Little Boys With Real Machine Guns

I still remember the Christmas when the local Walgreen's had a window display of toys including a realistic wooden model of the machine guns John Wayne  toted in his U.S. Marines movies.

My friend Ron Ellis and I really coveted those things. We had outgrown Santa Clause and one of us remembered his Mom saying those "awful guns" were overpriced,  so neither of us was particularly optimistic.  But we'd walk past that window display every day thinking how great it would be to run through the woods with such a real-looking weapon.  The imaginary "Japs" lurking in the weeds wouldn't stand a chance.

The store cut prices by half on its unsold toys on the day before Christmas, and our parents relented and we got our guns.  Couldn't wait to go out to the woods and hide behind trees and shoot "Japs."  Did so for a day or two, swaggering like the Duke,  feeling like big shots, tough guys, but ere long the simple noisemaker on the wooden guns broke, and we had to shout "blam blam  blam" or something when we shot "Japs," and pretty soon it wan't such great fun having wooden machine guns, and our killing sprees ended.

That was my last infatuation with guns. Same for most of my friends.  The war to end all wars ended, Johnny came marching home, there were blue birds over the white cliffs of Dover and real-life sports heroes replaced John Wayne.  And then, one day, the little boys of Harrison Street were young men, striving wherever young men strove those days to be ready to deal with the Real World.

In the Real World you learned to respect the rights of others, including those of different colors or creeds. You learned to respect the law, and obey it, and you learned how to work to change the law if it was unjust or unfair.  You learned about things like perspective and priorities and equality.  You learned about prejudice and hate and bullying.

And you learned there were those who never did grow up, who never did outgrow the coveting of guns, whose insecurity required phallic trappings and bullying comrades.  They tended to gather together, these little boys of middle age, and bring their sons and nephews with them, in places like the National Rifle Association, and ad hoc militias, at shooting ranges and in the great outdoors, toting their heat. Sometimes they called themselves "hunters" and"outdoorsmen" but in reality they were would-be murderers who mostly did their killing in fantasies.  A few  -- far, far too many -- fulfilled their fantasies against real people, in shopping malls, parking lots, churches, government buildings, army posts and schools.

Fort Hood.  Columbine.  Sandy Hook.  Blacksburg. 

From their intellectual puberty, these monsters of arrested development shouted their tortured Second Amendment logic, their posturing of patriotism, their utter nonsense about their "rights" to have and to use firearms, until even right wing propaganda sheets like Rupert Murdoch's New York Post called them "nuts." On the front page!

"Nuts" they are, but dangerous ones.

Ron Ellis, wherever you are, I'm grateful that we grew up.  Merry Christmas.

Less Than Two Weeks

After Sandy Hook

WEBSTER, N.Y. — An ex-con set a car and a house ablaze in his lakeside neighborhood to lure firefighters, then opened fire on them, killing two, engaging in a shootout with police and committing suicide while several homes burned. Authorities used an armored vehicle to evacuate the area.

The gunman fired at the four firefighters when they arrived shortly after 5:30 a.m. at the blaze in Webster, a suburb of Rochester on Lake Ontario, town Police Chief Gerald Pickering said. The first police officer who arrived chased the suspect and exchanged gunfire, authorities said.

Police say he lay in wait outdoors for the firefighters' arrival, then opened fire probably with a rifle and from atop an earthen berm, Pickering said.

"It does appear it was a trap," he said.

Peace on Earth

Good Will to Men

What Really Happened at Benghazi?

Even when the Reublicans get it right they get it wrong.

U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice was unfit to become Secretary of State, but not because of Benghazi, as is clear in the newly released report by an independent panel investigating the terrorist attack that killed four Americans, including the ambassador, in Libya.

The report won't stop crackpots like Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, a science-denying creationist, from continuing to blather the party line.

In fact, Rice's disqualification for the office was her huge stockholdings in Canadian corporations that stand to profit greatly if the Keystone XL pipeline is built.  The Secretary of State has the power of final determination of the fate of the pipeline.

That, of course, doesn't bother the Republicans, for whom conflict of interest is a way of life.  With hands always open for corporate cash, eagerly embracing legislation crafted by corporate lobbyists, kissing the boots of the biggest bankers, the GOP is oblivious to that silly thing called ethics.

The investigators' report on Benghazi came down hard on senior State Department officials.  "Systematic failures and leadership and management deficiencies at senior levels within two bureaus of the State Department resulted in a Special Mission security posture that was inadequate for Benghazi and grossly inadequate to deal with the attack that took place," the panel said.

However, the board ruled that no individual officials ignored or violated their duties and recommended no disciplinary action. It recommended that poor performance by senior managers should be grounds for disciplinary actions in the future.

Buried in most media accounts of the panel's report was the fact that Congress' own parsimony was a major factor in the security lapses in Benghazi. The panel found that budget constraints in the past had led some management officials to emphasize savings over security, including rejecting numerous requests from the Benghazi mission and the embassy in Tripoli for enhanced protection.

House and Senate negotiators on a pending defense bill on Tuesday agreed to fund another 1,000 Marines at embassy security worldwide, locking the barn door after the horse has been stolen.

What the report does not disclose is the source of the so-called "talking points" that Rice and others in the administration used when addressing the media in the immediate aftermath of he Benghazi killings.  Those points said the violence at the consulate began with protests over an anti-Muslim movie made in the U.S. The investigators determined that this was not true, that the attack was a terrorist plot from the outset.

Did the falsehood originate with the CIA? With its director, David Petraeus?  Two of the four slain Americans were independent CIA contractors.  A mysterious CIA compound -- a black hole for torture? -- stands near the consulate where the men were slain.

What was the CIA's role in all of this?

Our Worst President Strikes Again

Barack Hussein Obama, you have sealed your fate in history.  As long as a single sane, humanitarian voice remains to speak truth in this benighted land, you will go down as the very worst president the nation has ever had.

I don't know what motivated your latest capitulation to the handmaidens of corporate America, but it certainly was not your vaunted intellect.  Only an utter fool would think that our sick economy can be turned around by taking from the poor and the needy and giving to the rich.  But that is exactly what you have done in your concessions to House Speaker Boehner regarding the scarecrow perniciously called the "fiscal cliff."

My private opinion is that you are driven by cowardice and a desperate, sick need to prove yourself worthy of your high office to the elite, the oligarchs, the warmakers and the oppressors of the common people -- the relative handful who really run the country.

If I live to be a hundred, I cannot wash away the filth from the hand that cast my ballot for your second term.  I bought the canard that a vote for one of the worthy third-party candidates would in effect be a vote for Mitt Romney, and that somehow a Romney presidency would be even worse than a second Obama term.  You are peas in the same pod.  Liars both, although you disguise your lies more skillfully than the man who challanged you. Warmakers both, but you make a vile mockery of the Nobel Prize that was undeservedly conferred upon you.  Killer of women and children with your drones.  Torturer.  Repealer of the Bill of Rights.  Spyer upon your people.  Hider of ugly and terrible secrets.

Now you and your fellow connivers will market your latest sell-out of the common people as an "adjustment" in "entitlements" rather than what it is: viciously slashing  the safety net that millions upon millions of Americans need in order to eat, breathe, have modest shelter over their heads, get treatment for their most pressing illnesses. You would let the modest tax relief for middle-class wage-erarners lapse, while coddling the millionaires and billionaires -- many of whom themselves vainly challenged you to raise their taxes!

How can you stoop so low?  How can you allow yourself to grovel at the feet of right wing extremists who have no interest other than the obscene profits of their corporate masters?  How can you callously urinate on not just the dreams and aspirations, but the quotidian needs of the very people who elected you?

Never has a man so besmirched the highest office in the land.  The crimes of your predecessor pale in comparison to your betrayals of the masses, of basic human ethics, of human rights, of civil liberties, of truth and decency.

You, sir, are a disgrace to your race.  The human race.

Oh, We Can't Move That Mountain!

Even more pernicious than having banks that are too big to fail is the American propensity to perpetuate problems that are too big to solve.

Once such problem, brought to the fore by yet another mass killing spree, is our guns.  More than 300 million of them.  Even as citizens and politicians renewed the clamor for gun control legislation, skeptics pointed out why it can't be done. Nearly half of us -- 47 per cent -- own at least one firearm. We have  more registered gun dealers (130,000) than we have grocery stores. Yet 40 per cent of gun sales are unregulated transactions made by private, unlicensed vendors, mostly at gun shows and conventions. In 2008, the Supreme Court Gang of Five wrongly ruled in District of Columbia v. Heller that the Second Amendment provided for an individual right to bear firearms. This destroyed the more logical argument that the amendment applied only to militias.  Abraham Lincoln, the lawyer, once pointed out that the law is what the lawmaker intended, and it's clear to anyone not in the thrall of the National Rifle Association what the writers of the Second Amendment intended.  And so we're stuck with a problem that's too big to solve and mass killings of innocent men, women and children -- eight this year alone -- will continue. What can we do?  Get used to it.

Some say the climate that tolerates mass killings exists in this country because of our own government's policy of endless war, of covert killing of innocents, of death by drone. This is another problem that's too big to solve.  The greatest single engine driving our otherwise sick economy is the massive war machine and all of its accoutrements.  Shut it down and the economy collapses.  The most powerful corporations, outfits like Exxon Mobile and Chevron, owe their obescene profits to the U.S. military, the largest single consumer of fossil fuel in the history of the planet.  Even if public opinion were absolutely unanimous for peace, it wouldn't change one mind in the corporate suites of those who derive their money and influence from warmaking.

Our government is corrupt.  Office holders become corrupted because corporations legally are people, with a First Amendment right to throw unlimited cash at candidates until they own their very minds and souls.  Even if every single taxpayer in the United States demanded legislation to change this, nothing would come of it, because the votes would be cast by the corrupted.  Another problem that has become too big to solve.

Our corrupt government is militarizing local and state police forces, the better to suppress any possible insurrection against a dysfunctional and oppressive system.  And so our society plummets crazily down the sinkhole to enslavement.  And there's nothing We, the People, can do about it.

The problem is way too big to solve.

Take Away the Guns! Now!

Since we were shocked, shocked, by Columbine, and our hearts went out to and we prayed for the victims and their families, and some of us called for new gun laws and others said guns don't kill, people kill, and politicians prattled platitudes on one hand while the other hand pocketed millions in bribes from the NRA and gun and ammunition makers, and Michael Moore plunged headlong into making a shocking, shocking movie called Bowling for Columbine and the NRA spent more millions bribing more politicians who blathered refutations of the movie and after a while we forgot about the kids killed in the Colorado high school and went back to watching Fox and stewing about which celebrity was being unfaithful to which other celebrity . . .

. . . .since that time there have been 25 mass slayings in public places in the United States.  Schools, workplaces, hospitals, religious places, government places, business places.  At least 237 Americans have died in these shootings.  Another 220 or more were wounded.  The dead include at least 52 children.  Since 1982, this country has experienced more than 60 mass murders by firearms.  More than three quarters of the weapons used in these assassinations were legally obtained.

"The Columbine Massacre changed the way society looked at children and at schools," a contemporary historian wrote.  "Violence was no longer just an after-school, inner-city activity. It could happen anywhere."

Today, anywhere was an upscale New York exurb called Newtown, Conn., and the school was Sandy Hook Elementary and 20 little kids are dead.

It was the seventh mass slaying by gunfire in the United States in the calendar year of 2012.

What is wrong with you, America?  Why in the name of whatever god you invoke to decry each tragedy, and then forget about it, do you not rise up and demand that your governments do something to stop this carnage?

The Second Amendment "argument" is sheer bovine excrement.  We must round up and destroy the guns in private citizens' hands and pass iron-clad laws  that prohibit unauthorized persons from possessing them.  All kinds of guns, not just so-called "assault weapons." 

This isn't the time to bring up gun control, a White House spokesman said.

More bovine excrement!  If this isn't the time, when the hell is the right time?  After 500 more are dead in mass killings? A thousand more?  After an unarmed citizen is no longer able to go safely into a shopping mall, send his kids to school, go to worship, browse in a library or sip a mocha in Starbucks without their being in danger of death by gunshot?

Act like a  President, Barack Obama.  Go before the Congress tomorrow and demand sweeping gun control legislation.

Act like responsible leaders, members of Congress.  Start today to frame such legislation.

Seize the day, governors of the states, mayors of cities, legislatures, town councils.  Draft your own gun control measures.

Stop the carnage now.

Musings on Republicans and Hatred

I'm convinced more than ever that the underlying and unifying force driving today's Republican party is hatred.

It oozes from every pore of the public demonstrations I've seen by the Tea Party wing. In Congress, only hatred can account for some of the GOP actions against women, immigrants, people of color, the poor, the sick, the elderly and all the children of all of the above.

Just last Tuesday, for example, Republicans in the Senate blocked ratification of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which more than 150 other (obviously more compassionate) countries  have already ratified. To the GOP, all those cripples are takers, a burden on society, not "makers" like good, conservative Republicans. Or maybe they think the metal in those wheelchairs should be diverted to the weapons industry to help keep us safe from Muslims.

Symptoms of Republican hatred turn up all over the place.  Women? In Arizona, a drunken cop flashed his badge to enter a bar, walked up to a woman, put his hand under her skirt and groped her genitals.  When he finally turned up in court, the Rpublican judge gave him probabtion and chided the victim! "If you wouldn't have been there that night," the judge said, "none of this would have happened to you." The judge told her to "take a positive lesson" from the assault.



A journalist friend thinks that such hatred stems from fear, fear of all those "Others." As Freud wrote, "if a person feels they can't control the object or feel threatened by it, they act negatively toward it.”

The Republican position on immigration is, at bottom, racist and hateful.  Arizona Republicans seem determined to fight to the death for their Xenophobic Gestapo law ("Ve vant to see your papers, now!)  Even though net immigration from Mexico has dwindled to nearly zero, the Republicans still want to put up steel fences, fly armed drones over the border and station legions of armed outriders along a no-man's-land between us and Them.

Right wing hatred ended the community service group, ACORN, when rigged videos by a truant brat scared Congress into cutting off its funding.  Even though it no longer exists, a recent poll showed that 47% of Republicans believe that ACORN stole the recent election for Obama.

More than half of every tax dollar goes to illegal wars on people of color, and spying not just on suspected enemies abroad but on us, the people. Our local Republican Congressman supported these wars and that spying,  yet today in the local paper he argued in an op ed that we're spending too much on "entitlements" like Social Security, health care and education. It happens that in his district, most of the people who need those "entitlements" just to survive have skin of a different color than his.

I suppose one might say that it's not hatred of people so much as love of money that drives the Republican machine. Coming from Arkansas and becoming richer than Croesus, Sam Walton surely must have been a Republican. Sridevi Kalavakolanu, a  director of ethical sourcing for Sam's worldwide Walmart empire, imay not be a member of the GOP, but he played the lead role in blocking an effort to have global retailers pay more for apparel to help Bangladesh factories improve their electrical and fire safety. The New York Times, citing the minutes of a 2011 meeting of a worlwide association of apparel retailers, said the Walmart man noted that the proposed improvements in electrical and fire safety would involve as many as 4,500 factories and would be “in most cases” a “very extensive and costly modification."

"It is not financially feasible for the brands to make such investments," the minutes said.

Two weeks ago, in one of those factories in Bangladesh, 112 workers, people of color, died in a horrible electrical fire.

Robert E. Lee is said to have remarked to an aide, just before a major civil war battle began, "It is good that war is so terrible lest men grow to love it too much."

I have never heard of a CEO saying. "it's good that money is so terrible lest men grow to love it too much."  But then, most CEOs are Republicans, aren't they?

The Living Horror That Is Gaza

This is how Deacon Muskrat, the hatefully hawkish cleric in Walt Kelly's great comic strip Pogo, put it years ago: "If I had the bomb, I'd force peace down their throats."

Once more, Israel is forcing peace down the throats of the beleaguered citizens of  Gaza.  And the blood of innocents flows and flows. Thirty-two of the 66 acknowledged victims of the latest bloodbath have been civilian men, women and children.

Never mind the numbers.  Bibi and his friends don't care.

One invites being labeled anti-semitic for thinking these thoughts.  And so I give you the son of a teacher of Hebrew, who visited  Gaza just before the latest reign of terror began:

" . . . it hardly takes more than a day in Gaza to begin to appreciate what it must be like to try to survive in the world’s largest open-air prison, where a million and a half people, in the most densely populated area of the world, are constantly subject to random and often savage terror and arbitrary punishment, with no purpose other than to humiliate and degrade, and with the further goal of ensuring that Palestinian hopes for a decent future will be crushed and that the overwhelming global support for a diplomatic settlement that will grant these rights will be nullified."

Noam Chomsky wrote that, even as Israel was calling up 70,000 more reserve troops to active duty, the better to force peace down the throats of the sick, starving, angry inhabitants of "the world's largest open-air prison."

Granted, diplomatic solutions do not come easy in the most troubled parts of this vale of tears, especially when tens, even hundreds of generations of ethnic and religious conflict have buried the last vestiges of human decency under layers of murder, terror, torture, rape and pillage. 

And so we -- most of us in the so-called civilized world, remote as we are from the worst of the ethno-religious horrors -- as Pete Seger musically laments, "live like an ostrich, bury our heads in the sand . . ."

When the U.N. sought to condemn Israel's latest ourages on the Gazans, the United States, Netanyahu's enabler, vetoed the resolution because "Israel has a right to defend itself."  What Chomsky disdainfully calls "the security pretext."  He quotes "the prominent military-political analyst Yoram Peri, who wrote that the Israeli army's task is not to defend the state, but 'to demolish the rights of innocent people just because they are Araboushim ("nigger," "kikes") living in territories that God promised to us.'" And so the people of Gaza have become Samid (steadfast), watching their homeland turned into a prison by brutal occupiers, able to do nothing but somehow "endure."

And we bury our heads in the sand.

Chomsky writes that after several days there his reaction "was amazement, not only at the ability to go on with life, but also at the vibrancy and vitality among young people, particularly at the university. . . But there too one can detect signs that the pressure may become too hard to bear. . . There is only so much that caged animals can endure, and there may be an eruption, perhaps taking ugly forms — offering an opportunity for Israeli and western apologists to self-righteously condemn the people who are culturally backward, as Mitt Romney insightfully explained.

"Gaza has the look of a typical third world society, with pockets of wealth surrounded by hideous poverty. It is not, however, 'undeveloped.' Rather it is 'de-developed,' and very systematically so, to borrow the terms of Sara Roy, the leading academic specialist on Gaza.

"The signs are easy to see, even on a brief visit. Sitting in a hotel near the shore, one can hear the machine gun fire of Israeli gunboats driving fishermen out of Gaza’s territorial waters and towards shore, so they are compelled to fish in waters that are heavily polluted because of US-Israeli refusal to allow reconstruction of the sewage and power systems that they destroyed. . .

"Water is severely limited. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which cares for refugees (but not other Gazans), recently released a report warning that damage to the aquifer may soon become 'irreversible,' and that without remedial action quickly, by 2020 Gaza may not be a 'liveable place.'

"All of this is part of the general program described by Israeli official Dov Weisglass, an adviser to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, after Palestinians failed to follow orders in the 2006 elections: 'The idea,' he said, 'is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.'

"And the plan is being scrupulously followed. Sara Roy has provided extensive evidence in her scholarly studies. Recently, after several years of effort, the Israeli human rights organization Gisha succeeded to obtain a court order for the government to release its records detailing plans for the diet, and how they are executed. Israel-based journalist Jonathan Cook summarizes them: 'Health officials provided calculations of the minimum number of calories needed by Gaza’s 1.5 million inhabitants to avoid malnutrition. Those figures were then translated into truckloads of food Israel was supposed to allow in each day ... an average of only 67 trucks — much less than half of the minimum requirement — entered Gaza daily. This compared to more than 400 trucks before the blockade began.' And even this estimate is overly generous, UN relief officials report.

"Mideast scholar Juan Cole observes that “[a]bout ten percent of Palestinian children in Gaza under 5 have had their growth stunted by malnutrition ... in addition, anemia is widespread, affecting over two-thirds of infants, 58.6 percent of schoolchildren, and over a third of pregnant mothers.” The US and Israel want to ensure that nothing more than bare survival is possible.

"In one of the world’s leading medical journals, The Lancet, a visiting Stanford physician, appalled by what he witnessed, describes Gaza as 'something of a laboratory for observing an absence of dignity,' a condition that has 'devastating' effects on physical, mental, and social wellbeing. 'The constant surveillance from the sky, collective punishment through blockade and isolation, the intrusion into homes and communications, and restrictions on those trying to travel, or marry, or work make it difficult to live a dignified life in Gaza.' The Araboushim must be taught not to raise their heads."

Even as we bury our own in the sand.

Smoke, Catacombs and Partisanship

Once again in the nation's capital, blue smoke curls around black ops to make whitewash.

Someone -- Jimmy Hoffa? James Bond? Maybe even David Petraeus! -- was spirited through the catacombs of Congess and into a secret room, there to be interrogated by some of the best and brightest members of that bastion of intellect and integrity, the U.S. House of Representatives. Those servants of the people had sworn to "get to the bottom" of a complicated mess involving fatal violence at an American consulate in Libya and femmes fatales in the extra-marital embrace of at least one, and possibly more, high ranking members of our military and spying establishment. The someone they sneaked into their hidey-hole was thought to have all the answers to all their questions.

OK, for the record, let's just stipulate that the someone was, indeed, retired Gen. David Petraeus, the walking medal chest, military hero of our great conquests in Iraq, Afghanistan and countless other places great and small around this troubled globe. Not only did he appear before a panel of great minds from the House, he also talked to a group of Senators.

Some are reporting that he "testified," although he was not repeat not under oath.  Some testimony.

What did he say?

That depends upon whether you're being briefed by a Republican or a Democrat.  Their characterizations of what he said differ greatly.  Either he did or he didn't support the administration's version of events around the consulate in Benghazi that fateful day when an ambassador was slain.

What seems clear is that the questioning wasn't prosecutorial or probing.  Both Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) and Sen. Diane Feinstein (D.-CA.) indicated that out of respect for the tender sensibilities of the general and his family, there were no questions about his sexual pecadillos, and the questions that were asked were not "tough." 

Questioners on both sides of both panels seemed to agree that the focus was on "clarifying" what Petraeus had told Congress about Benghazi back when he was still director of the CIA  -- what we knew and when we knew it.  What he says now and what he said then seem still to be interpreted strictly along party lines, leaving us, the people, still in the dark.

Even before the blue smoke began wafting through the bowels of the Capitol yesterday, there were whiffs of gray smoke suggesting a deeper CIA involvement in what happened there than anyone has so far disclosed. I suspect this aspect was never raised in yesterday's questioning.

King and the Republicans seem satisfied that Petraeus gave them answers yesterday, answers that substantiate their charges that "politics" marred the intelligence the administration used in addressing the American public about the episode. Since semen spots on black dresses seem to excite Republicans more readily than suggestions of black ops, they'll probably let things rest where they are.

Is there any hope at all that the public will ever know the truth?  Perhaps that depends upon what the definition of is is.

Sex! Generals! A Cast of Thousands!

A television performer named Krya Phillips is the latest addition to the cast of the tragic-comic farce playing out around Gen. David Petraeus, who resigned abruptly last week as head of the CIA.

Phillips, of Headline News Network, disclosed that she had a discussion with Petraeus recently about the episodes that have titillated Washington and the media.  "I've had a very good professional relationship with General Petraeus," she said. "I've kept in touch with him ... we've always had a great measure of respect for each other. Needless to say, I'm shocked by his behavior.

"We didn't even talk about Benghazi at the beginning," she said. "It was more, 'oh my God, I'm in shock, I'm sick about this, what the hell happened.'" She said Petraeus told her that he had made a huge error, that he had not passed on classified information, and that his resignation had nothing to do with the attacks on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

Drawing on my own experience as a journalist in Washington, dealing with the city's spooks (as we always referred conversationally to people who worked for the intelligence-gathering agencies), I infer the following from Phillips's remarks:

Her relationship with Petraeus was cozier than "professional," classified information did  seep from him to a paramour, and his resignation was all about the Benghazi affair, in which an American ambassador and two CIA operatives were killed.

I infer also that Petraeus was the direct source of bad information --possibly intentionally bad information -- fed to U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice and the White House regarding Benghazi.
We are told that Petraeus himself will be called to testify as our brilliant representatives in Congress empanel themselves to "get to the bottom" of all this.  Maybe the truth will out, but don't bet the house on it.

Republicans will go haywire over the sex details, as they did with Monica Lewinsky and William Jefferson Clinton.  The saliva of anticipation of erotic detail is running deep in every hallway in the Capitol. 

Democrats will have to be careful about whose ox they gore.  Petraeus is, as more than one academic has noted, America's most political general since MacArthur. He has meddled deeply in electoral politics and, indeed, built his entire career on political skills rather than military ones.

Despite what his worshipful media cult writes and broadcasts, he is far from a military genius.  He wears a chestful of medals and ribbons not one of which was earned in combat.  He is vain, arrogant and manipulative.  But he is the darling of the military-industrial complex and President Obama loves his drone warfare concept.

A strong case can be made, I suspect, that Petraeus and Obama and former President Bush and many other most senior government officials of the last 12 years committed what under international law are war crimes.

Angry as Obama might be that Petraeus's leaks and misinformation played into the hands of the Romney campaign late in the recent electioneering, he can't afford to have too deep a probe into Petraeus, the CIA and the FBI.

Where there are spooks, there will be blood and dirt.  The more ambitious, political and powerful the spook, the greater the amount of blood and dirt. You can bet the house on that.

Will a Progressive Posse Ride in the Senate?

If there is a spark of life left in liberalism in these United States, the last, best hope for rekindling it lies in the newly elected Senate.

There, one can pray, women like Tammy Baldwin and Elizabeth Warren might rally around Bernie Sanders to form a Progressive Posse, perhaps attracting New Mexico's new Senator Martin Heinrich and a few other lefties to come out of the closet and grow some cojones.

Such a posse could have a profound effect on policy.  But it would have to coalesce fast or all will be lost and Dr. Kidglove's second term will be a worse disaster than his first.

John Boehner's Teapot House will be as delusional in its next incarnation as it has been for the last two years.  Sanity, if any, in the legislative branch has to come from the Senate.

A Progressive Posse's first order of business should be to send a message to President Obama that if he nominates Erskine Bowles to succeed Timmy Titmouse Geithner as Secretary of the Treasury, they will lead the fight against his confirmation.  Bowles's name is floating all over Washington as the likely nominees for Geithner's post.  Bowles, a sleazy tool of the corporatocracy, has called Paul Ryan's Disneyworld Fantasy budget plan "serious and sensible."

Just as Geithner's own nomination signaled what a farce of surrender Obama's first term would be, so the Bowles nomination, if it happens, would signal the magnitude of the disaster Term Two would become.

Someone needs as well to stiffen the President's spine to stand pat on the brink of the so-called financial cliff until Boehner and his cockeyed cronies come to grips with reality and accept a permanent extension of the Bush middle-class tax cuts, along with an agreement in principle on increasing taxes for the very rich.  Warren and Baldwin, a budget stalwart in the House, are ideal candidates to lead the spine-stiffening campaign.

The Progressive Posse could also submit its own list of proposed nominees to succeed Lady Macbeth as Secretary of State.  Obama would make a long overdue down payment on his undeserved Nobel Peace Prize if he nominated someone for Foggy Bottom who has less blood on his or her hands than Hillary.  Inasmuch as Bibi Netanyahu was Mitt Romney's offstage campaign manager, Dr. Kidglove really doesn't have to cater to the Israeli leader's whims this time around.  What's wrong with having a Secretary of State who might spend a few minutes in cabinet meetings suggesting peace alternatives?

A country without an effective left cannot be a democracy.  The democratic republic we called the United States of America  died along with the victims of the planes that crashed into those twin towers eleven years ago, because liberalism went up in the smoke.

Chris Hedges, the brilliant journalist and social critic, says the American left cannot be revived.  Part of me fears that he is right.   Another part hopes that somehow there will arise in the Senate the seed  of rebirth.

"I didn't run for the Senate to make history," said the openly lesbian Ms. Baldwin, "I ran to make change."

You go, girl!

The High Cards Are in the West Wing

We'll find out right quick if the electoral college landslide for Barack Obama stiffened his spine.

Did we re-elect Dr. Kidglove or a real President?

John Boehner obviously thinks he's still dealing with Kidglove.  The Republican Speaker of the House, in his first public comment on the election results, was still telling the President what to do about the nation's finances.

Today, there's a hint from Vice President Joe Biden that there might be a real President somewhere in the West Wing.  In a press briefing today, Biden said " . . . it appears is that, on the issue of the tax issue, there was a clear sort of mandate about people coming much closer to our view about how to deal with tax policy."  Since "our view" is that people earning $250,000 a year or more need to pay a higher tax rate, Biden seemed to be sending a signal to Boehner that he's not sparring with Kidglove any more.

But, whoa! Biden also said, "We are prepared to work with Republican leadership to actually deal with the two overarching problems right now. One is the whole sequester piece, and the other is the tax piece. It's possible you can bifurcate them. It's possible, there's all kinds of potential to be able to reach a rational, principled compromise."

There's that dirty word again.  "Compromise."  Kidglove's version of compromise is to give away the farm, and then open "negotiations."

But Obama and Biden hold the high cards between now and the swearing-in of a new Congress, if only they'll play out the hand that way.

Obama should quickly follow up the opening volley by his Vice President by ignoring Boehner and Mitch McConnell and talking directly to the American people who just re-elected them.

Simply by standing pat, the administration can let the Bush tax cuts for the filthy rich expire, increasing revenues; the payroll tax holiday for wage-earners expire, resuming normal funding for Social Security; and the mandatory ten per cent cut in war spending take place, a first step toward reducing the deficit.  These are all positive things. They will have an immediate effect on people's lives.

The President, who can be an articulate and persuasive speaker when he chooses to be, should use the bully puplpit to applaud these inevitable results of previous skirmishes but lay out in broad, general terms a plan for realistic tax reform, in which corporations and very wealthy individuals begin to pay their fair share of our nation's expenses, and for bold national spending on direct job-creating government initiatives to repair and improve the infrastructure.  He should pledge to flesh out these plans with specific legislation when a new, more progressive Senate is seated along with a House whose Republican majority has been slightly reduced, largely by the defeat of a handful of its most extreme right-wing financial policy whackos.

That's what a real President would do.

Let's see if we re-elected one.

The Kidgove of the first term gave away too much before the work on health care reform even began. He bailed out the financial industry, saving the bonuses of fat cat bankers.  President Obama bailed out the automakers, saving thousands of workers' jobs.

It's time now to bail out the people who re-elected him. 

You Can't Ignore the Sociopaths

Having done my civic duty, and worn a hairshirt for a day in the desert to atone for my vote for a truly bad president, I keep trying now to ignore the idiocy that passes for an election campaign in these United States.

But when Bishop Willard Romney refuses to withhold his endorsements of Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, he reaffirms one of the many reasons why we simply cannot allow this man to become President of the United States.

Only a sick mind could come up with the kinds of obscene distortions about women and rape that Akin and, most recently, Mourdock have uttered in campaign appearances and never really recanted.  It is a sickness that seems to infect only Republicans: various pieces of legislation in GOP-controlled state legislatures, most recently Pennsylvania's, reflect the same kind of sociopathic ignorance. Of course,  the Bishop's tolerance of such obscenity comes as no surprise, given his own church's attitude toward women.  Mormon belief holds, in effect, that  they should be kept barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen.

Bishop Romney's own ignorance of geography ought to raise warning signals for those voters who care about foreign policy.  This guy thinks Iran's access to the sea is via Syria!  (Iran in fact has both northern and southern seacoasts, and there's a hunk of land called Iraq between it and Syria.)

Since I still cling to the quaint Jeffersonian idea of separation of church and state, I consider it supremely unwise for any nation aspiring to be a democratic republic to even consider allowing a bishop of any religion to be its president. But then I also think the founders were dead serious when they wrote the first ten amendments to their own Constitution, the ones we now call the Bill of Rights. The current President and his predecessor both seem to have repealed those amendments by presidential fiat. Who knows what further mischief would be done to them under the presidency of a bishop born to a CEO mentality?

I cannot even walk the dog without passing the Romney/Ryan and other Republican campaign signs in a neighbor's yard. I am well acquainted with this neighbor, who is an otherwise intelligent and successful man.  How can he support the delusional policies of the Republicans whose signs he displays?

Part of it, I think, has to do with the distorted American definition of "success." Whether an American is deemed "successful" depends entirely on how much money he or she has made and kept.

Bishop Willard Romney was born to wealth and used his money to acquire still more money.  In the process, he outsourced far more American jobs than he ever created.
But he is a "successful" man.

So was Attila the Hun.

Should Sport Drop Those Doping Bans?

A blogger in the United Kingdom, commenting on the Lance Armstrong case, recently suggested that sport should lift all rules banning performance enhancing substances.

He argues that even the most stringent penalties have not halted the practice; that these are, after all, adults capable of making their own decisions about health, diet, training regimens etc.; and that with such huge amounts of money at stake, it is only human nature to seek an "edge" on the competition.

He has a strong case, in my opinion, where cycling is concerned. I want to believe that Armstrong really is clean despite the testimony of 26 people, mostly former teammates, to the contrary. Miguel Indurain of Spain, who along with four other riders has won five Tours de France untainted by doping allegations, told a Madrid radio station this week that he believes in Armstrong's innocence. He said the entire case was ``bizarre'' since Armstong never tested positive for doping. "It is strange they take away his tours because of the testimonies of some teammates,'' Indurain said.

Someone with inside knowledge of cycling, and no ax to grind, told me that "all three podium places in the Tour for at least ten years have gone to cyclists who either tested positive or otherwise were known to have used banned substances." If that's so, where's the edge?

This would include Floyd Landis of the United States, first and foremost of the Armstrong ex-teammates to point the finger, who was stripped of his own Tour de France title after testing positive.

Track and field is another sport in which it could be argued that eliminating substance bans would save a lot of time and money and not really compromise the competition. It's been 25 years since Ben Johnson of Canada tested positive after breaking the world record for 100 meters by a full tenth of a second.  World records at this distance usually are matters of hundredths of a second.

Johnson's punishments appear not to have diminished the practice in track and field.  Marion Jones, the great American track and field athlete, was jailed for lying about substance abuse.  Even Florence Griffith-Joyner, the memorable "Flo Jo," has been subject to allegations of doping. She dominated women's track and field in the manner that Armstrong dominated cycling with his seven Tour de France victories. Flo Jo, who died in 1998 after an epileptic seizure, set records in the 100 and 200 meter sprints that have never been seriously challenged in the 24 years since she set them. She never tested positive for any banned substance, but, as was the case when Armstrong was competing, clean blood tests didn't stop tongues from wagging.

And baseball! How many asterisks would it take to print a record book of achievements by steroid users and other performance enhancing drug users? Why not allow any players who's willing to take the health risk go ahead and use them, to make the playing fields level? Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs in one season, and 711 in his career, boosted only by booze and hot dogs. Yet his  home run records have all been taken by suspect sluggers like Barry Bonds and Mark Maguire. The hero of one of this year's World Series team's has served a suspension for banned substances. Why not let all the players choose to use or not use?

The case weakens, in my view, for football players.  Allowing the use of steroids and other chemicals that artificially increase the size and strength of football players is life threatening for other football players.  I was acquainted with the young Alex Karras, the fun - loving Detroit Lion who became a fair comic actor, and it saddens me deeply that he suffered dementia for so long before dying of his accumulation of football injuries. There is, of course, knowledge aforethought of the risks entailed in playing football for a livelihood -- as there is, say, for boxing as well -- and if an unimpaired adult chooses to take that risk, so be it.

As one who has always enjoyed sports as a participant and an observer, I'd like to think that wonderful performances like Flo Jo's and Lance Armstrong's -- or Roger Federer's, for that matter -- are the result of natural ability and good training, not chemical enhancers. But that is, of course, naive.

Speaking of Federer, his sport of tennis has never had a major doping scandal.  Perhaps nobody has yet come up with a performance-enhancing drug that is specific to the sport.  I almost wish they would.  I still play the game even though I'm too old and physically spent to play it well.  But if they came up with a pill . . . . .

Reflections on George McGovern -- and Voting

The best -- well, most effective -- people on the other side of the Great Corporate American War and Greed Machine are cynical pragmatists. People like the late George McGovern, who proudly called himself a liberal, and who spoke what he believed, not what he thought his audience wanted to hear, had no chance in the dogfight pit of American politics.

Thus his obituaries all stressed that he was on the wrong side of the greatest landslide in presidential election history.  With the exception of the piece by my dear friend, the late David Rosenbaum, in the New York Times, the obit writers largely ignored the probability that Sen. McGoven was absolutely right on all the great issues of his political era.

George McGovern was a good man. That will never be written about Richard Nixon, the man who won that landslide, then left the White House in disgrace to avoid impeachment.

As the brilliant social critic Chris Hedges wrote the other day, George McGovern never sold his soul.

Today, alas, our only real electoral choice is between two men who have sold their souls.

In its remarkable endorsement of Barack Obama to retain his presidency, the Salt Lake Tribune, largest newspaper in Mormon Utah, laments this very fact about Mitt Romney, whom it once idolized. "Romney. . . is shameless, lavishing vastly diverse audiences with words, any words, they would trade their votes to hear," the Tribune wrote.

Every true liberal left in the land laments the  sell-out by Mr. Obama, who is now owned by Wall Street, the Military-Industrial Complex, Big Oil, Big Coal and every other Big Nasty in our part of the universe.

Sen. McGovern, as recently as three years ago, held out the hope that Mr. Obama would be a good, possibly even a great, president.  This came at a Nation Institute symposium during which, in his role as a historian, McGovern discussed the humanity, wisdom and moral standing of former Presidents Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson, Adams and others.

Among the others was Lyndon Johnson, who, Sen. McGovern pointed out, "hated" the Vietnam war but could not figure out how to end our involvement in it.  Johnson, McGovern recalled, once  consulted Georgia Sen. Dick Russell about the question, and all they could come up with was a Machiavellian scheme to finance an assassination and coup that would establish a new regime that would invite us to leave.  It never occurred to them that we could simply withdraw, on the ground that we were doing no good there.  That, McGovern mused, would have been politically suicidal, as the opposite strategy of staying the course ultimately proved also to be.

Sen. McGovern implied that Iraq and Afghanistan are Obama's Vietnam, and advocated withdrawal on the ground that we are doing no good there. "Most people around the world don’t look like you and me, they look like him," McGovern said. "And I think that our standing worldwide is much better, all across Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America." This was still true three years ago, but has changed now, because Obama's worst moral sell-out has been the wars, overt and covert, that are the core of his foreign policy.  The people his drones are slaying willy-nilly do not look like George McGovern and me, they look like him.

Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers to end the Vietnam war that Lyndon Johnson could not bring himself to end, declared the other day that, with no illusions of better government to result, he was urging voters in swing states to support Obama because a sold-out Obama is still less bad than a sold-out Mitt Romney. The Salt Lake Tribune's cogent editorial reached essentially the same conclusion from a completely different starting point.

I have long argued that the only morally defensible position for me is to support Jill Stein, the Green Party's candidate, whose positions on the important issues of our time are closest to mine (and Sen. McGovern's).  Now, mulling the meaning of George McGovern's life and beliefs, I'm less certain.

Tomorrow I will vote early. I hope the nation will re-elect Barack Obama, and somehow survive another four years of his morally bankrupt reign.  I hope in the meantime some new leader arises from among the people, a leader whose soul cannot be bought, a leader who can win the presidency in another four years and begin the nearly impossible task of rebuilding the American Dream.

I will mark my ballot for Mr. Obama.  With self-loathing for selling my own soul.  Begging but not deserving the forgiveness of the families of young Americans slain in illegal wars; of the tortured, the imprisoned and the damned in our black holes around the world; of the elderly and the sick who will suffer and die because they still cannot afford proper medical care in the richest nation in the world; of those Americans who live in abject poverty and whose numbers are growing by the day; of the millions of jobless who have no hope of ever finding employment again, even though they are educated, capable and desperate for work; of the women whose most sacred privacy is violated by obscene government laws and regulations; of the women who are lucky enough still to have jobs, but for which they are paid less than men in comparable work; of the students who thought they were climbing the American ladder of success but now languish deep in debt to usurers; of the civilian men, women and children called "collateral damage" who have been slain, maimed and shamed by our endless wars; of the foreclosed, the homeless, the broken paupers who once were part of an American middle class; of those Americans who look more like Barack Obama than like me, but who bleed, sweat and weep with equal opportunity in an America rigged against them; of the land itself, and the planet, for the orgy of crimes against the very envelope of life that sustains us.

I will mark my ballot, and go off alone into the desert, and weep in shame for myself and my country.

Oh, to Have Had Ed Dale on the Case!

Edwin L. Dale Jr. was one of those New York Times reporters who knew as much as, and in some cases more than, the experts in his field, which was economics. 

For example, Ed was credited by economists with being one of the first to establish that the roots of inflation lay as much in the service sector as in the pricing of goods. He came to this insight in the 1950's and helped bring it to public awareness.

When Ed died in 1999, Joseph Laitin, a spokesman for Government agencies including the Treasury Department, said, ''One budget director commented to me after an interview that this man Dale was qualified to be budget director.''

Ed was famously good at digging out the real meaning of regular periodic government reports, like unemployment, gross national product, etc., and never accepting the official spin at face value.  These reports were widely available before the release date, which gave Ed plenty of time to report and evaluate the deeper meaning behind the numbers.

Occasionally a reporter, usually a wire service rookie, would rush to publish the numbers in advance of the release date.  "Statistics scooping," Ed would sneer.  "One of the lower forms of journalistic sin."

A couple of recent news stories reminded me of Ed, and how I wish his likes were still reporting from Washington.

One, just before the presidential "debate," was from a statistics scooper who wanted to appear wise.  I'm willing to bet he had a copy of the new employment report in hand when he wrote that the forthcoming data would be bad news for President Obama because the economy had only added 114,000 new jobs in the preceding month, which meant that the unemployment rate would be 8.2 per cent.

Then Willard Romney wiped the floor with Dr. Kidglove in the so-called debate.

Then the actual report came out.  The new jobs number was the same.  But magically, it had driven the unemployment rate down to 7.8 per cent, the lowest it had been since January of 2009.  Calloo, callay and hip-hip hooray for Kidglove and the Gutless Democrats of Oz.

"I wonder what Ed Dale would have done with this one," I thought.

Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric and something of a hero in many economic circles, smelled the same rat.  "Unbelievable," he tweeted, setting off a wave of skepticism about the numbers, which the Administration promptly defended as being beyond finagling, even if someone wanted to finagle them.

I'm betting that Ed Dale would not only have smelled this rat, he'd have captured it, measured its tail, counted its whiskers and dumped it in the trash can with all the other recent government deceptions.

Oh, for the good old days.

Great Journalism Leavened with Humor

I had the privilege to commit journalism in the tents of two of America's greatest newspaper publishers -- John S. Knight and Arthur Ochs Sulzberger.

When "Punch" Sulzberger died last week at 86, the obituary writers unanimously declared his greatest moment as publisher of the New York Times to have been the publication of the Pentagon Papers, which he personally approved. The documentation of lies and deceit at the highest levels of government and the military during the Vietnam War took place while I was an editor at the Washington Bureau of The Times.

Parenthetically, when publication was temporarily enjoined while the case was argued before the Supreme Court, journalists at the bureau conducted a wagering pool; entrants had to predict the decision, the vote, the justices on each side and, as a tie-breaker, the day and time the decision would be announced.  I won the pool with a nearly perfect score, missing only by about four minutes on the exact time of the announcement that The Times had won the historic case.

On Punch's next visit to the Bureau, he sought out the editor who had "called the shot" on the Pentagon Papers court battle.  Given this rare opportunity to impress the Boss of Bosses, I began to pontificate about Potter Stewart's historic role on the court and blah, blah, blah.  When I paused for breath, Punch smiled indulgently and said, "In other words, blind luck."

Clyde Haberman's excellent obituary in last Sunday's Times rightly made much of Sulzberger's sense of humor, a trait he shared with Knight, whose chain of fine papers was a magnet for great editors and reporters

Both men were not averse to making themselves the butt of their jokes.  "Jack" Knight attended a meeting with his Detroit Free Press editors not long after he had been the subject of a flattering cover story in Time magazine.   When this was mentioned, Knight said, with just the right hint of a wry smile, "The piece called me 'crusty,' which I think means hard on the outside -- and empty on the inside."

Both men filled their newsrooms with outstanding editors and reporters, then let them do what they did best unfettered by concerns about what the publisher did or did not want.  Both men believed that the news columns belonged, not to the man who owned the presses, but to the readers.

Under their leadership, The Times, The Chicago Daily News, the Detroit Free Press, the Miami Herald, the Akron Beacon Journal and other fine papers practiced a kind of journalism that has all but vanished from these United States, leaving democracy the poorer.

I think probably it helped that the editors of those newspapers knew the top boss had a sense of humor.

How to Characterize Wednesday's Show

Millions of Americans will commit a political act Wednesday night by turning on their TV sets.  They'll watch something called a "debate"  between the presidential candidates.  In fact it's just another TV show, a piece of political theater, and if there's a "winner," he should receive an Emmy, not four years' occupancy of the Oval Office.

Oh well, it will probably provide a wee bit more intellectual stimulus than the entertainments whose screen time it pre-empts. There are good scripts and bad scripts and this is likely to fall somewhere in between.

Roughly four in five of the Americans expected to watch Wednesday's performances had not even been born when these things we call debates began.  The Democrat was John F. Kennedy, a young senator best known outside of Washington for being a son of one of America's richest men.  The Republican was the incumbent vice president, a tough veteran of the political wars, Richard M. Nixon.  Nixon, it was thought, would make mincemeat of the inexperienced Kennedy.

Those "debates" undoubtedly had an important effect on the outcome of the election.  Even then there wasn't a lot of substance to them.  Image -- Nixon's "five o'clock shadow," Kennedy's "youthful vigor" -- swayed more voters than anything that was said. But it was a lesson for political handlers. These pieces of theater could be powerful tools in the right hands. And so the curtain rose on Camelot while, backstage, the era of spinmeisters, damage control and sound bytes emerged from behind the drums of pancake make-up.

The debates have evolved into showcases for the theater arts of so-called journalists as well as candidates.  Jim Lehrer of PBS, the moderator for Wednesday's show, is a widely-imitated master of The Serious Look, the mandatory mien for asking banal questions that the candidates know are coming.  Performers for ABC, CNN and CBS will moderate subsequent debate shows.

All of this stuff is orchestrated by a Commission on Presidential Debates, created in 1987 "to ensure that debates, as a permanent part of every general election, provide the best possible information to viewers and listeners." The commission members are a typical cross section of the white Christian male plutocracy that runs the country, with a token woman (Dorothy Ridings, a former newspaper publisher) and a token Hispanic (Antonia Hernandez, who is also a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation and a director of the American Constitution Society and the American Automobile Association0.

The commission sets the dates for the theatricals, names the moderators and generally assures that the voting public will get an entertaining show.  The commission even has its own set designer, f'gawdsakes, who makes sure that the lighting us up to snuff.  That assures that nobody will be done in again by "five o'clock shadow" although, truth to tell, there's nothing to be done about the Republican ticket's pronounced "good hair" advantage this time around.

It's all good fun and a cheap way to fill hours and hours of broadcast time without forcing anyone to actually think.  You might say it's just another one of those "reality shows" that TV executives love to death these days.  Occasionally in the past these things have given us flashes of soap opera drama, as well.  The Talking Heads will assure us that the shows make news.

They are some kind of made-for-TV animal.  But they aren't debates.

They Will Not Let the Sun Shine In

The sorry thing about the State Department v. Anderson Cooper fooferaw is that it's just one more symptom of the Obama Administration's obsession with operating in utter secrecy.

One of the many reasons not to vote for Obama is that, after promising transparency, his administration surpassed its predecessor as the most secretive in the nation's history.

Citizens are entitled to know what their government is doing and why.  Quit playing coy about your damned drones; this isn't a game.  You're killing civilian men, women and children by remote control.  The American people are entitled to know that and, if they choose, as they should, to demand that you tell them why you're doing it.

Quit playing coy about your spying on American citizens, poking into our telephone calls, e-mails, bank accounts and travels.  It's our law, our Constitution, you're trampling on.

Quit your pious warnings to other countries about violations of human rights and tend to the atrocities in your own back yard: torture, rendition, endless incarceration without charges.

Cooper dared to peel back a tiny piece of the black shroud behind which our government operates when CNN got hold of a personal journal written by the U.S. ambassador slain in a consulate in Libya. Of course CNN did what any news organization worth its salt would do before returning it to the victim's family: looked inside to see if there was anything newsworthy in there.

There was.  CNN again did what any news organization worth its salt would do: sent reporters to independently verify the news tips in the journal.  Then it reported truthfully on what its reporters learned.

Foggy Bottom went berserk. How dare a news organization actually report news about us!  What good Washington reporters are supposed to do is regurgitate the pabulum and propaganda we shovel out to them, no questions asked. Everybody inside the beltway knows that.

It's a sad state of affairs when a television performer like Cooper has to remind the mainstream media what real journalists are supposed to do.  Sadder still that it happens so seldom. 

When a government is as committed to secrecy and presidential power as this one is, and the free press reneges on its responsibilities, as today's media have, the people have two choices: accept  their slide toward virtual slavery, or rebel.

By militarizing the domestic branches of security and public safety, mostly in secret, the government has assured itself, according to a (secret, of course)  government study, that it is in a position to suppress by armed force any attempt at revolution by the people of the United States.

And if you think that's bad, wait till next year. The corporatocracy marches on.

I Am Not Going to Lose My Lunch Again

Against my better judgment, I clicked on an online clip of an encounter between Ted Koppel and Bill O'Reilly.  I had recently eaten lunch.

O'Reilly was challenging Koppel's characterization of what's broadcast by MSNBC (on the left) and Fox (on the right) as "bad for the Republic."

O'Reilly said Fox broadcasts eight hours of "hard news" a day.

O'Reilly said that he considers that what he, himself, does on Fox is "something noble."

I threw up.  Fortunately the carpet wasn't badly stained.

How can anyone take this guy seriously?  Before I finally lost my lunch there was some kind of banter about O'Reilly's viewership and the "free market place," with O'Reilly alleging that Fox's viewership numbers couldn't happen if the network were biased.

Something like that.

I believe it was O'Reilly's employer that pioneered a broadcasting concept called "reality shows," which in fact are obscene distortions of reality, but which also attract huge audiences, and which also should not be taken seriously.

The number of viewers attracted by television productions such as O'Reilly's, and the so-called "reality shows," suggests the answer to the question famously posed by a page one headline in a British tabloid the day after the 2004 U.S. presidential election: How can 50 million people be so stupid?

At least 50 million -- far more, probably -- go through life without ever dealing with anything real.  Those who are fortunate enough to still have jobs drive to work listening to O'Reilly's soul-mates like Rush Limbaugh; on breaks and lunch hours they talk about the previous night's "reality shows" or the fictions they heard from Limbaugh or O'Reilly; after work they go home to watch/listen to more of the same. They are encapsulated in a nonsense world where America is great and good, its wars are fought by heroes to keep the world safe for democracy, dark-skinned people with rags on their heads hate us because we're free and a bunch of white guys in wigs wrote the Constitution so that we would always be a Christian nation.

In about 40 days millions of these people will cast ballots in another presidential election whose outcome will revalidate the British tab's question about mass stupidity.

I will not be among them.  I'm going to cast an early ballot, voting for either Jill Stein or Rocky Anderson (probably Stein) for president.  There are two other candidates on my ballot who are actually worthy of the offices they are seeking (a U.S. Senate seat and a local judgeship).  I'll vote for them, too.

Perhaps none of my candidates will be elected.

But I'll damn well keep my lunch down the day I vote for them.

Eleven Years Later, This Is What We Are

"A Nation Changed" was the headline in the local rag on one of the Eleventh Anniversary stories, loaded with the usual platitudes, patriotic chest-thumping and banal braggadocio.

Then came word of the tragic slaying of Americans in a consulate in Libya.

Willard Romney's sick, slimy, error-pocked statement about events in Egypt and Libya was simply one more manifestation of the utter lack of ethical leadership under which this country has operated since the September attacks more than a decade ago. 

We have become a nation fueled by hate and greed, a nation whose gross national product is war, a nation whose wealthiest few are giddily driving ever more Americans out work and into poverty with the connivance of an abjectly corrupt governmental and political system.

Throughout the Muslim world, rage continues to rise, ignited by an artistically starved amateur hate movie made in the U.S.A. that profanes the Muslim religious and cultural heritage. Even though the U.S. government rightly denounces it, the rest of the world sees it as another piece in the hegemonic American mosaic of dominion and hubris. More violence seems inevitable.

The American ruling class and the Israeli government continue hell-bent on open and unprovoked war against Iran, even as our CIA and assorted covert, private armies conduct stealth wars in a dozen other places around the globe.  They regard Iran as a nuclear threat even though it has yet to take one serious step toward developing nuclear weaponry, whereas Israel's big nuclear arsenal is the world's most poorly kept military secret but somehow is not construed as a threat to its neighbors in the Middle East. 

American drones continue to kill civilian men, women and children.  Only this week another innocent victim of our national policies of illegal detention and torture died in our black hole in Cuba.  Our president retains the dictatorial authority to declare any American citizen, here or abroad, a terrorist enemy and have that person jailed indefinitely or killed on the spot.

We have 46 million American citizens living in poverty while the richest few among us enjoy spiraling and largely untaxed wealth unprecedented in the history of the republic. At a recent post-golf beer session in a club for the merely very rich, the good ol' boys took turns boasting about the number of recent years in which they paid no taxes.  A retired physician among them, himself comfortably well off despite paying taxes every year, gave up golf rather than having to listen to this bilge several times a week.

We have nearly one in four Americans of working age out of work, and a national economy that  adds jobs at a rate that does not equal the number of new citizens entering the work force.  Virtually all the "new jobs" are minimum or low-wage service jobs.

American corporations have shipped all of their living wage jobs overseas where pay scales are much lower.  Corporate profits soar, corporate money is parked offshore and untaxed. They have plenty of cash to buy politicians who, when elected, do their bidding.

 Median income in the United States is eight percent less than it was before the Bush-Obama recession. A typical member of the wealthiest American one percent now is 288 times richer than the median U.S. wage earner.

Our "free" press has become part of a massive propaganda machine.  Our sources of "news" are mere shills for government and its corporate masters.  We have fewer and fewer places to go to find truth.

Yes, we are indeed "a nation changed."

Musings While the Green Chiles Roast

There are other, often better, ways to measure time than clocks and calendars.

One of my favorites is the green chile harvest. When you see those bushels of green heading for the roasting sites you know that the autumnal equinox is just around the corner. With the harvest comes one of the most pleasurable food aromas in the world, that of flame-roasting green chiles.  Advocates of fresh-baked bread aroma have a point, but their favorite lacks the subtle pungency of the roasting chile.

At this time of year I like to take the back roads and linger near the chile roasters, savoring the scent and dreaming up new ideas for using green chile in cooking.

The aroma sharpens other senses as well. Yesterday I spotted half a dozen "new" sandbars in the Rio Grande.  I think the water-release guys at the upriver dams ration the flow a bit more cautiously at this time of year.  When winter arrives, of course, they turn it off completely.  This year it was mid-May before they turned it on again.  Everyone dependent on that river hopes and prays for more snowfall on the southern San Juan Mountains in Colorado in the coming winter. 

Hoping and praying for water is a year-round sport in the parched southwest, one that so far hasn't affected the record drought. Hope and prayer are impotent weapons against the ignorance of man, who manages the precious resources of his home planet with reckless abandon.

But our Mesilla Valley is fortunate.  It still has enough water to get by.  On yesterday's meander I passed a field where it seems that only yesterday fresh rows of pecan seedlings had been planted.  They're trees now, soon to mature into crop-yielders. One more season, perhaps. That field is an important landmark. 

Across the road, when one generation passed the land on to a younger one, the heirs sold out to developers.  Times were good when they sold but the Bush depression came and Obama did nothing to end it, so nobody's building these days.  Two or three nondescript homes sit rather desolately in the far reaches of the plot, but the ground closer to the road is just another place for the late-night drink-and-drive cowboys to pitch their empties, used condoms and dirty sweat socks.

The heirs to the land where the pecans are growing decided to plant trees that provide an annual yield, rather than rotating three or four crops a year as their forebears did. Probably not as sustainable, long-term, but better than selling out to a developer who would plant little boxes made of ticky-tacky that all look just the same.

My back-road meander doesn't take me all the way home.  I have to travel a mile or so on a main thoroughfare.  It's littered these days with political signs.  "Keep Judge Hoozit."  "Elect Sam Friendly!"  The World's Worst Congressman, who represents our district, has more signs than anyone.  He's a drilling multimillionaire and his even richer pals in the awl and gez bidness keep him rolling in campaign funds.

A neighbor whom I know well, a good lawyer who will be a fine judge if she's elected, has a lot of signs, too. Hers somehow seem less offensive than the congressman's.  Well, she's prettier for one thing. Smarter, for another.  And a lot more honest, I believe.

On the last lap homeward I noticed that the sun is taking on its autumnal angle, creating beautiful late-afternoon light.

Where the heck did I put the camera gear?

Our National Pastime: The Lying Game

This is how low we have sunk.

•  A candidate for vice-president tells the nation so many lies that even Fox "News" acknowledges some of them.
• Truth doesn't matter, says the head of Mitt Romney's campaign for the presidency.  "We're not going to let fact-checkers run our campaign."
• Never mind the peccadillos, writes a so-called journalist for a once-reputable newspaper, Paul Ryan's speech last night was about "big ideas."

Right.  His big ideas include the notion that rape is just one more "form of conception."  That if we let children go without education, sick people go without treatment, hungry people starve to death and aged people die quickly, and continue to spend trillions  on imperial wars that violate international law and our own Constitution, we will, in 28 years, have a balanced budget. That we must not collect taxes from the very wealthy or from the richest corporations in the history of the world because then they will only cut  a few hundred thousand jobs a year rather than, say, millions.  That we must put up with millions of cases of disease and death from pollution of our air, water and soil because restrictions on what corporations can or cannot do are, well, a nuisance and a burden to the free market economy.  That guns are every citizen's right, even children, and  the occasional mass slaying in schools, synagogues, churches and mosques are the price of being free. That planetary climate change is a myth dreamed up by overpaid scientists whose jobs ought to be outsourced, maybe to Mars.  And that's just a sampler.

Tonight, as I recall, is the night that Mr. Ryan's running mate, Mitt Romney, will address the nation with still more lies.

Ah, but this is an equal opportunity country!  Next week the Democrats seeking to retain the offices to which Messrs. Romney and Ryan aspire will have their turn to lie to the nation on national TV.  Being wont to temper their untruths with soupcons of veracity, they will admit that everything isn't entirely hunky-dory in the U.S. of A., but insist that we're making progress because Barack and Joe are in office and not those nasty Republicans.  They will say they have tried and tried to compromise and will try and try again but, you know, Republicans just don't play fair.

Mainstream media performers will continue to treat everything that's said as worthy of serious consideration by  voters.

But in fact, the game metaphor implicit in "play fair" is apt.  All of this is a game, a giant charade permitted for our amusement by the  rich and powerful few who actually run things. 

The better the show the more likely it is to perpetuate the myth that we are a free people, exceptional in our national virtue and blessed with the quadrennial opportunity to choose our own leadership.  Love it or leave it!

As long as we're playing fast and loose with truth, I'll let you in on a little secret:  I never did commit journalism for a living.  I really did play the piano in a whorehouse.  I and Harry Truman.

You could look it up.

Three Voices Voters Should Hear, But Won't

Most Americans will go the polls about nine weeks from now without having read or heard a word from the only three presidential candidates who are truthfully addressing all or many of the most important issues in the republic today.

Our great quadrennial Silly Season, during which candidates for high office and their giddy advocates perform childish hijinks and applaud saccharine entertainments, is, the Associated Press soberly tells me, "in full swing" in Tampa.

More of the same will ensue in Charlotte, NC.

And then we will endure the so-called "presidential debates."

At no point in all of this will we be exposed to the positions of Jill Stein, the Green candidate for the presidency; Ross Carl (everyone calls him "Rocky") Anderson, the Justice Party candidate; or Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party candidate.

That's because they aren't "serious" candidates.  Before the 2008 primaries had run their course, a television performer masquerading as a journalist dismissed Dennis Kucinich, the Ohio congressman, for wasting time in the Democratic presidential nominating debates because he wasn't a "serious" candidate.  The TV clown said Kucinich's lack of "seriousness" was evident because he wanted to talk about the illegal wars that were killing hundreds of young Americans and thousands of Iraqi and Pakistani civilians rather than answering questions about whether he and Shirley MacLaine had actually seen a flying saucer.

Despite fierce opposition from the Romney campaign, Johnson will be on the ballot in all 50 states and, on that ground, still hopes to take part in the so-called presidential debates.  He would hold both main party candidates' feet to the fire:

Democrats: "The notion of ending the wars, the notion of ending the drug war, repealing the Patriot Act, marriage equality [all of which Johnson favors] -- wow! These are traditionally Democrat issues that they're not doing so well on."

Republican vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan: "This guy's supported the wars, this guy's proposed a balanced budget in 28 years, assuming growth, this guy voted for the Patriot Act, this guy voted for the National Defense Authorization Act, this guy proposed legislation in line with Virginia's ultrasound legislation regarding women .   . .and the irony to me is that (he's) supposed to be the boldest Republican on the budget, but if he's the boldest the Republicans have then the Republicans are really a third party, they've abandoned what's historically supposed to be Republican."

Romney's position on immigration: "I'm speaking as a  former border state [New Mexico] governor.  There's a total disconnect between his rhetoric regarding immigration and the reality.  (The language in the GOP) platform is anti-immigration; it borders on racist."

Put this guy on the stage with Romney, Ryan, Obama and Biden and we'd have the beginnings of a genuine debate. Add Anderson and Stein there might even be a smidgen of hope of restoring our democratic republic some day.

Anderson, the former mayor of Salt Lake City, wants to talk about why a Democratic administration wants to crush dissent (the Occupy movement, for example) and why government hasn't investigated what really happened on Sept,. 11, 2001.  He, too, opposes NDAA and wants to debate why it should be repealed.

He told an interviewer: "The rule of law has been utterly eviscerated during the Bush and Obama administrations. We've engaged in wars of aggression, wars for which there has been no coherent explanation. Our debt is completely out of control. We have a military-industrial complex with a stranglehold on our government. And at the core of almost every public policy failure, all we have to do to find an explanation is follow the money, because our Congress and the White House have been purchased lock, stock and barrel by wealthy corporate interests. The Republican and Democratic Parties have colluded in creating the corrupt, perverse system that has led our nation to this point today. And there is now no question in my mind that we need a major new alternative.

"This isn't only about the American people. This is about the future of our world. Climate change poses, by far, the greatest risk to humanity. And the failure of essential US leadership in the international community will end up having devastating consequences.

"If we allow the fear-driven argument that the lesser of two evils may be defeated by the greater of two evils, then we're simply conceding to the status quo. Then we'll never see a change. In fact, we'll see things continue to get worse, with the ratcheting up of an imperial presidency, with the undermining of the rule of law and our constitutional values, and a continued destruction of our democracy, as well as a worsening economic disparity - which is already worse than at any time since the 1920s and during the Great Depression.

"We can either choose to simply move the players - Republicans and Democrats - around and sustain the corrupt system in which those with the money call all the shots, or we can finally organize and take action together to choose a very different way."

Stein likes to jump into the economic issues by saying government must "make the banks do what they're supposed to do, which is negotiate to keep homeowners in their homes." She says, "The playing field is tilted against everyday people trying to get jobs, trying to have decent wages, trying to get affordable health care, trying to have affordable higher education for their kids."

She speaks out bluntly against "this president negotiating a new Free Trade agreement that is like NAFTA on steroids." She wants to talk about "the attack on our civil liberties in which President Obama codified all the violations of George W. Bush and then took it further to where he can throw anybody in jail for whatever his pleasure is."

She has lots more to say, about the real problems that have dragged this country down, and about the bogus "lesser of two evils" argument.

Gary Johnson and Rocky Anderson have lots more to say, as well. But most Americans, when they vote for president in November, will not have heard them.  Many will not even know their names.
And so they'll cast their ballots in ignorance, like sheep fattened on the sophistry of the Great Quadrennial American Silly Season.

No wonder the country is such a mess.

Don't Let 'Livestrong' Become a Victim

Today I feel like the mythical little boy who waited outside the baseball commissioner's office in some long-ago sportswriter's fable, then confronted Shoeless Joe Jackson when he emerged from the hearing that banned him for life because he deliberately lost games in cahoots with gamblers.

"Say it ain't so," the tearful boy said in the fable.  "Say it ain't so, Joe."

Lance Armstrong said it ain't so over and over and over again as he won an unprecedented seven Tours de France and countless other major bicycling competitions while being constantly accused of using banned substances or other performance-enhancing devices.

How, after all, could a man who had recovered from not one but two killer cancers perform so remarkably in this brutally challenging competition and still be clean?  With all the accusations he became the most tested athlete in sports, yet throughout his racing career no testing agency ever purported to have found evidence that he cheated.

Now, saying he is sick and tired of all the accusations, he has chosen not to fight the latest and most serious ones, which emerged from a grand jury investigation of evidence collected by the U.S. sports anti-doping people.  For most people, this amounts to a tacit admission of guilt.  Armstrong has been stripped of his seven Tour titles and banned from cycling for life.

I don't feel sorry for Lance.  He has a lot of money, his health, and a lot of memories.  He really did overcome first testicular and then brain cancer, fierce maladies that almost always kill.  And as he did so he put himself through a training  regimen the likes of which few athletes, even world class athletes, have but considered, let alone taken on.  And, regardless of what he did or ingested between races or stages of races, he really did climb all those mountains in the Alps and Pyrenees, he really did ride all those torturesome time trails, he really did outride everyone else in the field.  Given how rife his sport is with cheating, given how many of his rivals have been tested and found to have used banned substances, it is reasonable to wonder just how much of an unfair  advantage Armstrong might have gained from his alleged transgressions.

Unlike Shoeless Joe, Floyd Landis, Roger Clemens or the legion of other sports cheaters, caught or uncaught, Armstrong did one particularly admirable thing:  He founded. funded and promoted the Livestrong foundation.

As a cancer survivor myself, I admire the fact that he put a considerable portion of his wealth and all of his prestige and influence into this agency for research in quest of a cancer cure, education of the public about healthy lifestyles than can reduce cancer risk, and aid and comfort to the victims of the disease and their families.  In an age when our government can find trillions for wars that kill and maim  innocent men, women and children, but not even pittances for life-saving research and science, Livestrong is a critically important force in the effort to improve the human condition around the world.

I hope Armstrong's decision yesterday and the ensuing widespread assumption that he is guilty  do not result in the death or diminution of Livestrong.  Armstrong once asked why anyone could think he would risk everything he had put into his foundation just to cheat in bicycle racing. Now, he says, ``I will commit myself to the work I began before ever winning a single Tour de France title: serving people and families affected by cancer, especially those in underserved communities.''

I will continue to support Livestrong because the question of its founder's guilt or innocence is immaterial in the context  of the good the organization does, having raised more than $500 million for cancer causes since its foundation.

On the great gray scale of human merit, I still think that makes Lance Armstrong a far better man than his accusers.

No Point? Listen Again to the Music of Revolution

I forgive the brashness of youth but that doesn't mean I allow its impertinences to stand unchallenged.

Michael Barthel has written about popular music for a number of print outlets and his work appears widely online.  It was on the website Salon that I read his essay triggered by the conviction of the three Pussy Riot  women on hooliganism charges in Russia.

The headline -- "Protest Songs Are Pointless" -- only sort of captures what Barthel has to say.  He takes issue -- sort of -- with those who recall the music of the1960s and wonder "what happened to protest songs."  Their yearning, he writes, "feeds listeners' fantasies of music as a revolutionary tool, even though its actual pleasures are far more complex than that."  Huh?

Oh, well, toward the end of his essay Barthel does recognize, sort of,  something about the "spirit" of music as a motivating force, but he quotes another, unnamed critic when he does so: "One critic got it right when he said that Pussy Riot  shows 'the punk rock spirit . . . can be a force that incites fear.' Indeed, the spirit can, but the actual music still mostly incites pogoing." Huh?

Oh, well, Barthel also makes the point, sort of, that it's OK for Paul Ryan to like the music of Rage Against the Machine even though Rage's  leader, Tom Morello, publicly scolded Ryan for being part of the very machine he rages against: "Perhaps Paul Ryan was moshing when he should have been listening."  Never mind, writes Barthel: "The politically important stuff about music isn't the 'content' of the lyrics; it's the symbolic gestures made by the people performing them." Huh?

Oh, well, if Barthel really is saying that protest music is pointless so quit longing for the good old '60s when you fantasized that it actually motivated people to, well, protest, and besides, Paul Ryan can listen to Rage Against the Machine  if he wants to because it's a free country, isn't it? -- if that's what he's saying, he's right, sort of, about Ryan.

As for the rest of it, though, he needs to bone up on history.  He probably wasn't even alive when  people, white and black, suffered and died to advance the Civil Rights Movement.  He needs to see the grainy film footage of some of those people marching down the dusty road to Selma, singing the simple melody and simple lyrics of We Shall Overcome as they risked mistreatment in prison or even death for their actions.  He needs to learn about how the wives of battered warriors for workers' rights sang Song of the Union Maid as they marched to support their men in the bloody struggle against thugs and corrupt lawmen in the battles of the coal fields, the auto plants and the rail yards.  The underdog has always marched to the music of the troubadours of protest in the unending struggle to right the wrongs of history.

Even before Beethoven tore up the title page of his third symphony to protest  Napoleon and renamed it Eroica, the music of protest stirred a great peoples' revolution in France.  Marchers from Marseille paraded into Paris in July of 1792 singing DeLisle's Chant de Guerre pour l'Armee du Rhine and the gathering insurrectionists were so bestirred that they dubbed it La Marseillaise and made it the rallying cry of their revolution.  It remains the country's national anthem and was adapted by the leaders of three Latin American uprisings as the anthems of their own revolutions.

How many roads must a man walk down
Before you call him a man ?
How many seas must a white dove sail
Before she sleeps in the sand ?
Yes, how many times must the cannon balls fly
Before they're forever banned ?

And how many young Americans were moved to defy their own country's government by  Bob Dylan's anthem?

It's probably too late to do much about the deplorable state of this country, but a new generation of Dylans, Guthries, Seegers and their ilk might at least stir up some action.

It Was Published. It Was Not Fact-Checked.

Never mind whose side you're on in the fuss between Paul Krugman and a host of other reputable economists on one side, and Nial Ferguson, a cockamamie Harvard professor of history on the other, about Ferguson's maniacal cover story in Newsweek.

Well, on second thought, do  mind.  If you side with Ferguson, move to Missouri and vote for Todd Akin.

Otherwise, consider this little item buried in the exchange of broadsides:  Newsweek did not repeat not fact-check the article!  According to Dylan Byers of Politico, a  Newsweek spokesman said the magazine does not have a fact-checking department, and that "we, like other news organizations today, rely on our writers to submit factually accurate material."

Mein Gott!!!!!

I hope the magazine's mouthpiece is wrong that "other news organizations today" don't check the facts before publishing.  I hope the New York Times, where I once worked, not only holds editors accountable for the veracity of every word in every story they vet, but also still  backs them up with the superb research department we were able to consult back then.  I hope the Philadelphia Inquirer, where I once worked, hasn't lost the lesson it learned when it was zapped with the biggest libel judgement in history for failing adequately to check the work of a writer who was a known drunk and had a widely known jihad against one of the subjects of his article. I hope the Detroit Free Press, where I once worked, despite its economic troubles, has not ceased to hold editors accountable for the accuracy of the stories they edit.  (I once got hauled up to the office of Lee Hills, then the Free Press publisher, to explain why I allowed a a sentence with a subtle double-meaning -- not an error, mind you, but something that readers might misconstrue -- slip into a complex story.)

The very first thing we learned in journalism class, the very first thing we drummed into the skulls of rookie reporters, was, "Get it right!"  And we -- the editors -- were, by God, there to make damned sure they learned that lesson.

Because, truth to tell, that's all we had: getting it right.  The scandalously low pay, the ridiculously long hours, the shabby newsrooms -- badges of honor, because day after day, when the presses rolled we could pick up the first-offs and read our stories -- the ones we had reported, edited, checked, and checked again -- and know that we got it right.  We owed that to our readers because they trusted us to get it right.

If we could get it right in fine language -- "Literature in a hurry," as one great editor used to say -- all the better.  If we could get it first and get it right, better still.  If we could get it right and get it exclusively, best of all.

But always, always, first and foremost, get it right.

Nial Ferguson reported demonstrable economic fallacies, not facts, on several matters of key importance in his Newsweek screed.  That is to his discredit.

That it got into print is to the magazine's everlasting shame.  No fact-checkers?

Get the hell out of business.