Oufitting for a National Parks Vacation

If you're planning a National Park vacation this year, here are some things you ought to know:

Body armor

Most police departments use protective clothing made of aramind fabric, first and foremost among which is DuPont's Kevlar.  Kevlar vests can be made to custom sizes and usually cost between $390 and $700. Specially engineered women's vests cost $430 to $630 and are not available in the ultra-light, ultra-thin but extremely effective version of Kevlar called GoldFlex, made by Honeywell.  Aramind protective clothing called Twaron, made by a Japanese firm, is popular in Europe and priced about the same.  Very tall or very large people may have to pay $1,000 or more for proper coverage.

Automobile touring 

Steel armor plating has been used for years to bullet-proof cars, trucks and limos.  But steel is soooo yesterday. Check out "Microtruss." a vehicle armoring material that is "lightweight, strong and environmentally rugged," according to its manufacturer.  This is billed as  a periodic cellular material offering protection "without compromising vehicle weight."  For prices, contact: http://www.cellularmaterials.com/applications/armor.asp?gclid=CLnUv-_QlaACFQP7agodY2yHO

International Armoring Corp. claims to have invented the "lightest armoring in the industry" back in 1993, a synthetic fiber laminate called "Armormax."  IAC also sells "a revolutionary all curved 1" to 3" thick rebated transparent ballistic glass" and a material called Elitus, whose curved overlap function "provides even greater passenger protection." For prices: http://www.iacarmormax.com/

Or you might want to consider ceramic protection.  A company called CoorsTek produces "ceramic armor components used as the ballistic armor strikeface of lightweight composite armor systems."  The company advertises that its "CeraShield" ceramics, with "an appropriate backing system, can defeat various threats including armor-piercing rounds and IEDs."  Ceramic armor is said to be half the weight of comparable steel systems.  Pricing: http://www.coorstek.com/products/ceramic-armor.asp?gclid=CILSlvTRlaACFSYaawodlmDQdg

Camping

Check the above manufacturers to find out if their armor is suitable for travel trailers and RVs, and for cost estimates.  You might also consider rigid, bullet-resistant fiberglass panels.  It comes in three levels of protection, ranging in weight from 2.6 to 4.9 pounds per square foot.  It can be cut to size.  It's about the thickness of plywood -- 1/4" to 7/16".  Pricing: http://www.pacificbulletproof.com/get-pricing/


Tent campers don't have many options.  Working with the military, Zumro Inc. of Hatboro, PA, came up with a thing consisting of an inner and outer Kevlar tent, which can be placed over an explosive device.  When the device detonates, the two-tent gizmo prevents shrapnel and gas from escaping into the atmosphere.  To find out if the material could be used for ballistic protection in recreational tents, contact Zumro at 401 Jacksonville Rd, Hatboro, PA, 19040-4605. Phone: (215) 957-6502 .  Or perhaps you could build a cubicle of bullet resistant fiberglass over your tent. 

The federal law that allows loaded guns, of any type, in national parks took effect Feb. 22.  In the House, 105 Democrats and 174 Republicans voted for passage.  In the Senate,  27 Democrats joined 39 Republicans voting "aye."

God Bless America.

'Good Enough' for Whom?

When I was a little boy, I loved the sports books of John R. Tunis.  There were villains in his books, of course, but nobody remembered them; they remembered his straight-arrow athletes, pure of heart, fleet of foot, nimble of mind, who could conquer whatever Fate threw at them and emerge on the winner's podium at the Olympics, triumphant in the World Series, champions of the Rose Bowl.

But in one book that I was particularly fond of, no sports were played.  There was a sports hero: the local high school basketball coach who, in a previous book, had to suspend the star player for breaking rules, but managed to win the state championship anyway.  He had decided to resign from the faculty and run for mayor because crooks had taken over city hall.  Underfunded, opposed by the Power Structure, he urged the people to join him in making "a city good enough for Lincoln."  That was the book's title: "A City for Lincoln."  Of course he was elected, and he took the oath of office pledging to form a "government of the people, by the people and for the people."

Back then we believed that the pure of heart who played clean always won; that we had the kind of democracy that put its best and its brightest into office to form  a government "good enough for Lincoln"

And then we grew up and went out into the real world and we learned that life ain't like that.

I wonder what Honest Abe would have said if he'd still been President yesterday when the Republican Senator Lamar Alexander said that if we passed health care reform, “for millions of Americans, premiums will go up.” This is every bit as much a lie as the "death panels" the Republicans conjured when the first health bill went to the House floor.

The Republicans had ample time to finally craft some solid proposals for meeting the expressed wants and needs of the American people: affordable health care for every American.  What they offered at the White House summit was the same arrogance, ritualistic slogans, lies, distortions, playground bullying and childish nonsense that they have been feeding the American public for nearly a year now.

"Good enough for Lincoln?"  What they gave us yesterday was an x-rated performance, an obscene parody of government.  Tunis's straight-arrow basketball coach would have thrown every one of them off the team.

After reviewing the Republicans' history of lies and obstruction on behalf of profiteering insurance companies, Nancy Pelosi gave us a sports metaphor worthy of Mr. Tunis: "We have lived on their playing field all this time," she said. "It's time for the insurance companies to exist on the playing field of the American people."

Or else what we'll have is a government "good enough for Lincoln National Insurance."

Epic? What's This Epic Crap?

You heard it, too, didn't you, about 14 months ago?

The president, the treasury secretary, the talking heads on TV, all telling us the only way to save our economy -- hell, the economy of the whole world! -- was to send trainloads of money to the Wall Street banks.  So much money we had to print more just to fill the box cars.  We had to do this because then the big banks would start lending money again and businesses would start hiring people and things would get better.

"Better" sounded good.  We'd lost 43% of our life savings in 2008.  Or we'd lost our jobs and used up our savings just trying to eat.  Or we were living on food stamps.  Or in a big empty box under an overpass.

For most of us the retirement accounts have recovered some of their losses.  But precious few of those who lost their jobs are back at work.  Businesses are still laying people off in the hope that Wall Street banks will notice and stock prices will go up. Rush and Glenn and the Tea Cup Dingbats are railing against the folks on food stamps and the boxes under the underpass are getting crowded.

A year after the congress approved the boxcars of cash for the big banks, the President declared "Mission Accomplished" even though a few of us were having trouble making ends meet because we were still out of work.  Say, 10 or 12 million of us.

The bankers paid themselves 19 billion or so of the boxcar dollars in bonuses for their good work.

But wait a second.  Wasn't there something else?  Oh, yes, the banks were going to start lending again, remember?  And when the banks started lending again, businesses would get healthy and when businesses got healthy money would trickle down and pretty soon we'd all be back in the land of milk and honey.

That's what they told us, remember?

So what's with this headline at the top of the front page of the Wall Street Journal the other day?  LENDING FALLS AT EPIC PACE, it read.  Epic pace!   The sharpest decline in bank lending since 1942.

How can this be?  Mr. President, Mr. Treasury Secretary, Mr. Congressman, Mr. Talking Head -- HOW CAN THIS BE?

If Wishes Were Horses, All Could Ride

Big day today for hopes and dreams.

Marchers arrive in Washington today to rally for real health care reform.  Many of them marched more than a hundred miles in memory of a progressive activist who died of breast cancer while still fighting an insurance company for benefits.  Others are armed with personal stories from around the country of victims of the industrialized world's worst health care system.

On the other coast,  Bloom Energy will unveil its much-hyped fuel cell, known as the Bloom Box, at eBay headquarters in California. The company calls it an off-grid source of cheap electric energy -- from a cell the size of a loaf of bread.

The health marchers are sincere, but not likely to succeed.  Dr. Kidglove has already given us the "reform" he will talk about tomorrow at the over-hyped bipartisan gathering of the congressional clan at the White House. No public option; hence, no real reform.  Twenty-some Senators have signed a proposal to pass a public option using budget reconciliation rules -- a process that circumvents Republican filibustering and needs only 51 votes for passage.  But the Republicans are solidly against anything, and the Milquetoasts with (D) after their name are afraid of all the papier mache ogres the Republicans have built to do battle against reconciliation.

The Bloom Box has been developed in more secrecy than Dick Cheney's energy plan. Not even a sign on the secret location headquarters.  Bloom has dropped enough hints about the technology to attract $400 million in venture capital and the support of Colin Powell.  "I have seen the technology and it works," said the general and former Secretary of State.  He is on Bloom Energy's board of directors.

Of course, Gen. Powell also told the United Nations, "What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence" about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.  You be the judge.

Bloom energy has provided tantalizing little peeks at its gizmos to Atlantic magazine and the CBS TV show "60 Minutes." Who would not share in the hope that this will be what 60 Minutes called "the holy grail" of clean energy?

But anyone who would bet the farm on it should join those marchers in Washington who believe, really believe, that the corporatized wimps who hold office there will give us something  resembling real health care reform.

 Dreams die hard.  Hope dies last.

Canine Therapy

A lawyer friend used to suffer from terribly painful gout.  His most reliable source of relief was to stroke, and be "kissed" by, his dog, Boots.  Never mind the cynics who say painful gout is a just God's retribution for being a lawyer.  Noah was a good guy and he was onto something.

Dogs are good for lots of human ailments.  I speak from experience, with dogs and with ailments.

When I was recovering from lung cancer surgery, the pain ebbed if Sandy, the cocker spaniel, napped in my lap. His big, brown eyes and jaunty way of cocking his head were more effective than pain pills. Taking him for walks provided the exercise the doctors said I needed when the pain subsided.  Jogging in the woods with him helped improve my lung capacity.  Like Lord Byron's Boatswain, Sandy was "in life the firmest friend, the first to welcome, foremost to defend," and when he died I could not imagine any other animal replacing him.

But then one day I visited the animal shelter where my wife intended to adopt a cat.  Someone else had adopted the animal she wanted, but I strolled past a cage that housed a litter of puppies.  One of them shouldered aside his siblings and stepped forward to perform for me.  It was an unforgettable series of dances, smiles, squeals and tumbles.  Saxon the Rottweagle went home with us that very day.

When I took him for his second veterinary appointment for vaccinations, an attendant spotted us coming in the door and called out, "Hey, Everyone!  The happy puppy is back!"


Today, at 14, he's still the same happy puppy, willing to dance on arthritic legs, light up a greying muzzle with the same big smile, charm ladies and beguile gentlemen.

Saxon and I have shared a thousand adventures,  walked a thousand miles together, up mountains and across deserts, chased a thousand critters from deer and rabbits to lizards and roadrunners.  We have soothed one another's pain, bluffed away one another's enemies, played stick and chase-me and dodge 'em and other, nameless games he invented and taught me. 

We have exchanged profound thoughts; he, by reading my tone of voice if not my words, and my gestures; I, by reading his posture, facial expressions, nods, moods and gaits. 

These days, we help one another to cope with the infirmities of our aging.  I assist his getting up into the car; he slows his pace for the desert walks, and settles for short paths of level ground, rather than the canyons and mesas we used to explore, because he knows I can't go there any more.  Perhaps, if pressed, he could even identify the anatomical part  that's at fault: the lumbar region of my back.  All sorts of bad stuff in there.

Other treatments having failed, I'm hopeful that a spinal surgeon can restore some mobility.  Perhaps that will involve "open back" surgery, which I've experienced once and didn't want to go through again.  But now if it's the last resort, let's go for it.

Whatever the outcome, however difficult the rehab might be, however long it takes, I've got the best therapist in the world: Saxon the Rottweagle.

Quicksand

The American Civil Liberties Union betrayed its base when it filed an amicus  brief  in what became the infamous Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court.

On the ground that the First Amendment protects free speech even by bad guys, it supported opening the door for corporate control of our elections and elected officials.

The decision essentially held that, because corporations are legal persons,  imposing political contribution limits on them violates their first amendment right to free speech.

The First Amendment doesn't say anything about persons, except that "the people" have a right to peaceable assembly. Congress, it says, shall make no law abridging free speech.

The Fourteenth (civil rights) Amendment says:  "All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

The idea that corporations are "persons" within the sense of this amendment seems to go back to an 1886 Supreme Court case called Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific.  There's not much in the decision itself to get riled up about; it's a boring tax case and the court ruled on behalf of the railroad without addressing the corporate personhood business.

However, before oral arguments began, Chief Justice Morrison Waite admonished the lawyers for both sides that "The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution,  which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does."

This extraordinary statement was used by the court reporter, J.C. Bancroft  Davis, in the headnote for the case in the United States Reports.  Before he did so, however, he wrote the following to Chief Justice Waite:

"I have a memorandum in the California Cases Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific &c As follows. In opening the Court stated that it did not wish to hear argument on the question whether the Fourteenth Amendment applies to such corporations as are parties in these suits. All the Judges were of the opinion that it does."

The Chief Justice wrote in reply:

"I think your mem. in the California Railroad Tax cases expresses with sufficient accuracy what was said before the argument began. I leave it with you to determine whether anything need be said about it in the report inasmuch as we avoided meeting the constitutional question in the decision."

Headnotes for United States Reports, written by the court reporter, are intended to be summaries for lawyers of the decision and the main facts and arguments in a case.  In a 1905 case, U.S. v. Detroit Timber and Lumber,  the Court itself said headnotes are "not the work of the Court, but are simply the work of the Reporter, giving his understanding of the decision, prepared for the convenience of the profession."

I'm no lawyer, but I can read.  The Tinker to Evers to Chance basis for the 5-4 Citizens United decision is about as firm as quicksand. And that doesn't even take into account the bigger legal question: does money constitute "speech?"

I received my renewal notice yesterday for membership in the ACLU, along with a request for an additional donation to support its "important work." I told 'em to go pound quicksand.

Say It Ain't So, Doc!

It's another bad news day: Australia's koalas are dying off.  AIDS.  Really.

In the last six years, according to the Australian Koala Foundation, the population of the cuddly marsupial in the wild has dropped from more than 100,000 to fewer than 43,000.

A disease called Koala Immune Deficiency Syndrome has been positively identified by Dr. Jon Hanger, head veterinary scientist for the Australia Zoo Wildlife Hospital.  He told CNN it's just as severe as AIDS in humans, but does its deadly work faster in the koala.  "It's knocking off a large proportion of koalas that come into this hospital and that means a large number in the bush are dying, too," he said.

I remember watching the koala exhibit in the Australian Zoo with our friend Jeanie, who wouldn't eat our fresh-caught bluefish one day on Cape Cod because she'd been charmed by their eyes when we caught them.  That kind of animal lover.  We might never have dragged her away from the koala exhibit, except that a passer-by mentioned the butterfly house where, if you stood perfectly still, one might perch on your nose.  This was after we'd struggled through a horde of Nikon-toting tourists to catch a glimpse of the pygmy penguins coming in from the sea southwest of Melbourne.  Please, Jack, don't let Jeanie read this! 

Dr. Hanger said, “There is no vaccine available now and may never be, but what it’s saying to us is that we need to be very careful about the way we manage the population. We have to stop destroying habitat and fragmenting it and we’ve got to address all the causes of death.” 

In an official snit it can only have learned from American Republicans, the Australian government refuses to give the koala endangered species protection under the law.  The Spotted Owl Syndrome.  What would the extraction and development industries do if we protected wildlife?

Koalas are losing their homes in the eucalyptus forests, being injured by cars and animals moving into their areas and dying from sexually transmitted diseases. The marsupials seem to be particularly susceptible to Chlamydia. The disease affects their eyesight, urinary tract and leaves them infertile.  It also causes a slow, painful death.

The Ozzies might consider bringing James Dobson over to teach koala abstinence, but that would be counter-productive.  Can you imagine trying to artificially inseminate a koala?

Two professors from the Queensland University of Technology are working on a vaccine for Koala Chlamydia.  Peter Timms and Ken Beagley estimate that, “As many as 25-50 percent of koalas coming into care in both Queensland and New South Wales are showing clinical signs of the disease and it seems to be getting worse.”

Dr. Hanger isn't optimistic.  “Extinction is inevitable in some areas” he said.  “I certainly hope we don’t see it across Australia.  But if we don’t take the decline seriously and pick up on the warning signs now it’s certainly a risk.”

In animal-loving France, the news fell like the knell of doom.  Jean Claude heard about the koala while lunching in a bistro in Clermont-l'Herault.  "An Australia without koalas," he said, "would be like a meal without wine."

(Words) Anagram for Peace (Sword)

More than one historian will attest that the Battle of Britain was won by a single human voice: Winston Churchill's.

Buildings and bridges broke under the relentless Nazi bombing, but thanks to the great rhetorician's  unwavering encouragement, the will of the people never broke.

What a political figure says, and how he says it, does have an importance of its own.

Douglas L. Wilson, in Lincoln's Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words, makes the point persuasively that Lincoln's rhetoric bypassed the two other branches of government and went directly to the people to rally them through a terrible Civil War.

While less eloquent than Churchill's as spoken literature, the words of Franklin D. Roosevelt's fireside chats put steel into the spines of the people who put steel into the weaponry of World War II.

With all due respect to the oratory of the contemporary leader who has yet to put substance behind his own fine words, I submit that there have been two sublime examples of great political oratory in my lifetime:

John F. Kennedy's inaugural address provoked an entire nation into a new and better view of the world and itself.

And eight years ago yesterday, while the drums of war thundered and a trauma-shocked nation numbly allowed the unraveling of its Constitution, a single voice uttered a Prayer for America.  It rings as true today as it did then.  You can read it here:
http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0226-09.htm

Stimulus, Dimulus! Mobulus Jobuless.

Hot air drives public policy farther than cold facts. 

The American right has learned to create demons like death panels and global cooling myths, and then blow hot air all over them until they've diverted elected officials from doing the right thing.

Meanwhile two deadly facts confront us and languish in governmental limbo.  One such fact is massive unemployment.  If we magically produced 10,000 new jobs overnight, we would simply have restored the unemployment levels of 2007.  The second fact is this:  Our entire infrastructure is in deadly decay.  We have unsafe bridges, falling-down schools, leaking and degraded water systems and crumbling highways.

It would seem logical to draw a connection between those two facts and create most of those 10,000 needed jobs by setting out to make all those needed infrastructure repairs, right?  Wrong!  It would cost trillions,  cry the Republican guardians of the treasury, blowing hot air all over their new demon, The Dreaded Federal Deficit.

Never mind that those same Republicans still defend the unwinnable wars, triggered by illegal U.S. invasions of sovereign nations eight years ago, that cost us many trillions more.  Their wars, expanded by Dr. Kidglove the reborn militarist,  are draining away the dollars that are needed at home.

Why not stop that drain? Why not divert those dollars to needed projects at home?

For example: we prate piously about the importance of education to our society.  Yet without even mentioning curriculum needs, we face a looming disaster in the deteriorating condition of the very buildings in which we endeavor to teach our young.  An immediate investment of $12 billion or so, creating 1.5 million new jobs, would provide the needed repairs.

Consider bridges.  When the the I-35 bridge across the Mississippi River at Minneapolis collapsed during rush hour in August of 2007, the nation briefly took notice of the infrastructure problem, -- an interest that quickly and predictably waned.  We had celebrity marriages to fret about.  Yet at that time Pennsylvania alone had 5,600 unsafe and structurally deficient bridges.  Its Democratic governor muscled through a capital budget with 700 million extra dollars earmarked annually to fix the things.  "Every time we fixed two," lamented Gov, Ed Rendell, "three would bump onto the list."  Last year the state had more than 6,000 structurally obsolete bridges.

In Washington today, the President thumped his chest over the year-old economic stimulus law as having staved off a second Great Depression and preserved some 2 million jobs.  He acknowledged that for the many millions more angry Americans who are still jobless, "It doesn't feel like much of a recovery."  Thank you, Dr. Kidglove. What are you doing about it?

Every state has its own bridge problems like Pennsylvania's: at least a quarter of the nation's bridges, including the iconic Brooklyn Bridge,  are structurally deficient or functionally obsolete.

We're accustomed to drought here in the Southwest, but two years ago Atlantans had to ration water because of drought conditions -- while 18 per cent of their drinking water leaked away every day because of ancient, deteriorating pipes.  Where clean water seeps out, contaminants often seep in.  Virtually every American city is in desperate need of repairs to its water system.  The same is true for aging sewage removal and treatment systems.

Thanks to Bush's tax cuts, cities and states can't afford to fix these things. 

Deregulation of polluting industries and wink-wink non-enforcement of existing laws and regulations have created massive environmental damage that needs to be repaired.  Water tables corrupted by mining and drilling, streams poisoned by mountaintop removal, rivers befouled by runoff -- these things are fixable if we act now.

A year after government saved the big banks and their executive bonuses, it is time for real economic stimulus: federal funds that will put Americans back to work fixing the things that threaten our health, safety and daily lives.

Update


Whirlpool, the appliance manufacturer, received 19 million of those taxpayer stimulus dollars the Administration is so proud of.  Whirlpool is thanking working Americans by closing a refrigerator manufacturing plant in Evansville, Ind., putting more than 1,100 people out of work. Whirlpool will continue to produce the refrigerators -- in Mexico. Muy bueno, Amigo!

Sound, Fury and Idiots

The scientific illiteracy of the American public is a rising concern of scientists, educators and the handful of public policy-makers who still believe their role is to serve the interests of the people.

While many public opinion polls in the United States seem to reflect a favorable opinion of science and scientists, other polls and studies have betrayed Americans' collective ignorance of basic science.

The condition is manifest in the public debate on issues ranging from education to climate change. A powerful member of the Texas state board of education is proud that he was able to force into the state's textbooks a "teaching" that the planet Earth was created by a supernatural being 6,000 years ago. Deniers of climate science spout nonsense like the following statement from a recent letter to the editor of a southern New Mexico newspaper:

"True science is proven fact."

 In the first place, science needs no adjective such as "true" or "sound."  Science is what it is: disciplined study seeking to explain phenomena through observation, experimentation and logical deduction.  Scientific logic specifically rules out absolute certainty, or what the letter-writer calls "proven fact."  Scientists insist on many tests, and peer review of the tests, all of which must tend in the same direction, before they accept a hypothesis as probably true.  The more evidence, and the more acceptable it is, the higher the probability of truth.

Contrarily, experiment and observation can only falsify hypotheses or even theories (two different things).  When a theory, such as evolution or Einstein's theory of relativity, has a long history of being tested and never falsified, scientists accept that its probability of being true is close to 100 per cent.

Science that indicates the earth is undergoing climate change because of human activity, especially the emission of carbons into the atmosphere, has not yet been sufficiently tested and re-tested to be accorded the same degree of probability.  Neither has it been falsified by any rigorous study, experimentation, observation and deduction followed by intense peer review and re-testing.  Hence science accepts it as probably true, if in need of further rigorous scientific study.  Such study can not only enhance the probability of truth, but also lead to theories that enable the development of technology to solve the problems created by climate change.

Of course, in any massive study that crosses lines of scientific discipline and seeks consilience among them, individual scientists with good credentials may and do disagree with the scientific methodology or conclusions of hypotheses like climate change.  But until they produce rigorous, disciplined, tested and peer reviewed science to falsify the hypothesis, their views are strictly their own, to be regarded as "opinion" and not "science."

Moreover, the motivations of the questioners need to be examined as well as their arguments.  "Follow the money."

If their "work" is funded by folks with a dog in the fight, be wary.  Exxon Mobil, the most profitable corporation in the history of the world, achieved its obscene wealth by extracting, refining and selling fossil fuel to produce energy.  Since the findings of climate science would tend to encourage public policy makers to support development of new, renewable sources of energy, Exxon and its partners in fossil fuel energy have an enormous dog in the fight.  That's why they shower dollars and euros and yen on people with degrees in science to derogate climate science.

To distinguish their propaganda from science, the rent-a-scientists began to attach adjectives to their work.  Hence one Steven Milloy, for example, was hired by the Phillip Morris and RJR tobacco companies to claim that second-hand tobacco smoke did not cause cancer.  Phillip Morris is believed to have invented the term "sound science" at that time.

George W. Bush picked up on it, and his friends at Fox Fiction not only picked up on it, they also hired Milloy to spout his nonsense over the airwaves.  Milloy was paid handsomely by Exxon to denounce climate science, which the Foxies saw as no conflict of interest. Yet even the far right-wing Cato Institute saw the conflict and acted on it.  It stopped sponsoring Milloy's "Junk Science" website and removed him from its list of adjunct scholars.

None of this seems to have diminished his ready acceptance by the world's most scientifically illiterate society.

Not Like Ike

Dwight David Eisenhower, the best Republican President since Teddy Roosevelt, would not be welcome in today's Republican party. Not only was he far too liberal (in the true sense of the word), but he also had too much personal integrity.

When he pledged during the campaign, "I shall go to Korea," he went there, and he ended the war there, early in his first term in office.  Contrast this alone with the endless war policies of subsequent Republican Presidents and the present occupant of the oval office, who has just accelerated once again the Afghanistan war he pledged to end.

Ike's progressive legacy towers over the agendas of his Republican successors.  The Atoms for Peace program that led to the creation of the International Atomic Energy Agency.  The St. Lawrence Seaway.  The Interstate Highway System.  A balanced Federal budget. Enlarged Social Security coverage and benefits. Sharp reductions in military spending.  The country's first meaningful civil rights legislation.  NASA. A new cabinet department, dedicated to the Health, Education and Welfare of the American people.

If any of these alone would not have earned him the libel of "socialist" from today's Tea Party GOP, then surely his federal intervention to force the integration of the public  schools of Little Rock would have gained him that honor.

A military hero who led the United States to Victory in Europe in World War II, Eisenhower reminded us that "humility must always be the portion of any man who receives acclaim earned in the blood of his followers and the sacrifices of his friends" -- words that would turn to bile if they came from the lips of Bush II, for example.

But perhaps the greatest legacy of Eisenhower's presidency lay in his choice of federal judges, especially four of his Supreme Court appointees: Earl Warren, John Marshall Harlan II, William J. Brennan and Potter Stewart.

The Warren Court  gave us integrated public schools, established the principle of "one man, one vote," protected the rights of the accused (Miranda v. Arizona), strengthened the Constitutional wall of separation between church and state, and powerfully reinforced the right of free speech.  Subsequent Republican Presidents have appointed ideologues to replace these judicial giants in a determined philosophic war against progressive principles.  And so today the highest court in the land has decreed that corporations are endowed by the Constitution with the same rights as people.

Eisenhower's appointees concerned themselves with the concerns of the people.  "Legislators represent people, not cows and trees," the Chief Justice wrote.  "Property doesn't have rights; people have rights," Potter Stewart wrote. Its decisions resonated of compassion for the underprivileged, protection of the weak and the equality of man.

Subsequent courts have given us Antonin Scalia: “Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached." And Samuel Alito: "I believe very strongly in limited government . . .and the legitimacy of a government role in protecting traditional values."

Many Americans disagreed with Eisenhower on policy, but none ever questioned his personal integrity.  His altruism and dedication to peace were genuine. He was, like George Orwell, a "lover of liberty and intellectual honesty."

American politics today is awash in professions of love of liberty, some of which may even be sincere.  What's lacking is intellectual honesty.  There's no room for a Dwight Eisenhower in the party of Sarah Palin.

What's Left of a River Runs Through It

There was an old homestead in southwest Virginia, not far from Haysi.  Don't know where Haysi is?  Well, it's near Clinchco.

The Russell Fork of the Big Sandy River runs past Haysi.  Some folks joke that the town was named for a fellow named "Sy" who had a flatboat that he'd pole across the river, ferrying passengers for a small fee, before they built the bridge.  "Hey, Sy!" they'd call from the opposite side, and he'd pole over to fetch them.  Actually "Haysi" is the combination of the first syllables of the surnames of two merchants who pretty much founded the town.

Haysi was surrounded by lush forested mountains.  Fellow named Corb grew up there, in that homestead halfway up the mountain, in a clearing made by strong hands and a sharp axe two generations before Corb was born. Started as a one-room cabin.  Over the years they added two or three lower rooms and an "upstairs" sort of dormitory bedroom for Corb and his six brothers.

Like most of their neighbors in that hardscrabble country they were poor, but they didn't know it.  They hunted, fished, coaxed vegetables and feed for a few livestock out of the rock-pocked hillsides.  Everyone worked dawn to dusk -- Corb said his Momma hoed a field of corn the afternoon of the evening his brother Guy was born.  Brother Ralph said it wasn't Guy, it was me was born the day Momma hoed all that corn.

Corb's generation mostly moved away from Dickenson County to find more prosperous lives, but "home" was always that green, rugged mountain country of southwest Virginia.  The farflung descendants of the man who made that clearing and built that cabin went "home" every summer for an old-fashioned country feast and lots of fiddlin' and pickin' and dancin'.

They'd swap stories that began as sort of true but became bigger and better whoppers with the passing of the years.  Remember what a sharpshooter ol' Aub was?  He could kill two squirrels with one shot from his .22!  Remember when Ralph and Cooger got into the still  Pros kept up in the holler?  Those boys got a lickin' they wouldn't forget when they staggered home drunk as skunks!  Remember when the Haysi basketball team consisted of Corb and four of his brothers and they whipped teams from schools four times their size? Remember. . . .?

There were riches to be had from that hardscrabble country, but it took big corporations with big profits to get them out.  Deep mining extracted most of the best coal.  Those of Corb's generation who stayed home in Dickenson County did so to work the coal.  Woody drove a coal truck over those steep, twisty roads and wound up with a bad back.  Others went down into the mines and died of black lung.  Or in one of the periodic explosions.  "Once again in West Virginia," a lyric journalist named Winfrey wrote, "there is frost on the mountain and blood on the coal."

After the coal was gone there was methane left in the mine shafts and the big coal companies learned to drill for natural gas, too. They could put wells on your land whether you wanted them or not.  State law.  Most of the time your royalties got held up in a mysterious state fund that never sent out any checks.  A road to a gas field took out the old homestead, and Pros's lovingly handcrafted house of wood and stone with the cold stream running underneath to keep the hand-churned butter cold.

But the forests remained, and the rugged mountains where the seven brothers once whooped and ran and played and hunted and fished and didn't know they were poor.

As fortunes were made pumping natural gas out of the rugged green mountains, the median family income in Haysi was $25,781.  In Clinchco it was $23,750.  The national median was more than $44,000.  One in four families; one-third of the total population; and 40% of those under age 18 lived below the federal poverty line while fat cats somewhere counted their millions and bribed politicians to look the other way while they ignored OSHA safety regulations and EPA anti-pollution laws.

The poor people of Dickenson County still had the Big Sandy and the streams that fed it, like Fryin' Pan Creek and Skillet branch. They had the green rugged mountains and they had strong family bonds with those who'd gone afield in search of prosperity but still came "home" at least once a year.

Even then,  there remained riches to be stolen away.  Paper corporations clear-cut those forests of old growth pine and deciduous trees that housed the squirrels ol' Aub could pick off, four or five with a single shot, from his .22, trees that were there long before Pros made his little clearing halfway up the mountain.

And huge new machines could literally scrape off the tops of the rugged mountains to extract the remaining coal. Red Onion Mountain,  one of Cousin Kay's favorite places, is a barren moonscape now. And they keep drilling new gas wells and building new roads and sending no checks.

With the trees gone there was nothing to prevent the bilious remains of mountaintop removal from tumbling down to pollute Fryin' Pan and Skillet and the Big Sandy. The few fish that survived  weren't fit to eat, the squirrels had no trees to frolic in and old-timers who came back didn't recognize "home" any more.

                  * * *
Someone cares.  It's called the Dogwood Alliance  http://www.dogwoodalliance.org/ and it has a growing number of partners in the effort to hold corporations responsible for the rape of what's left of "home" in the Appalachian South.

An Awakening (Perhaps)

Tom the Cop back east still thinks New Mexico is a foreign suburb of Arizona.  He'd be surprised to learn that significant stuff sometimes happens here.

Take, for example, the action this week by the state house of representatives.  It passed a municipal funds bill that would move between two and five billion dollars of state assets out of big banks (think TARP and massive bonuses) and into small local banks and credit unions (think accountability). 

The bill, which must pass the senate to become law, probably caught the big banks by surprise.  Already, without a doubt, the guys in the aluminum suits with freshly-tanned alligator on their feet are on their way to Santa Fe with bags of cash.  Even if the lobbyists buy a sufficient number of senators to prevent the bill from becoming law, its passage by the house is a sign of grass-roots awakening out here among the cacti.

Is the awakening broad enough and deep enough to represent the beginnings of a third political party with progressive goals?  A pipe dream?  Why?  If there are Americans who will shell out $550 to hear a kook like Sarah Palin read her hand, surely there are exponentially more who will rally to support the restoration of progressive ideals in our governance.

One of those ideals is to rebuild the constitutional wall of separation between church and state.

The latest manifestation of the urgency of that particular goal is the push for signatures on a document called the "Manhattan Declaration," a right-wing religious manifesto that equates pro-choice advocates with Nazi eugenicists whose signers vow to defy any law that does not conform to their religious beliefs.  Its originators claim to have garnered more than 400,000 signatures already, including those of the Roman Catholic bishops of Philadelphia, Washington, D.C ., New York and Louisville.  Surely "Bishop Ramirez," who campaigns by robo-call against pro-choice candidates here in the southwest, will soon join them.

Churches whose leaders so blatantly engage in political activity should simply lose their tax exemption.  It's the law.  Enforce it.  It'll only happen if we create a strong third party dedicated to progressive values.

If there is sufficient outrage "out there" to rally gun-toting rednecks to shout vilification at political rallies, should there not also be sufficient outrage to rally intelligent Americans to elect candidates who will actually do something to rectify the wrongs that madden them? 

We need a third party.  Democrats for the most part have either been bought or intimidated by the same forces that sent our jobs overseas, our economy to its knees and our foreign policy into the toilet.

We need a party whose candidates will provide health care for every  American, jobs for everyone who is capable of working, training for those who need it, quality education for all, fair elections absent the vile influence of corporate money, separation of church and state as the Jeffersonians who wrote the constitution intended, and, for the sake of Tom the Cop and his fellows in law enforcement, sane gun laws to prevent their having to deal with far better-armed criminals.

And that, folks, is just for their first week in office.

In the second week they can take on clean energy, environmental protection, re-regulation of business and finance, torture, civil rights (even for gays!), prosecution of office-holders who violated the Geneva Conventions, gender discrimination, rights of workers to unionize (an old fight that needs to be fought and won again). . . . .

It's a long, long road a-windin'.  Let's get started.

Let It Snow

Perhaps we as citizens should be grateful for the massive snowstorms that have paralyzed our government.  It's Mother Nature's way of telling the Republicans: "Obstruction?  You want obstruction?  I'll show you obstruction!"

The good news is that until the snow melts or is cleared away, the dolts and corporate-owned cretins inside the Beltway can't commit any official acts to further harm us or the country.  The bad news is that -- like the Republican congressman who camped out in his office -- they will have had time to engage in the process  they call "thinking."

One trembles at the possibilities!  What might emerge next in the feeble brains that gave us killing Grandma and the deficit good/deficit bad dichotomy?  (Wherein the enormous deficits run up by George Bush are good but the enormous deficits run up by Barack Obama are bad.)

Republicans recently sent out a fund-raising appeal thinly disguised as a "poll."  The questions were cleverly phrased by Frank Luntz or an acolyte to encourage replies that favored GOP positions on various issues.  Hence, respondents were encouraged to call for "more jobs" but only by providing massive tax cuts for the very corporations that have shipped millions of American jobs overseas.  They were encouraged to call for reducing the federal deficit as a matter of extreme urgency, but also to oppose federal action in the one area that could most immediately reduce the deficit: control of health care costs.

In the most conservative areas of the country (like mine) the brain-numbed parrots of the Republican line warn us that health care reform would drive small businesses to fail.  But Manfred Chemek, who runs a real estate investment and consulting firm with offices in the United States and Europe, disputes this propaganda.

"I have been a small business owner in the USA and in Germany for over 25 years," he says. "I cannot afford the same medical benefits to my USA employees that my employees get in Germany.

"In the US as a small business owner I am always at a disadvantage when hiring employees vs. a large company or hospital that can offer benefits. So I am forced to hire less qualified workers or pay more to get the same level of expertise."

His conclusion: "Single Payer Health Care (along the lines of the German and French systems) is the way to go. It should be marketed to the US voters as best for small businesses, which it is."

When the snow has melted and life returns to normal in Washington, President Obama will meet with a gaggle of Democratic and Republican pols to solicit the very best ideas  to resolve the health care crisis in the United States.

What are the odds that any of these geniuses will suggest the one best and easiest solution to both health care and deficit reduction: Medicare for all?

False Prophets for Profit

One manufacturing industry is thriving in these United States, unaffected by recession and creating a new class of millionaires.  It manufactures bogeymen.

The tactic of controlling the tribe by inventing demons is as old as human society.  Shamans and priests, warlords and demagogues, clerics and dictators have used it to their own profit and that of their closed circle of abettors.

Only in America, however, has an entire industry emerged to manufacture bogeymen on demand for the ideologues who keep the corporatocracy humming. The industry thrives because Americans seem to want to be deceived.

You can, for example, rent a protester -- an army of them, if you have enough money; the going rate is $1,800 per head at various PR firms. These rent-a-hecklers, trained in tactics devised by the right-wing strategist Frank Luntz,  touched off the "grassroots" protests at congressional town halls during the 2009 recess.  You can rent a scientist:  the most widely quoted deniers of climate change had their "research" funded by the likes of Exxon-Mobile, the most profitable corporation in human history. Pen poised over checkbook, the buyer  says: "Here is the conclusion; give me the science." You can rent a spook. The CIA actually permits its top intelligence agents to moonlight for private corporations, thereby doubling or even tripling their income. The big banks and financial hedge funds that gave us the Great Economic Meltdown are the most avid spook-renters.  The rent-a-specialist industry exists to verify that bogeymen are real. 

Now that it's so profitable, the bogeyman makers have learned to move with remarkable speed.  No sooner had a paid flack for an insurance company discovered  a way to spin one paragraph in draft legislation for health care, than the bogeyman industry took over.  "Killing grandma" was the result.  Another bogeyman factory spotted another paragraph in the bill and soon "you'll be forced to buy government insurance."  More little bogeymen were built and soon all of them were rolled into one big bogeyman called "Obamacare." 

It would be difficult to choose which recent bogeyman was most successful.  Certainly a prime contender is the Saddam Hussein bogeyman, which frightened us into an endless war that has cost not only lives but trillions in taxpayer dollars.  The Obamacare bogeyman was a big winner for corporations.  The Cap and Trade bogeyman may well succeed in scuttling health protections for millions of Americans breathing polluted air or drinking contaminated water; in obstructing the creation of millions of clean energy jobs; and in licensing polluters to drill, drill, drill and profit, profit, profit.

Bobby Burns was right when he reminded us that "others" see us with far more clarity then we see ourselves.

Thus a Brit, writing in The Independent UK, perfectly described what's happening here:

"A streak that has always been there in the American right's world-view -- to deny reality, and argue against a demonic phantasm of their own creation -- has swollen. Now it is all they can see."

This is a phenomenon that, in Bill Maher's words, "has moved the Democrats to the right and the Republicans to a mental hospital."  Where, I might add, one hopes that their health insurer will deny coverage because of a pre-existing condition.