must leave their homes, or "shelter in place" in the event of an accident, a tsunami, an earthquake (which we've had lately) which will cause release of a radioactive cloud over that 20 mile diameter surrounding the plant. 

When Mad Dog was growing up in the Washington, DC metro area, he was accustomed to those yellow painted sirens on poles near elementary schools, fire houses, playing fields. They would occasionally, usually without warning, blast off, causing people to pause to consider whether or not this was Armageddon or not, whether or not the missiles were on their way to obliterate us.  Of course, we had practiced diving under our desks at school in the mid 1950's, but by the mid 1960's everyone agreed diving under your desk was not likely to protect you from a nuclear bomb.

When Mad Dog left Washington, DC and moved to seacoast New Hampshire, he said one thing he was happy to leave behind was the threat of instant nuclear annihilation, or becoming the target of a terrorist dirty bomb, on the theory terrorists would not likely waste a nuclear bomb on New Hampshire. Only after he moved into his house did he realize he was only 2 miles down wind from the Seabrook nuclear plant, which is actually, virtually, in Hampton Falls. 

Mad Dog thought back to the talk Senator Gale McGee  delivered when Mad Dog was a tender 13 years old. The children of Congressmen and Senators were students at the local suburban public schools--Western Junior High School, Bethesda Chevy-Chase High School, Walt Whitman High School. So, it was commonplace for someone's father, who was a Congressman or Senator, to come out to give a talk to a student assembly. McGee was from Wyoming, and he gave a speech he had given many times to be sure, about a man who was sick of worrying about Russian nuclear bombs blowing him up in his Chevy Chase home, so he moved to Montana, where he could be safe from the nuclear threat, only to find he had built his home just down the road from a field of missile silos, sure to attract Russian missiles.. The message was, we are all in this together; there is no escape from nuclear holocaust. 

Fukishima has now brought home the likelihood of another possibility: Beyond worries about human error, human malevolence, terrorist attacks, is the worry about what nature, perhaps stoked by the new weather extremes of a warming planet, might do to a nuclear plant on an ocean coast.

Seabrook has applied for another 50 years of operation.  The people of the seacoast do not need its power, and its not clear who else might benefit from its presence. But, most of Mad Dog's neighbors in Hampton don't think about the plant. There were demonstrations against it when it was being built, with citizens handcuffing themselves to the wire fences around the plant. But now, the citizens of Seabrook, Hampton, North Hampton, Rye and Portsmouth just don't think about it.

Until the sirens go off.

Republican Trope: There is a Fracture. I need to fix it.

Have you ever had a friend, wife, husband, antagonist with whom you have arguments and you know you will never make any progress because that person will never actually deviate from his obsession with his one purpose in life?

Listening to NPR radio interviewing whichever Republican Congressman or Senator, that's the sensation I get. 

"What should we do about getting some government action on this economy?"
"We should cut spending."
"Can we raise revenues?"
"As a last resort we can raise revenues by cutting 'loopholes.'"
"Which loopholes?"
"We can talk about those later. We are just talking big picture now. We need to cut spending."
"But, specifically: Are you talking about eliminating interest on mortgage payments, or the health insurance premiums paid by employers, or local property taxes, or expenses for private airplanes for CEO's?"
"We need to cut government spending."
"Can we raise taxes on the billionaires?"
"We need to cut government spending."
"Can we allow the tax cuts for the billionaires to expire?"
"We need to cut government spending."
"But where?"
"We can talk about that later. We are talking big picture."
"Can we shrink the government to the size where we can drown it in our bathtub?"
"We need to cut government spending. We can talk about the details later."
"Do you even care if we have a functioning government?"
"We need to cut government spending."

There is a cartoon which went viral in the medical community:  An orthopedic surgeon  confronts the anesthesiologist he needs to give anesthesia to a patient in the operating room. The anesthesiologist needs some basic questions answered: How old is the patient?  Does the patient have any medical conditions which might make giving the patient anesthesia more risky or which might entail reducing the doses of the drugs, which might affect all the details of delivering medicine to put the patient to sleep? The orthopod  keeps repeating:  "There is a fracture. I need to fix it."  It turns out the patient has, in fact, had a few medical conditions which might well affect the course the anesthesiologist might take: The patient is in the emergency room, has had a heart attack and in fact has had a cardiac arrest and is actually in asystole, which means the patient's heart has stopped beating, and in fact, the patient is dead. 

"Wait, a minute," the anesthesiologist finally screams, "You want me to give anesthesia to a dead patient?"
"There is a fracture. I need to fix it," the orthopod repeats.
"I need to punch you in the head," says the anesthesiologist. "But then I'd probably break my hand, on your thick head."
"I will need to fix that fracture,too," the orthopod replies.

This is the Republican approach. One answer, keep repeating.

It's worth a look. Go to Youtube and put in " Orthopedics vs anesthesia. There is a Fracture. I need to fix it." This link may work.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0S5EN7-RtI

What do you do when your partner will not dance?

New England Journal of Medicine: Strip Searching in America

Lincoln, who (eventually) freed some of the slaves

H.D. Thoreau, who spent a night in jail 

One of the creepier aspects of the United States of America is the strip search. 

One of the most astonishing features of American life is how sheepishly the citizenry have accepted this rape of the idea of a citizenry free from depredation by official power.

In an October issue of The New England Journal of Medicine--of all places--is a peculiar article on this affront.  Why, you might ask, would a journal of medicine and surgery publish an article on strip searching?  The short answer, I am guessing, is the editors and the author of the article were so appalled by strip searching they were determined to find a way to address it in the pages of their one source of public access. 

The tie in turns out to be the arguments in the Supreme Court in Florence vs Board of Freeholders took two basic thrusts: 1. Strip searching is for the protection of the jailers 2. Strip searching is for protection of the jailed because it is a form of physical examination,  which insures they are not sick.

Of course, neither of these arguments were what really carried the day in the Court. What pre determined the outcome, that the Court would endorse this form of citizen abuse and degradation, is the make up of the court itself: Scalia, Thomas, Alito and Roberts (in about that order) can be counted on to always vote for the powerful, for authorities and against the underdog.  These men are authoritarians, pure bred.

Of course, it is patently absurd strip searching protects the police or the jailers: They have prisoners handcuffed and totally under their control. And when the more liberal members of the Court asked how many weapons had ever been discovered in the vaginas or rectums of prisoners the answer was never, or virtually never.  And they do examine vaginas and virtually, rectums. And the prisoners so examined against their will  are people who have demonstrated themselves such potent threats by in one case driving without a seat belt, and in the other by driving as a passenger in a car which was stopped for a traffic violation.  

But, you never know, a sixteen year old girl, who drives down the street without her seat belt may just think quickly, when she sees those flashing blue lights in her rear view mirror and she may stuff a switch blade into her vagina and she may use that on a jailer or a prisoner, some day. Could happen. Anything's possible. In this age of terrorism, you just never know what a citizen might do.

In none of the cases before the court was there any accusation, suggestion or even innuendo that the arrested citizen was violent, had ever been violent or was accused of being in proximity to a violent crime. They were simply citizens traveling by automobile who found themselves arrested, stripped, examined. 

Ironically, the man who complained during his own hearings for appointment to the Supreme Court, Justice Clarence Thomas, spoke of a media high tech lynching, but he voted for virtual rape when it came to strip searching.

One can only imagine the real reasons for strip searching, but let me offer a few:  1. Stripping a man or woman naked in front of uniformed police is an effective method of intimidation and control.  2. The police and their supervisors enjoy looking at naked women and/or men.  3. The power to strip a person is a significant power. It makes the police, the jailers feel powerful. In our society only doctors are allowed to see you naked, but that power is only granted with the patient's permission. Physicians are taught definitively to examine a patient against his or her will is a criminal offense: assault and/or battery.

What the New England Journal argued is that once the Court had accepted the bizarre  idea that strip searching somehow benefited the prisoner on the basis of identifying occult disease, the Court had made strip searching into a medical procedure and the medical profession should protest this idea.

Here, here!  Let all physicians and surgeons protest.

Fact is, until this rape of freedom is expunged, the United States of America is not a free country. It may be a democracy. It may be a nation of laws. But even if "the people" accept this particular offense, this is not a free country.

It may come down to the line from that wonderful song from the movie Nashville, "You may say, that I ain't free, but it don't bother me."