Stimulus, Dimulus! Mobulus Jobuless.

Hot air drives public policy farther than cold facts. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Update


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

Sound, Fury and Idiots

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

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

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

"True science is proven fact."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not Like Ike

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What's Left of a River Runs Through It

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Awakening (Perhaps)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let It Snow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

False Prophets for Profit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Artist at Work

I have never seen a work by Laurie Anderson or any of the other practitioners of what is called "Performance Art." I'm told that Ms. Anderson's works usually involve gadgetry as well as spoken text, music and perhaps projections of images or videos.

Today I submit that the finest performance artist in the world is best known as an athlete.  His name is Roger Federer and the only gadget he employs is a tennis racquet.  He has won more so-called major or "grand slam" championships than any man who ever played the game  -- 16.

There are four "Grand Slam" tournaments every year -- Wimbledon, the crown jewel of them all; and the national open championships of the United States, France and Australia.  Federer has won all of them at least once, as he did just hours ago in Melbourne.  One can recite an array of statistics -- record number of major tournament finals; record number of consecutive finals; record number of consecutive semifinals, record this, record that.  Having done so, one would still be challenged by someone, somewhere, if one contended that Federer is the greatest player ever to wield a racquet.

But I don't think anyone would question the statement that Federer is the sport's finest performance artist, perhaps even the sporting world's finest performance artist. (Muhammad Ali comes to mind as a contender for the world championship.)

No player -- certainly no male player -- has ever been more balletic.  Imagine a video tape of just the lower torso of Baryshnikov at the peak of his career.  Watch the feet.  Now picture a video of Federer from the same perspective.  Watch the feet.  If it weren't for the different shoes, you'd be hard pressed to tell who's the dancer and who's the tennis player.

With only the "thwack" of the tennis ball for rhythm and the grace of his movements as melody, he creates a kind of  symphony on the tennis court.  He might begin a point andante, with carefully placed shots of moderate pace.  Then -- agitato! -- an arpeggio of deft slices, angles, volleys.  When he plays ad libitum he is apt to create a shot that nobody has ever seen before -- not only getting to a ball that few other players in the world could reach, but returning it for a winner with his back to the  net. His codas are masterly -- a service ace, a laser forehand, a topspin backhand that kisses a sideline. Each game he plays in his a capella sport is bel canto.

Tennis is a game of power, grace, speed, tactics, determination, endurance, strength, psychology and sheer mystery.  In the entire history of the game, one or two players might be Federer's better in power, or in speed, or in tactics.  None has ever equaled his total command of every element of the game. Only he, it seems, has solved the entire mystery.

There are more fine tennis players in the world today than ever before, thanks to improved equipment, coaching, diet and training methods.  Some, like Andy Murray, who lost to Federer earlier today in the Australian championships,  are capable of winning a grand slam even with Roger in the field.  It's been done a few times.

And perhaps some day someone will surpass the record numbers he is running up.  But it will be a long, long time before anyone wins so many tennis championships so artistically.

Black Ops and Red Herrings

I was enraged when I learned that the jugglers, clowns and fact-twisters on Fox Fiction were referring to the punk with the camera phone as a "journalist."  James O'Keefe is no more a journalist than Dan Quayle was John F. Kennedy.  Applying the term  to him is an insult to the craft I served, and to those  professionals in places like the McClatchey Washington Bureau who pursue the truth with dedication and integrity.

It was O'Keefe who posed as a pimp to film a "sting" of the community organizing group called ACORN. His shoddy work made the Foxies giddy with ecstasy and sent the hypocrites in Congress scurrying to take away the organization's government aid.  He was arrested last Monday in an apparent attempt to bug the phone system of a Louisiana senator. O'Keefe is just one more worm in a line  that traces back to the Nixon administration.

Even before the infamous "plumbers" brought down his presidency in the Watergate scandal, Nixon's White House employed one Jack Caulfield, an ex-New York cop, to be a political spy.  At various times Caulfield was commissioned to pose as a reporter to get dirt on Ted Kernnedy; to infiltrate the opposition and gather blackmail material on the Democratic National Committee chairman, Lawrence O'Brien, and to find candidates for the infamous "enemies list." From 1970 to 1973 the Republican Gestapo grew bolder and more ambitious.  One plan, masterminded by a secret operative named Fred LaRue, proposed to kidnap ("surgically remove") antiwar and civil rights leaders by "drugging them and taking them 'across the border.'"

Over subsequent years, as extremists of the right took full control of the party, the propensity for black ops appears to have become part of the Republican DNA.  Hence the punk with the camera phone (who could use a lesson in spycraft from G. Gordon Liddy, a former FBI agent who was a key player in the Watergate crimes).

Concomitant with the evolution of Republican espionage is the increasing ugliness of the party's hate talk.  Presumably media gassers like Limblow, Beck, O'Reilly and Coulter have inspired this contribution to public discourse.

The Nixonites at least confined their most hateful diatribes to deleted expletives in the privacy of the Oval and other White House offices.  These days Congressmen and Supreme Court Justices publicly abandon 200 years of traditional decorum for presidential addresses to Congress. A Republican senator-to-be smiles approvingly when a supporter at a public meeting calls upon him to "shove a hot curling iron up her a--,"  in reference to his opponent.  Gun-toting Obama-haters shout racist slogans, circulate racist jokes on the internet and make loathsome references to the First Lady and the two Obama daughters.  For this they are hailed by Republican party officials as patriots and grassroots political heroes.

No one is surprised that the President's call for civility in public discourse at the Republican party retreat in Baltimore has brought only derision from the windbags of the right.  It's in their political genes.

As for the O'Keefe kid, one might aptly paraphrase the voice-over on the jelly commercial on TV: "Call him anything, but don't call him a journalist."

2 Boys, 2 Books

The deaths within a day of one another of J.D. Salinger and Howard Zinn struck powerful chords in my memory.

Fittingly, it was my eldest son John who alerted me to Salinger's death.  I remembered my own introduction to Mr. Salinger, whose most famous book had just come out as my generation was preparing to enter college.  For years our favorite pejorative was "phony."  But I particularly remembered when John was 15, flailing about in a turbulent and troubled adolescence, and was given a copy of "Catcher" to read. He devoured it, then the rest of Salinger's ouvre, and not only found a path past many of his personal demons, but became a true literatus.  Today, himself a father, he is one of the best-read men of my acquaintance, and among the very most knowledgeable about fine literature and poetry. He is living evidence of the truth of Thoreau's remark that "many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book."  Though we are miles apart, John and I conducted our own ritual to Mr. Salinger's memory by re-reading "A Perfect Day for Bananafish."

I met Daniel Ellsberg through my friend and New York Times colleague, Neil Sheehan, to whom Mr. Ellsburg entrusted his copy of a massive study of the Vietnam war that came to be known as "The Pentagon Papers," for which our newspaper won a Pulitzer Prize.  But I never kew about Ellsberg's close friendship with Howard Zinn until I searched the internet to read Mr. Zinn's obituaries and found Ellsberg's own tribute to the popular historian, activist and teacher. It focused on their participation in social protests on behalf of peace and civil rights and I thought again how my late grandson, Logan, would have fit right in with them.

In his immediate post-adolescence Logan was adrift, seemingly without purpose to his life.  He had, however, become an avid reader; he was seldom without a book in hand.  One day the book in hand was Zinn's great "People's History of the United States" and another young man began a new era in his life.  Logan became a prolific writer of poetry, polemics and essays on the very causes that Zinn espoused.  He organized peace rallies, spoke to them and renewed his pursuit of a long-forgotten childhood ideal to become a history teacher himself. He became a magnet to troubled teen-agers on whom society had given up, and helped them to find new paths of their own. He organized a chapter of Food Not Bombs and prepared and carried meals to the homeless.  He had a load of them in his little pick-up truck when he had the tragic fatal crash.

Hundreds of people of all ages gathered for his memorial service on the ocean shore. Many spoke about the ways in which an extraordinary young man had touched their lives for the better.  One by one they pledged their assistance to the creation of the only memorial they deemed proper for him: a library.  Its first volumes would be the collected works of Howard Zinn.

State of the Union (I)

President Obama's first State of the Union address made clear that his greatest asset is the same one that won him the Nobel Peace Prize -- that he is not George W. Bush.

At a time when the nation was strangling on his bad policies and worse actions, Mr. Bush couldn't think of a single mistake he'd ever made as President. Last night a sitting President told us, "I take my share of blame. . ."

Mr. Bush's state of the union preachments amounted to, "Trust me, I'm doing fine, I'm the decider, and God is with me. . ."

Mr. Obama offered no such Panglossian prevarication.  He acknowledged the truth: that we managed to stave off financial devastation, but the economy still is far from healthy; that without government action our job losses might have been even greater but remained grievous; and above all that Americans are angry and hurting and greatly disappointed in their government -- with cause.

He was largely stern-faced, professorial and determined throughout his address and his few smiles were pasted-on grins, except when he acknowledged the First Lady and thanked her for her efforts to combat childhood obesity.  That smile was genuine.

But when he attempted to mask with gentle humor his jibe at the Republicans for failing to respond to anything he said -- even things he thought they'd approve of -- both his smile and the attempt at humor were painfully artificial.

And although he continued to appeal for bipartisanship, even while acknowledging the profound differences between the parties, he projected genuine determination to keep fighting for solutions to the major issues confronting the nation.

He rearranged his priorities to put jobs and the economy first, but remained committed to health care reform for all the right  reasons.  He needs to tell us more about his job creation policies, but those he described last night are promising.  Obviously he is not inclined toward the greater government financial role in job creation that many economists deem necessary, but at least he is deferring his cuts on government social programs until 2011 "when the economy has recovered more." 

Overall, he struck me as a President determined to fight much harder for some of the country's most urgent needs than he did in this first year, when he made too many concessions to his racalcitrant opposition and received nothing in return.  The surly determination of that opposition, and the personification of it, were evident when cameras panned the audience as he spoke.  It was not just Republicans who pointedly refused to applaud any of his statements; not one of the people with all the brass and braid on their suits did so either.  Nor, in fact, did a substantial number of Democrats, notably when he reminded them that they still held majorities in Congress and should not "run for the hills." When Mr. Obama rightly criticized the Supreme Court for playing politics in its decision granting corporations First Amendment license to buy elections, one of the crafters of the decision, Samuel Alito, was seen to sneeringly dismiss the President while mouthing "not true."  The Joe Wilson of the Supreme Court.

Mr. Obama chose not to address those deplorable policies of his predecessor that remain in effect -- domestic spying; pleading national security to veil activities that reek of the probability of being illegal or unconstitutional;  keeping secret the actions of senior government officials that led us into unwinnable and illegal wars.  He did proclaim that we have "prohibited" torture but that dances around the continuing renditions of captives to lands that are known  to condone and practice it. 

What Mr. Obama gave us last night was a statement of  precisely centrist goals. If Congress achieves them, the country will be a somewhat better place than it was when he took office a year ago.  If Mr. Obama remains firm and uncompromising, and the Senate Republicans filibuster, so be it.  Let the fault for failure than fall exactly where it belongs.  Surely not even the American electorate is so blind as to let that pass unnoticed.

We heard last night from a President who is not George Bush, and that's good.  Good enough, perhaps, to get these United States through one of its darkest times.

State of the Union (II)

By Mort Persky

OK, the truth. Just tell the truth!

I now have to come clean and admit that my President grabbed and squeezed me by the gut tonight. Thus there had to be times when I was helpless to remember what I really thought of his healthcare maneuvering, and whatever he was saying on my TV screen right now took precedence. It was quite a show.

Thus I mainly forgot my foregone conclusion that he was at least a Blue Dog Centrist. He papered over it so well that I considered holding his paste pot while he finished up. He came across as a man running on a straight common-sense ticket and I just couldn't resist the guy.  I sat there, his helpless captive, for the whole 90 minutes.

 We were back in a room with the same Obama we voted for a whole year and three months ago. Just like nothing had happened in-between. No Geithners, Summerses, Afghanistan surges, still-rendered detainees or threatened habeas corpuses, none of it. Here was a guy who sounded for all the world like he was determined to put  my political philosophy to work, damn the Republicans and Blue Dogs! Although he kept smiling at 'em the whole time, he got in his licks

But did I choose to forget that one of the most noticeable things he did when entering that room was go over to Geithner and give him a special look, a special smile and handshake, maybe a little shoulder squeeze that nobody else got -- right in front of every one of us, including his new friend Paul Volcker? Sure I did.

Quite a while later, the same guy was shaming the seated members of the Roberts court, Roberts himself front and center, for their recent reenforcement of corporate personhood and a good company/citizen's right to buy elections in their entirety instead of piecemeal -- or however they do it now. The justices had to sit there in their privileged seats right under his nose and take it, though I heard later he had Alito muttering about it at the very least.

It even occurred to me to feel glad I'd sent him a few bucks prior to last November -- back before I knew Lloyd Blankfein was writing him a check that would trump Bam's entire "citizen's army." That's right --- I could barely remember there was such a thing as Goldman Sachs. That's how carried away I was. The guy gives a real Oscar performance with his back to the wall, and I salute him.

A Just God

For those dedicated Christian warriors determined to drive satanic atheists to cover there is today new evidence of the existence of God.

It comes from Louisiana, of all places -- the very Louisiana upon which God had to inflict the hurricane known as Katrina because of the late Madaline Murray O'Hair's atheism. 

It is this (according to the New Orleans Times Picayune):

"Alleging a plot to wiretap Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu's office in the Hale Boggs Federal Building in downtown New Orleans, the FBI arrested four people Monday, including James O'Keefe, a conservative filmmaker whose undercover videos at ACORN field offices severely damaged the advocacy group's credibility."

What will Fox Fiction make of this?  Will Glenn Beck, who secretly helped fund O'Keefe's mischief against ACORN, take proper umbrage against this attempted crime?  Will Bill O'Reilly play the tape of O'Keefe's arrest over and over?  Will Congress pass a law?

The FBI alleges that two of O'Keefe's  accomplices  entered the federal building at 500 Poydras Street about 11 a.m. Monday, dressed as telephone company employees, wearing jeans, fluorescent green vests, tool belts, and hard hats. When they arrived at Landrieu's 10th floor office, O'Keefe was already in the office. He told the staffer they were there to fix phone problems. At that time, the staffer, referred to only as Witness 1 in the affidavit, observed O'Keefe positioning his cell phone in his hand to videotape the operation. O'Keefe later admitted to agents that he recorded the event.

Why did they want to bug Landrieu, a Blue Dog who votes with the right wing on virtually every issue?  To keep her in line? 

Never mind.  It'll all come out sooner or later.

Meanwhile, thank you, God, for jailing this scoundrel.