Tax Political Religionists

It is high time to rescind federal tax exemptions for the Roman Catholic church and other religious groups that scorn the constitutionally ordained separation of church and state.

The Roman church's high-handed interference in secular affairs is unrelenting and unlawful.  Consider the recent revelation that the top bishop in Rhode Island has instructed his priests not to give communion to Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-RI) because he supports keeping government out of the private realm wherein women make decisions about their reproductive health. Kennedy said the bishop told him "that I am not a good practicing Catholic because of the positions that I've taken as a public official," particularly on abortion.

During the 2008 presidential election, voters in heavily Catholic southern New Mexico were bombarded with robo-calls from "Bishop Ramirez"  telling them that Catholics in good conscience could not vote for any candidate (read Obama) who supported a woman's right to choose.

The anti-woman Stupak amendment to the health care bill in the house -- which prohibits health insurance payments for abortion -- was inserted at the insistence of the powerful Roman Catholic bishops' national organization, in alliance with other powerful fundamentalist religion groups.

These blatant intrusions into secular affairs must be punished under the law.  The Roman church and its fundamentalist allies, as they persist in violating the law that gives them exemptions from taxation, must be made  to pay the appropriate penalty: loss of those exemptions.

The religious lobby has become too powerful in our political system and must be curbed, along with the military-industrial lobby, the gun lobby and all the other lobbies that send overpaid sleazes in designer suits into every legislative office in Washington with bags of money and veiled threats. 

The founding fathers intended ours to be a secular government representing "we the people."  Let's begin to restore that ideal.

A Contrarian Victory

Ron Paul, the nominally Republican congressman from Texas, is sui generis in American politics.

After nine years during which bipartisanship utterly disappeared from our government, Rep. Paul revived it yesterday in stunning fashion.

Paul, who is more libertarian than Republican, teamed with a Democrat, Alan Grayson of Florida, to sponsor an amendment to the sweeping financial overhaul legislation that aims to regulate the industry for systemic risks.  It subjects  the Federal Reserve to greatly intensified audits and oversight. The amendment advanced on a 43-26 vote of the House Financial Services Committee with both Democratic and Republican support. The vote reflected the widespread and bipartisan populist anger at the central bank's policy decisions and secretive methods of operation.

It was also a sharp rebuke of the Obama administation's economic policies and especially of its top two financial regulators, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and National Economic Council director Larry Summers.

Summers and Geithner were among President Obama's very first appointments, and among his very worst.  The debate in the financial services committee gave Republicans an opening to go after Geithner's hide with particular fervor, even demanding that he be fired from the treasury post.

It stung. Geithner snapped back at them that the country's financial mess was "inherited."  What hypocrisy! Sure it was "inherited" -- from a gang of Wall Street thugs including then president of the New York Federal Reserve Timothy Geithner.

At the New York Fed he operated in the very atmosphere of clubby secrecy that the Paul-Grayson amendment will terminate.  It would allow Congress to order audits of all the Fed's lending programs as well as of its basic decisions to set monetary policy by raising or lowering interest rates.

I hope the Paul-Grayson Odd Couple keep the pressure on this administration for all of its economic policy follies.  The worst of them is what former New York Gov. Elliott Spitzer called "continuity."  He elaborated:

"They have embraced the Bush Administration view that if you solve the problem of big banks everything else flows from that. They are wrong. Too big to fail is too big. They don't get it. The only two people I know who don't appreciate that are Tim Geithner and Larry Summers. Paul Volcker, Alan Greenspan, Henry Kaufman, Mervyn King -- every major academic has said, we must get rid of too big to fail." 

Public exposure of which financial institutions get big bucks from the Fed  will put a significant dart  in Too Big to Fail.

Perhaps the Odd Couple have a few more darts in their quiver. I hope so.

What's Our Line?

America's business was business when Calvin Coolidge first uttered his famous phrase.  Now, however, America's business is war.

Although Barack Obama campaigned on a theme of change, he has done nothing to change that fundamental fact about the United States.

Why, in a nation that can work itself into a frenzy over a celebrity's breast popping out of her costume at halftime of a football game, is there not a tsunami of anger at this fundamental fact? 

Why can a blathering ignoramus on a TV show rally thousands to protest -- protest! -- our government providing health care to its citizens, whereas few voices are raised in alarm, let alone anger, at the squandering of our human and monetary resources on preemptive wars we cannot win?

Born in the violence of armed revolution, ours is a national history steeped in violence. We love it. We love our guns. We love our gory movies and the tough guys  portrayed in them.  We love our war slogans and our flag-waving notions of patriotism.  We love the idea that we are the best, bravest, most powerful nation on the face of the earth -- and if you don't believe that we mean well, we'll drop a few bombs on you and force peace down your throats.

Chris Hedges put it well in a piece entitled, "Quit Begging Obama to Be Obama and Get Mad."

"Violence," he wrote, "is spreading outward from the killing fields in Iraq and Afghanistan to slowly tear apart individuals, families and communities. There is no immunity. The longer the wars continue, the longer the members of our working class are transformed by corporate overlords into serfs, the more violence will dominate the landscape. The slide into chaos and a police state will become inevitable.

"The soldiers and Marines who return from Iraq and Afghanistan are often traumatized and then shipped back a few months later to be traumatized again. This was less frequent in Vietnam. Veterans, when they get out, search for the usual escape routes of alienation, addictions and medication. But there is also the escape route of violence. We risk creating a homegrown Freikorps, the demobilized German soldiers from World War I who violently tore down the edifice of the Weimar Republic and helped open the way to Nazism.

"The Afghanistan and Iraq wars have unloaded hundreds of thousands of combat troops, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression, back into society. According to a joint Veterans Affairs Department-University of San Francisco study published in July, 418,000 of the roughly 1.9 million service members who have fought in or supported the wars suffer from PTSD. As of August 2008, the latest data available, about a quarter-million military veterans were imprisoned on any given day-about 9.4 percent of the total daily imprisoned population. . .There are 223,000 veterans in jail or prison cells on an average day, and an unknown number among the 4 million Americans on probation. They don't have much to look forward to upon release. And if any of these incarcerated vets do not have PTSD when they are arrested, our corrections system will probably rectify the deficiency. Throw in the cocktail of unemployment, powerlessness, depression, alienation, anger, alcohol and drugs and you create thousands, if not tens of thousands, who will seek out violence the way an addict seeks out a bag of heroin."

As a people, we choose to ignore such grim truths.  Too many of us live in communities where the local economy is dependent upon the nearby military base or DoD installation.  Too many of our colleges and universities have become part of the Military Industrial Complex, dependent upon government defense contracts for too much of their budgets.  Too many of us believe that the wars we wage -- whether openly in Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Kuwait or Afghaqnistan -- or clandestinely, virtually all around the world, somehow are necessary to preserve our freedoms.  Yet we willingly forfeit our most basic freedoms in the oxymoronic belief that doing so makes us safer. The president who campaigned for change has done nothing to restore those freedoms, either; has, in fact, fought to continue the very policies of his predecessor that took them away from us.

Hedges again:

"There is a yawning indifference at home about what is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan. The hollow language of heroism and glory, used by the war makers and often aped by those in the media, allows the nation to feel good about war, about 'service.' But it is also a way of muzzling the voices that attempt to tell us the truth about war. And when these men and women do find the moral courage to speak, they often find that many fellow Americans turn away in disgust or attack them for shattering the myth. The myth of war is too enjoyable, and too profitable, to be punctured by reality."

It is profitbale only for those who are in the business of war, and whose wealth is so powerful that even those in the highest offices of the land do their bidding.  Never mind that we have exported most of our manufacturing jobs to other countries where workers are paid less; we dare not dismantle our enormous war machine because we'd lose too many jobs. We ignore the studies that demonstrate that a billion dollars invested in health, mass transit, home construction, education or tax cuts for personal consumption produce up to two and one-third times the number of jobs as the same billion spent on defense.

We justify unjustifiable wars by asserting that they will end our dependence on foreign oil, even as our military exponentially increases the petroleum consumption that already is greater than the consumption of the entire Chinese nation.

None of this makes us mad. After all, war is just business as usual.

Like It is, As It Were

When did it become de rigueur to apologize for saying, "I told you so" -- if, in fact, one did tell you so?  My parents said it to me often and they never apologized, always nursing the usually futile hope that one fine day I would wake up and heed their warnings about wrong and ill-advised ventures.

The time has come for many of us -- pre-eminently Dennis J. Kucinich, the most qualified person never to be seriously considered for the Presidency -- to say, unapologetically, "I told you so."

It was the oil, stupid.  Yes, Mr. and Mrs. America, your sons and daughters bled and died in Iraq for oil.

Every week, when we gathered for Peace and marched silently around the federal building, one or more someones in the group carried a sign saying, "No war for oil."  You spat on us, mooned us and flashed middle fingers at us.  When the war for oil actually began you pasted little flags and "Support Our Troops" ribbons on your SUVs and called us traitors.

You had to believe that your sons and daughters were being sent abroad to  protect us from terrorists, to bring democracy to the poor, stupid people of the Middle East, where Saddam Hussein had a great store of WMDs ready to rain upon us.  "If we don't fight 'em there," you told us, "we'll have to fight 'em here."  You would not, could not, believe that your kids were fighting and dying over there so that a handful of Americans stakeholders in megacorporations could become filthy rich on Iraqi oil.

Now the truth is seeping out.

Peter W. Galbraith, a former American ambassador and son of the respected economist John Kenneth Galbraith, brought his clout and his membership in the Democratic party to an alliance with the Bush administration hawks to promote the war with Iraq. "It is time to remove Saddam Hussein and his regime from power," he prattled in the influential op-ed opages of the New York Times. "Regime change is not an end in itself but a means to an end."

When we had occupied the country, fetched Hussein from his hole in the ground and Mr. Bush had declared fatuously, "Mission Accomplished," Mr. Galbraith became a key member of the commission that crafted our puppet government in Iraq and drafted its constitution.  He took good care of the Kurds, with whom he had a long history of profitable relationships.

Now the Times tells us, in another of its sorry sequence of "oopses"  about its own sorry role in promoting this sorriest of American war initiatives, Mr. Galbraith did all these things while quietly building a major stake in a Norwegian oil company whose Kurdish oil rights will net Mr. Galbraith a profit of more than 100 million dollars.

But that's peanuts in the Iraq oil takeover game.

Remember the "leadership" of British Prime Minister Tony Blair in forming the "coalition of the willing" to invade Iraq?  His own intelligence people warned him that U.S. intelligence was being "cooked to fit the policy"  of going to war under whatever justification could be made to fly.  But Blair risked scathing rebuke in Commons to take Britain into that war.   Blair is now a fat cat in the Carlyle Group, the shadowy super-investment cartel with staggering oil interests all over the globe.  British Petroleum, which owned him as PM, won the first of the enormous contracts to exploit Iraqi oil that are being awarded by our puppet government there.

Then there's our own Exxon-Mobil, whose  profits during the economic meltdown that sent millions of Americans into poverty and homelessness were greater than any ever made by a United States corporation.  Exxon  and Royal Dutch Shell recently won the right to develop one of Iraq's most prized oil fields, the West Qurna Stage 1 field.  How many Americans died to liberate that piece of the Middle East?

There are many more lucrative oil contracts to be awarded in Iraq.  Virtually every key member of the two Bush Administrations has large personal holdings in Carlyle, Haliburton, big oil companies or their major suppliers.

Timmy  Russert, who played the role of "journalist" on a TV entertainment called "Meet the Press," was a favorite in the Bush White House.  Whenever the administration wanted to plant a particularly smelly piece of bullshit, a toady would call Timmy Titmouse and arrange for someone in the administration to appear on "Meet the Press" to answer planted softball questions.

As evidence of his good conscience, Timmy occasionally brought a Democrat onto his TV show.  He invited Kucinich in February of 2003.

Quoting from the transcript of that show:

MR. RUSSERT: Congressman, you made a very strong charge against the administration and let me show you what you said on January 19. "Why is the Administration targeting Iraq? Oil." What do you base that on?


REP. KUCINICH: I base that on the fact that there is $5 trillion worth of oil above and in the ground in Iraq, that individuals involved in the administration have been involved in the oil industry, that the oil industry certainly would benefit from having the administration control Iraq, and that the fact is that, since no other case has been made to go to war against Iraq, for this nation to go to war against Iraq, oil represents the strongest incentive."

He told you so.

Back to Reality

   I returned from a recent trip to a few favorite places feeling a slight sense of optimism about the state of the nation.  I considered taking two aspirins and going to bed, but chose instead a better antidote: I read the letters to the editor and op-ed pieces in the local paper.

  There is no better place to gain appreciation of the appalling collective ignorance of Americans.   Here you find, repeated as Holy Writ, the craziest of the utterings of the familiar right-wing loonies -- people who still believe there are WMDs in Iraq (they're just very well hidden), Democrats in Washington mean to create death panels to kill grandma, and legislation to clean up our air and water is just a thinly-disguised plot to raise our taxes and use the money to provide abortions for wanton harlots who are in the country illegally.

   Our congressman, a nominal Democrat who campaigned as a champion of health care for all and women's right to make their own decisions about reproductive health, won high praise from many letter-writers for  voting for the anti-abortion amendment to the House health care bill, then voting against the bill itself.  "I was voting for what my constituents wanted," he explained.

    Translation:  All the screaming about death panels, socialized medicine, exorbitant taxes and denial of choice -- lies, every one  -- worked. 

    Blatant lies and distortions succeed as a political tactic only when the audience to whom they are directed is stupid enough to accept them on face value.

   Thus do the carefully contrived "talking points" of the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Manhattan Institute, the Hoover Institution, the Claremont Institute, the Middle East Forum, Accuracy in Media, and the National Association of Scholars, and the Center for the Study of Popular Culture -- right wing-funded propaganda institutes all -- turn up as Vox Populi in the pages of our local rag.

To quote Lewis Lapham:

"The quickening construction of Santa's workshops outside the walls of government and the academy resulted in the increased production of pamphlets, histories, monographs and background briefings intended to bring about the ruin of the liberal idea in all its institutionalized forms - the demonization of the liberal press, the disparagement of liberal sentiment, the destruction of liberal education - and by the time Ronald Reagan arrived in triumph at the White House in 1980 the assembly lines were operating at full capacity."

Or Gore Vidal:

 "Does anyone care what Americans think? They're the worst-educated people in the First World. They don't have any thoughts, they have emotional responses, which good advertisers know how to provoke."

And the fools don't even realize they're being used.

The Missing Link

The late David Rosenbaum of the New York Times, one of the longest-serving true journalists  in the nation's capital, was a master at reading, digesting and analyzing the important legislation in Congress. 

Oh, how we need him today!

The House of Representatives has passed a massive (nearly 2,000 pages) bill designed to provide health insurance for Americans regardless of their ability to pay, and prohibit some of the worst practices of the private health insurance industry such as denying coverage for pre-existing conditions or family health history.

I wonder if any single legislator who voted late Saturday night for or against the bill had read and understood it the way David understood the legislation he wrote about so clearly and lucidly.  I doubt it.

The media accounts don't really tell us much, either, and what they do say is suspect given today's media reliance on spin, sound bites, handouts and propaganda. So it's hard to work up much jubilation because our elected representatitives -- at last! -- at last! -- seem to have taken a meaningful step toward giving our citizens the kind of health care that citizens of most other civilized democracies have long taken for granted.

I share the feelings of my friend and sometime contributor, Mort Persky: "Lord, I hope it's a good bill that leads to an even better bill, but gotta be highly skeptical."

Until we can flyspeck the thing, neither he nor I will know if it's a "good bill," nor will our fellow citizens.  The mindless lemmings of the right will parrot Limbaugh and Beck and Boehner and other Republican meatheads, prattling about "government takeover" and what-all, as if they actually knew something about the bill.  But their vacuous barnyard leavings don't matter.

What matters is whether some of our elected representatives actually read every line of the legislation, and its Senate counterpart when that emerges, with as much thought, care and objectivity as David Rosenbaum once did.  If that were to happen, perhaps another Republican mind or two would see what Rep. Joseph Cao, a first-term Republican from New Orleans, saw: that the importance of health care transcends party politics.  He voted "yes" last night. Thirty-nine Democrats, including one who represents my district, voted against health care for all. There are like-minded Democrats in the Senate.

Will any of them see the light of reason?  Most of them won't even bother to read and analyze what they're ranting against.

Would that David were still around to tell them.

Forest Evashevski, Football Coach

Forest Evashevski came to Iowa in the 1950s with a Michigan background and the Delaware winged-T offense.

He took over a downtrodden program whose last great memory was the 1939 season when Nile Kinnick was an all-American.

Michigan State, Ohio State and Michigan, in one order or another, were the top dogs in the Big Ten back then. Evy beat all three of them in his first two seasons as head coach of the Hawkeyes.

Woody Hayes, the Ohio State coach, should have known what was coming when Evy snatched three of the best Ohio high school stars, including an end named Jim Gibbons, in his very first season of recruiting. Gibbons caught the game-winning touchdown pass in Iowa's upset victory over an OSU team that had national championship aspirations.

Two years later two of Iowa's most promising recruits were suspended after two young women who were not students filed sexual assault charges against them. Ultimnately the charges were dismissed when defense lawyers produced records of previous convictions of the complainants on prostitution charges -- in Columbus, OH.

I was a young sportswriter when Evashevski, the newly-hired Hawkeye coach, made his first speaking visit to eastern Iowa. Thinking to be helpful, I told him about a high school freshman the local folk thought would blossom into a very special player. "I've been in touch with Kenny's Dad," Evy replied. "I think he'll play at Iowa some day."

Play indeed. Kenneth Allen Ploen led Iowa to the Rose Bowl, where he was the most valuable player in a one-sided victory over Oregon State.

Evashevski seemed to be a step ahead of everybody -- including the fiery-tempered Hayes. Twice Evy outfoxed Hayes by installing entirely new offensive and defensive schemes just for the Ohio State game.

I learned of Forest Evashevski's death, at age 91, on the same day that I watched an Iowa football team remain undefeated through nine games by making an improbable comeback to beat Indiana 42-24.

Kirk Ferentz, who coaches the Hawkeyes these days, attributed his team's success to its "mental toughness."

Surely Evy was smiling in his new grave.

Two Updates

Update No. 1

The United States of Goldman Sachs has shifted one of its oligarchs from a high position in the businesses it controls to a high position for regulating businesses in the government it controls.

Adam Storch, vice president in Goldman Sachs' Business Intelligence Group, is assuming the new position of managing executive of the Security and Exchange Commission's enforcement division.

The Pianist has begun an autdit to determine of there are now more foxes guardinmg henhouses than there are hens in the henhouses.

A report will be published when the audit is finished.

Update No. 2

There are independent courts of great integrity in at least one western democracy: the United Kingdom.

After long months of a function called due process, which once existed also in the late United States of America, the highest court in the U.K. has reversed itself on making public information in a torture case that has aroused international indignation.

Binyam Mohamed, a British citizen, alleges in a suit against the United States and in statements by his lawyers on his behalf, that he was tortured at the hands of the CIA while in custody in Pakistan and in other countries to which he was "rendered" by the Bushies, a practice the Obamaniacs continue to defend.

Because the CIA told British intelligence agents exactly what was done to Mohamed while he was in custody, he asked the British courts to release those documents to him to prove that anything he told the CIA was coerced.

The High Court's original ruling in Mohamed's favor contained seven paragraphs which described the torture to which Mohamed was subjected. In its original decision in favor of Mohamed, the High Court redacted those seven paragraphs at the request of the British government, because the Bushies threatened -- the court's verb -- to cut off intelligence flow to Britain that was deemed essential to the national security of the U.K .

The Obamaniacs stood behind the Bush threats, but in a new decision, the British High Court ruled that it considered the threats to be mainly blue smoke, and in any event, the U.K. public interest in the seven paragraphs overrules any national security questions.

In short: Truth trumps government bullshit.

There's one more appeal to be heard before the stuff hits the fan.  (Hint:  Reports in England, where many reporters still practice journalism, indicate that the most lenient of what was done to the prisoner was waterboarding.)

Panic's first cousin

  Today's Wall Street Journal tells me that the Tea Party gang -- they don't mention "birthers," Palinites, Limbaugh lovers or Fox "News" faithful --  are creating problems for the Republican Party in its efforts to rehabilitate itself and retake Congress in 2010.

  I don't believe a word of it.

  The Republican base IS the Tea Party Gang -- and the birthers, Christicans, Foxies and their ilk.  Among the assets they bring to their party, besides a zealot's passion and a lemming's mob mentality, is an uncanny ability to use the internet to turn blatant lies into widely accepted "truth."

   Breathes there a soul who did not receive the e-mail about how Ollie North, testifying in the Iran-Contra hearings, warned the country about Osama bin Laden and put a Senate questioner, John Kerry, in his place while doing so?  There were two little flaws in this: North, long enshrined in the litany of right-wing saints, never said any such thing; and Kerry was not a member of the Senate committee that questioned St. Ollie.

   What's now going around is an e-mail purported to have been written by David Kaiser, a reputable historian and member of the faculty of the Naval War College.

   It's a screed, pure and simple, sounding very much like a list of talking points from Limbaugh and Michael Steele.  The friend who forwarded it to me asked, "What if he's right?"

  "He" is not right and "he" is not David E. Kaiser, who posted the following on his website, "History Unfolding:"

"People are still arriving here because they have received an email attributed to myself comparing President Obama to Adolf Hitler. They are also still calling my home, contacting the public affairs office of the Naval War College, and deluging another David Kaiser with emails. I did not write, and do not agree with, that fraudulent email."

   There was the Jane Fonda lie intended to add heroic dimension to John McCain's stoicism as a Prisoner of War.  The fellow POW to whom it was attributed denied having written it.

   The birth certificate lie got its first legs through internet forwarding of messages often attributed to reputable sources who had to issue denials.

   I can't count the number of internet forwards -- not all of them political in nature -- that I've checked out and found to be fraudulent.  Most of the political frauds come from the far right and they have been inordinately effective -- "death panels," forced enrollment in government-run health plans, Obama as socialist, Obama as Muslim, Obama  and the birth certificate.

   The Base disttributes these lies and The Base believes them.  A recent poll conducted in rural, fundamentalist Tennessee disclosed pluralities who believed the socialist, Muslim and birther lies.

   The First Amendment right to free speech must not be weakened, although, as the Supreme Court ruled in Schenk v. United States, it is not absolute.  In his majority ruling, Justice Oliver Wendell Homes, Jr., wrote:

   ". . .the most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic."

   In my view, the right-wing internet liars are shouting fire in a very crowded public place.  Are they causing a panic?  They're sowing fear, which is panic's first cousin.
 

Toward Corporatocracy

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

–W.B Yeats

By Steve Klinger

   The summer was all about what happens when a country is run by a greed-driven oligarchy that is able to tap into populist fear, anger and racism to advance its agenda – and block reform. Although polls have shown up to 75 percent of Americans support universal health care, it’s the other 25 percent, largely funded by moneyed special interests, who grab all the headlines with their hysterical obstructionism and wild accusations.
   Instead of a discourse on corporate healthcare rationing and the impending bankruptcy of the middle class, teabaggers and rabble-rousers scream incendiary rhetoric: socialism, Hitler, Maobama. The debate is deflected from the merits of fixing our broken healthcare system to a vitriolic assault on all things Democrat that leaves progressives and moderates alike in helpless confusion at this unexpected lack of civility from the right. Gosh, could there be violence?
   Congress as usual is gridlocked, with all the power residing in the corporate puppetmasters who pull the strings backstage while Max Baucus does his little tapdance. The Democrats, having already compromised with themselves, are poignantly begging for one Republican vote to get the most diluted of bills moving in the Senate. Also stalled are meaningful climate-change and financial-industry reform. The economy may be inching out of recession, but home foreclosures and unemployment rage on. The ice shelf keeps crumbling into the sea. Everybody knows what the problems are, but no one can accomplish a solution.
   It’s a good thing Americans are optimistic people because things are about to get a whole lot worse. Our glaring socioeconomic inequities and ongoing national paralysis are perhaps a few months away from taking a mortal body blow from the third branch of government – the Supreme Court. While the mainstream media have frothed over healthcare legislation, a SCOTUS case, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, was reheard by the Roberts court in September, and the smart money says the conservative majority will overturn more provisions of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance act, allowing special interests to pour money more freely into campaign advertising, just in time for the 2010 elections and the 2012 presidential campaign (http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0909/26843.html).
   To put it succinctly, the Court is leaning heavily toward a ruling that puts the First Amendment protection of corporations on the same footing as that of individuals, rolling back some tight restraints on political spending by special interests. Instead of having to channel money through PACs to “soft-issue” advertising, corporations (and labor unions, among others) would be able to spend money on ads directly backing or opposing candidates. If the Court doesn’t just further loosen restraints but opens the floodgates, the millions now filtering into the healthcare debate from Big Pharma and Big Insurance would be a trickle compared to the frontal assault unleashed to help Republicans regain Congress and oust Obama.
   Forget public campaign financing, the sensible alternative practiced in most other advanced western nations, along with universal health care. (Do we see a pattern here?). Like single payer, that’s off the table in this country. Instead, we seem to be in a losing fight to hold onto what’s left of McCain-Feingold. If you think it’s frustrating right now that our leaders won’t do the people’s bidding on financial or healthcare reform, just wait and see what kind of “elected” government we have in a few years.
   Isn’t it ironic that so many humanoids who pass for citizens of American Dreamland are getting their panties in a knot calling Obama and the Democrats totalitarians? They will have a rude awakening when the fecal waste of their populist rhetoric hits the blades of the approaching corporate propeller.
   (Steve Klinger conducts and writes regularly on http://www.grass-roots-press.com/blog/ and is the founder of both the print and online versions of New Mexico's outstanding alternative information source, The Grassroots Press.

Racist? Me?

   Republicans today seem largely incapable of political discussion without resort to vitriol, personal attacks and canned lies -- especially vitriol.

   My local paper recently published a letter to the editor from a Republican appropriately named Biles.  Biles's bilious blurb of 300 words began with 120 words of sheer  personal insults to the writer of a column he disagreed with.  "Demagogue" and "drivel" were two of the milder derogations.

   The columnist (rightly, in my opinion, as readers of this site already know) had written that much of the Republican hatred of President Obama is race-based.  Biles retorted that, as a lifelong, proud Republican, he didn't know of a single racist in the party.  It would appear that he's never heard of Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Joe Wilson or Michelle Bachmann.

   Biles repeated several of the favorite Frank Luntz mantras against the Democrats, then got off on the personal responsibility tack.  We believe in helping the truly needy, he asserted, but if "they" aren't willing to work for what "they" get, then "they" can just go pound sand. Why should "we" share "our" hard-earned wealth with "them?"

  Is there anyone who doesn't recognize the code?

  Ironically, on the very day that I read Biles's bile I learned the story of Michelle, a highly educated (Ph.D. and two MA's) specialist in an esoteric field, who had held a well-paying job at a public agency before the Republican economic disaster.

  She'd been laid off in the vast round of budget cuts caused by the failed Republican policies.   She had been freelancing projects in her field for anyone who had funds to pay for them.  She had lost her health insurance with her job.  She didn't have an ort of food in the house.  She couldn't afford to buy food until an expected $300 check arrived, her fee for a recent freelance project.  IF the check ever arrived.

  The compassionate Republicans don't give a damn about the hundreds of thousands of Michelles in this country; meanly resist repairs of a broken health care system that might at least enable them to get flu shots; fight viciously to preserve multi-million-dollar bonuses for the bailed out honchos of the failed financial system; and gladly circulate watermelon patch in the Rose Garden jokes on the internet.

   May they all choke in their own vitriol.