Keep an Eye on the Brits, Washington

Maybe if we're lucky we'll get another lesson in government from the Mother Country.

Here's the deal:

No party in England's national election won enough seats in Parliament for a majority, which is required to form a government.  David Cameron's Conservative Party won the most seats (and the most popular votes) but not enough to put a Tory in No. 10 Downing Street.  The ruling Labour Party of Prime Minister Gordon Brown finished second in number of seats won and, by a narrow margin over the Liberal Democrats, in the popular vote.  The Lib Dems were thought to be surging, but actually lost seats, yet nevertheless could emerge as kingmakers.

Their seats plus the Tory seats would be enough to form a coalition government.  That, in fact, is what Cameron has proposed to the Liberal Democrats' charismatic leader, Nick Clegg.  Cameron said his "big, open and comprehensive offer" would ensure stability for the British government and would include LibDem cabinet seats.  Clegg seemed receptive, saying the party with the most seats should govern. (He also refers to Brown as a "squatter" on Downing Street.)

If this coalition happens, it would be somewhat like Mitch McConnell and Dennis Kucinich forming a coalition government here -- if we had more than two parties and a system that allowed for coalition governments.

Wouldn't work, would it?

Don't bet against the Brits.  These, after all, are the people who defeated the Luftwaffe using only "blood, sweat , toil and tears."  They know how to make things work, even if they suffer doing so.

And if they succeed, will we, too, learn how to make coalitions work for the betterment of the people?

In the U.S., the Democrats control the White House and a majority in both houses of Congress -- and haven't done a damned thing to fix the god-awful mess Dubyuh left behind.  Took 'em a year to realize that even lacking 60 votes in the Senate, they could still pass some kind of health care bill.  OK, it's a lousy bill.  But it's something.

Meanwhile, getting control of the economy; providing jobs for millions who are out of work; restoring confidence in the marketplace; devising an intelligent and workable immigration policy, restoring Constitutional values, rule of law and the Bill of Rights; ending illegal, costly and demeaning wars; all of these and other pressing needs go unsolved, like the massive oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. Republicans simply vote "no" on everything and let the country flounder like oil-soaked pelicans in the bayou.

If Cameron's coalition comes to be, it will need true cooperation between the left-of-center Lib Dems and the Tory right in order to govern effectively.  If our hapless, corporate-owned, sleazy, lying, cheating pols will watch and learn, perhaps we can still muddle our way to becoming a better country.

Then again, we got the very foundation of our legal system from the Brits, and look what a mess we've made of that! We've even given up Habeas Corpus. 

What's next, politically?  Hogamous, higamous, let's go polygamous.  As the Mother Country may yet prove, it's better than what we've got.

Look Who's Not Coming to Dinner

In an age when newspapers are dying, good journalism is more rare than sightings of Yeti and millions of Americans base their political opinions  on misinformation from jugglers and clowns, is it too much to ask for just a gesture of maturity on the part of Washington reporters?

End the high school musical fiasco called the White House Correspondents' Dinner.  It could be the first step toward establishing a professional relationship between Washington journalists and Washington politicians.  A respectfully adversarial relationship.  One that would benefit not just consumers of news, but reporters of it and sources of it.

I don't expect this to happen overnight.  The cozy, inside baseball, old school tie climate of  Washington journalism has been evolving too long, is too deeply entrenched on both sides for instant reform.

But getting rid of the infantile correspondents' dinner would at least be a signal of better intentions.  One of the great benefits of retirement from the newspaper business is not having reason to attend the silly things any more.  They're boring, insipid, the food is mediocre and they demean newsmen who allow themselves to be stuffed into white tie and tails just to rub elbows with the highest and mightiest of people they're supposed to cover.

The thing should have ended several years ago, when Bush II sank to  making a silly skit out of the non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.  Rather than walking out, as they should have, the so-called newsmen actually laughed at this. Here was the President of the United States, the Commander in Chief of our Armed Forces, making a joke out of the lie with which he bamboozled Congress and the public into supporting a war that is still going on; that has cost  thousands of lives and trillions of dollars.  Here were the men and women who are supposed to report the truth about our government, chuckling along with good ol' Dubyuh at the bloodiest sick inside joke of all time.

From what I hear, nothing quite as obscene happened at the 2010 White House Correspondents' Association dinner last week.  Someone told me Jay Leno was a dud;  that Obama dutifully poked lame fun at himself and the opposition; that Biden was the butt of lots of jokes about his talent for putting his foot in his mouth. High school pep-rally humor of the sort that would be cause for instant dismissal of a writer for the Stewart or Colbert shows.

How many examples must we have  of supposed "news" reporters allowing themselves to be used as puppets of the politicians in power before some responsible editor or publisher declares, "Enough." He or she could immediately demonstrate bona fides by refusing to  allow his or her journalists to participate in the anachronism of the correspondents' dinner.

No more puerile song parodies.  No more wink-wink insider jokes. No more stenography. Just serious, hard questioning, slogging, dig for the truth, detached reporting of what our government is up to.  It used to be called journalism.

It isn't done by sharing Gratinee de Coquilles St. Jacques and Domaine Gouron Chinon with Tim Geithner, Larry Summers and the rest of Barry's Bosom Buds at a fancy dinner while millions of Americans are still jobless and Washington has not taken a single action in nearly a decade to really fix what's wrong in this country.

The fat cats scarfing canapes last week don't even seem to realize that anything's wrong.

This Was the Week That Was

Sing, it Dinah! Sing, "See the U.S.A. . . . ."

See the offshore drilling platform catch fire, blow up, sink, killing 11 workers and creating the worst oil spill we've ever had. See them call in the Navy, the Coast Guard, the robot subs, the shrimp boats; see them actually set the ocean afire. How's that make you feel about more offshore drilling on the Atlantic Coast, and up in Alaska? Swell idea, eh? Gotta keep those Hummers humming.


"America is asking you to call. . ."

Call on Arizona -- if your skin is very white, and you've got a passport, a driver's license and six other forms of picture ID to verify that you are, by God, a red white and blue-blooded citizen of the Yew-Nited-States of Murrica. If you look the slightest bit Mexican, Guatamalan, Haitian, Dominican, Puerto Rican, Chinese, West Indian or such -- maybe even if you look sort of like the President himself -- you'd better be ready for a set of pink drawers and some hard time in Shurf Joe Arpaio's canvas jail, where dawgs get better treatment than prisoners.

"See the U.S.A. . . ."

See the Goldman Sachs guys in the thousand-dollar suits try to explain why Wall Street's "heads I win, tails you lose" way of doing business is really just good old American free enterprise. See the Senate Republicans refuse to allow a vote on legislation that would regulate Goldman and the other banks that are too big to fail, because Republicans believe in free enterprise. See some of the country's richest men struggle to spell F-R-A-U-D.

See two even richer men -- Pete Peterson and Bob Rubin, both former financial policy-makers for the federal government -- tell pensioners that they have to learn to sacrifice more. Everybody's got to pitch in, you know, so the economy can recover from the mistakes of the financial policy-makers for the federal government. At your age, Mort, you don't really need three meals a day.

"America's the greatest land of all . . ."

Yes, the greatest -- if you're Exxon Mobil, the most profitable company in the history of profit, whose first quarter earnings were up 38 per cent over the year before. Drill, baby, drill!

The greatest -- unless you work in a coal mine. Thirty-one miners in West Virginia and Kentucky are dead in mines with long records of safety violations. Even Rush Limbaugh decried unsafe conditions. "Where was the union," he demanded after the West Virginia tragedy that killed 29. "Why didn't their union do something about those conditions?" But there was no union. Workers tried three times to get a certification election, but the mine owners managed to stiff them every time. Legally.

The greatest -- provided you speak English. Tim James, an Alabama gubernatorial candidate vows to put an end to driver’s license tests being conducted in any language but English. “This is Alabama. We speak English,” he tells voters in a campaign ad. (Have you ever tried to translate a pure Alabamian dialect into English?)

The greatest -- unless you're a woman in Oklahoma. The Oklahoma Legislature this week overrode Gov. Brad Henry’s veto of two anti-choice bills, one of which gives doctors immunity from being sued if they conceal information about a fetus’s possible birth defects from a pregnant patient.

The greatest -- unless you're one of the six in every ten Americans who live in places where the air you breathe is dangerous to your health, according to new report from the American Lung Association.

All of this in a single week. Sing it again, Dinah!

"America's the greatest land of all . . ."

Spare Me the Details

The Jack Kevorkian movie on HBO has triggered another spate of maudlin first-person stories about loved ones snatched from the jaws of doom who would have been dispatched to the hereafter if they'd fallen into the clutches of a Dr. Death.

Spare me.

I have first-person stories of my own, the sort that impelled me to send a modest contribution to Dr. Kevorkian's defense fund for the trial that put him in prison. I almost wish I hadn't, because rather than hiring a good lawyer he chose to defend himself, with predictable consequences.

I presume the people who are posting their macabre tales on internet sites are the same ones who prodded the political slime into making a public issue of the Schiavo family's very private grief a few years ago. The decision to terminate artificial life support for a loved one is difficult enough without the obscene circus those people created.

Their narratives can't even be left to speak for themselves. They've got to be tarted up with purple. Hence, in one recent post, the representative of The Hemlock Society was "an overweight man in a black suit and a bolo tie." (Boo, hiss.) He didn't speak, he "drawled," droppin' the final "g" of his gerunds, the way , y'know, villains talk. He "pulled out what looked like a dirty white headband" as he prepared to help Momma die.

Spare me.

I haven't seen "You Don't Know Jack," the HBO movie on Kevorkian, but I'm told that it treats him fairly, neither varnishing over his personal flaws nor tarring him as a heinous killer. His facial resemblance to Boris Karloff alone would have made him an easy target for hate.

All I ever knew about Dr. Kevorkian is what I read. Despite the undertones of moral outrage in the media coverage, I concluded that he was doing important work. The suffering of the terminally ill can be unspeakably cruel. Three states have passed more enlightened laws regarding assisted death since Jack came on the scene. That can't be entirely coincidental.

How striking is the difference between how we treat dying pets and dying humans! Our beloved cocker spaniel, Sandy, died with dignity and compassion in the care of a kindly animal doctor. My cancer-ridden mother suffered the torments of hell before she died.

What sort of society permits animals to die with dignity but requires people to endure agony before dying "naturally?"

Surely it is time to recognize that rational human beings have an absolute right to determine for themselves when their quality of life has become so dismal that extraordinary efforts to sustain it should be terminated.

The right, if you will, to be treated like dogs.

How Now This Honorable Man?

McClatchey newspapers, in a series of articles beginning last November, exposed the machinations of Goldman Sachs in packaging worthless mortgages as investments which it sold to clients even while taking a short position on them -- that is, betting that they would fail.

Fail they did. But Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of the investment bank that almost caused the entire U.S. economy to collapse, insists he and his cohorts did nothing wrong.

And Lloyd Blankfein is an honorable man.

In e-mails exchanged among executives at Goldman Sachs, the bankers crowed over their financial successes from betting against the housing market.

But Lloyd Blankfein will testify to Congress tomorrow (according to reports today based on his prepared remarks) that, "We didn't have a massive short against the housing market, and we certainly did not bet against our clients. Rather, we believe that we managed our risk as our shareholders and our regulators would expect."

And Lloyd Blankfein is an honorable man.

Earlier this month, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a civil fraud case against Goldman, saying it misled investors about securities tied to home mortgages. Regardless of the outcome of the SEC's case, "Goldman Sachs has lost," said James Cox, a Duke University law professor and securities law expert. "It's lost in the arena of public opinion."

And Lloyd Blankfein is an honorable man.

Politicians in the U.K. and Germany are starting to call on their governments to cut ties with Goldman, which has long been one of the top financial advisers to European policy makers. In the United Kingdom, Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg, who leads the opinion polls less than three weeks before national elections, said on Tuesday that Goldman "should now be suspended in its role as one of the advisers to the government until these allegations are properly looked into." His comments follow Prime Minister Gordon Brown's recent characterization of Goldman's alleged behavior as "morally bankrupt."

And Lloyd Blankfein is an honorable man.

In Rolling Stone magazine, mild-mannered reporter Matt Taibbi characterized Goldman Sachs as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money."

And Lloyd Blankfein is an honorable man.

When he goes before the Senate Permanent Committee on Investigations tomorrow, Blankfein will say that the young trader charged with securities fraud for failing to disclose alleged conflicts of interest when he sold a portfolio of toxic mortgages to investors “showed poor judgment,” but also that the company didn’t fire him because he did nothing illegal. The trader, Fabrice Tourre, is accused of misleading customers into buying a pool of collateralized debt obligations — complex mortgage bonds that many consider the root cause of the economy's great collapse — by not revealing that the pool was largely assembled by a short seller betting that the investment would decline in value.

But Lloyd Blankfein is an honorable man.

Would that some modern-day Caesar cry Havoc, and loose the dogs of war upon this honorable man, and his honorable friends at Citibank, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and WellsFargo.

Goldman and the four Big Banks have assets of $8.1 trillion, equal to 59.7% of our entire gross domestic product.

No wonder the bastards own Congress and the rest of government. The purchase price was chump change for them.

But Lloyd Blankfein is an honorable man.

A Stroll Down Easy Street, USA

Wall Street? Main Street? No, Easy Street is the American Way. Americans prefer slogans to thinking. They want SUVs, air conditioners and golf courses; let future generations worry about environmental damage, fossil fuel dependency and potable drinking water. It's easier to paste a ribbon on the pickup truck than to actually think about whether what we've accomplished in Iraq and Afghanistan in the last 8 years is worth a single young American's life -- let alone thousands. We have made a collective, national decision not to try to answer the hard questions that confront us.

As a people we have been brainwashed by the millions of dollars worth of propaganda corporate America rains down upon us. Every branch of government continues to cede more power to corporations, edging the American people farther and farther away from reality.

The global warming "debate" is an example. It isn't a debate and global warming is only part of a related series of hard questions we have to answer about the envelope of life around the planet on which we live. We have been carefully taught to ignore such hard questions. Corporate America, led by Exxon, the most profitable corporation in the history of man, has persuaded us to stroll down Easy Street shouting slogans and listening to the elevator music of phony science.

The debates we ought to be having haven't even started; the white noise of corporate bovine excrement has shut them down. Everyone gives lip service to "green energy" -- sort of like pasting those "support our troops" ribbons on the SUV -- but having blinded us to the real motivations for it, corporate America won't invest seriously in it.

The area in which I live in New Mexico could be an enormous source of renewable energy from wind and sun. But the extraction industries that hold political power here have coached the people in NIMBY.

Another potential treasure trove of renewable energy is the Mojave Desert in southeastern California. Not only does it have 360 days of sunshine a year, but it also has some fierce wind that could be harnessed. There's a small wind farm development not far from the city of Mojave; now, there's interest in developing solar power there as well.

The Mojave is also home to a great many rare plants and animals, a precious and fragile ecosystem that some environmentalists want to protect from development of any kind even as other environmentalists promote renewable energy development.

The hard question is:Shall we have clean energy if it destroys sand dunes, endangered animals and plants, ancient lava flows, fossil beds, cactus forests and the pictorial record of native American culture? The answer is not to be found on Easy Street, USA.

The feds at one point authorized solar energy development on a million-acre tract of Mojave desert land that was donated to Uncle Sam. "Whoa," said the donor, the Wildlands Conservancy, which gave the land to the feds for conservation. Sen. Diane Feinstein of California is moving to protect the area by having it designated a national monument. The solar developers have backed off.

The Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technologies hasn't given up.V. John White, its executive director, says the Mojave is a very big place that should have room for everybody. "There's 4.5 million acres set aside for the desert tortoise, there's 3.5 million acres for the military reservations, there's 1.5 million acres for state-protected species, and the monument will take another million acres off the table," White told NPR radio. "Right now we have more land available for off-road vehicle parks than we do for solar, and that's crazy."

Maybe it's not so crazy on Easy Street, USA, where the corporate wealth of the ATV industry speaks loud. "Public land is for everybody," is their slogan.

Don't bother thinking about it.

A Bad Idea, Properly Stifled

The rule of law is a quaint notion that a bunch of starry-eyed dreamers once thought might apply to a republic aborning in a hall in Philadelphia.  This was back in the 18th Century.

By the dawn of the 21st Century the crazy idea had long since been laid to rest in the republic, whose name is the United States of America.

It still has a national legislature, called Congress, that occasionally passes laws.  It has a chief executive who frequently signs them.  And it has a Supreme Court that, well, sort of pontificates about them, feigning homage to a document called the Constitution.

All of this is an elaborate game because, except for really unimportant little people, called citizens, the laws don't apply to anyone.

Laws that prohibit bribery, fraud and vote-stealing, for example, do not apply to members of Congress, especially in states south of the Mason-Dixon line.   No law whatsoever applies  to the chief executive, as long as he remembers to utter his magic incantation, "national security."  The Supreme Court pretty much ignores the laws passed by Congress and signed by the chief executive because, on any given day, the law is what five justices say it is.

That's how it came to be that people called corporations are above the law, too.  The more profit they make, the higher above the law they are.  Some corporations don't even have to make a profit to be far above the law.  They are called banks and they have names like Goldman Sachs or  CitiGroup.  Being a bank is a license to steal from citizens, who are powerless to do anything, and use their money for a really big time game of roulette called investing.  When the banks lose the citizens' money by investing huge sums in absolutely worthless things, called derivatives,  the government gives them more money to invest.  The highest executives of corporations, especially banks, are so far above the law that when they violate it, they are rewarded with immense amounts of money, called bonuses.

The major role of the federal government in this republic is to give money to corporations that fail.  Its other duties are to  fight wars that Congress never declared and to collect something called taxes from citizens who have any money left over after being robbed by the banks.

Well, there is one more job the federal government has to do, and it is probably the very most important thing.  The federal government must shrink.  It must get smaller and smaller and smaller until it disappears entirely.  When the federal government has finally disappeared entirely, the republic will be exactly what those starry-eyed dreamers back in the 18th Century wanted it to be.

People will be truly free.  That's  because everyone will have guns, lots of guns, big guns, little guns, long guns, short guns, howitzer guns, machine guns; guns guns guns.  If the silly notion about rule of law had been allowed to remain, some socialist fascist dictator would have passed a law prohibiting people from having guns.  Then nobody would be free.

Well, say some terribly ignorant people, called liberals, if there's no federal government there won't be anyone to give money to the failed corporations; to raise an army to fight the wars that were not declared by Congress; to spy on citizens, even in their bedrooms, and make certain they aren't really terrorists; to torture, assassinate and imprison people who aren't like us; to keep the republic Christian, as those starry-eyed 18th Century guys, called Founding Fathers, intended it to be; and to encourage corporations to drive the cost of health care so high that mere citizens won't clutter up hospitals and clinics because they can't afford to be there anyway.

Best of all, there would  be nobody to collect taxes either.  It will be party time!  Somebody brew the tea.

The Sour Notes We Do Not Hear

Lee Hills was not a physically imposing man, but if you were a 28-year-old, newly-minted assistant city editor summoned to his office, you were staring at a giant.  Hills, editor and publisher of the Detroit Free Press, had risen from humble, small-town beginnings to become Jack Knight's right-hand man in editorial matters for the Knight family's excellent chain of newspapers.  He was smart, fair and he oozed dignity.

"Do you stand by this story?" he asked.  I knew that if I said "yes" the meeting would be over and he'd back me to the hilt till the story's flaws were laid bare.  If I said "no" I knew that he would rightly demand why in the hell I should remain in an editor's post on a newspaper whose integrity ultimately was his responsibility.

"There are no serious factual errors in it," I said, "but there are two minor ones.  I believe they require a standard correction notice.  They should not have escaped my notice.  Deadline pressure is the reason they slipped by -- but not an excuse. "

"Is that all?" he asked.

I hope my hesitation was not as long as it seemed to me.  "No," I said.  "Two minor errors of fact are not the problem with the story.  The problem is that everyone who handled it -- especially me -- was tone deaf."

"Interesting choice of words -- tone deaf," he said.

"The overall tone of the story is wrong," I said.  "Too often when we're writing or editing a piece, especially on deadline, our inner ear fails us, we go tone-deaf.  In this story, the sequence of thought in some of the paragraphs, the language, the choice of words,  all add up to a tone that isn't right.  We weren't hearing the same music that the readers of the story would hear.  And that's a failing on our part."

"As you no doubt have guessed," he said, "I have received a complaint about the story."

I waited for a shoe to drop.  It was a most terrible moment.

"I will tell the complainant that we are publishing a correction of the two facts we got wrong. Please see to it that I get a copy of the correction."

With a sigh of relief I accepted his gesture of dismissal and went back to work.  But I wasn't off the hook.

Some time later Jack Knight himself was in town for an editors' meeting.  He'd just been the subject of a Time magazine cover story that called him "crusty" and a "curmudgeon" and the owner of a chain of newspapers producing some of the best journalism in America. "Crusty," he said.  "I wonder if they meant that I'm tough on the outside -- or hollow on the inside?" It was all he had to say about the magazine story.

How privileged I am, I told myself, to labor in the shadow of such great journalists.  Whereupon I heard Lee Hills utter my name, and call upon me to repeat what I'd said to him about deafness because he thought Mr. Knight and the other editors here assembled might find it interesting.

An even more terrible moment.

I think I managed to say pretty much the same things I had said to Hills in our  meeting, but to tell the truth, my memory is a blur.  Jack Knight seemed to give my words a slight nod of approval -- perhaps I simply hoped that -- and Lee Hills said, "Thanks, Tom," and moved on.

The movie in my mind replayed those scenes from yesteryear just the other day when a major newspaper published a story about a young man whom I know and an important matter in which he was involved.  There were few serious factual errors in it but the tone was entirely wrong.

It was a grave injustice to a good man who does good work, of that I am certain.

I am almost as certain that neither the writer nor his editors heard the sour notes when the piece went into print.

Sad.  Being made to hear them would make them better journalists.

Government, and Justice, by Crap Shoot

Supreme Court appointees sometimes surprise everyone, even the Presidents who nominated them, with the work they do after they've been seated.  Earl Warren's record as Chief Justice surprised and did not always please Dwight Eisenhower.  Byron (Whizzer) White surprised and did not always please John F. Kennedy.  John Paul Stevens surprised and did not always please Gerald Ford.

Then again,  Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, John Roberts and Samuel A. Alito have produced exactly the kind of ultra-conservative, law-bending jurisprudence their conservative nominators expected of them.

President Obama is about to make his second Supreme Court nomination, to replace Justice Stevens.  Already the Republicans are blowing Force Twelve hot air without even knowing who the nominee will be.

Whomever Mr. Obama chooses, we can only hope that he or she will serve in the distinguished tradition of Justice Felix Frankfurter, who memorably wrote in a 1943 dissent, "As a member of this Court, I am not justified in writing my private notions of policy into the Constitution, no matter how deeply I may cherish them or how mischievous I may deem their disregard."

The nation desperately needs another such judicial philosophy on its highest court, as counterweight of sorts to the Four Horsemen of the Far Right who routinely write private notions of policy into the Constitution from their narrow point of view as doctrinaire Roman Catholics with an inbred loathing of federal government.

Whether such a nominee will in fact be offered depends largely upon which Mr. Obama makes the appointment.  Will it be the Obama who boldy threw down the gauntlet to the Four Horsemen and their collaborator in perfidy, Anthony M. Kennedy, for the dreadful Citizens United decision?  Or will it be the Dr. Kidglove who caved in to the minority party in Congress on the economy, the wars, human rights and medical care for our citizens?

Even if Kidglove seizes the day and nominates a milk sop to the right-wing Republicans and Democrats of the Senate, we can cling to the hope that somehow he or she, once confirmed and seated, will evolve into another Warren or Stevens.

That would be a monumental piece of good luck for the country.  But when the leaders of the nation lack the spunk do do what's right simply because it is right, there's nothing left for citizens to trust but luck.

Do the deed, Mr. President, whether as Iron Glove or Kidglove.  Everything's a crap shoot now.

Linguistics, Social Research and Tax Protests

One of the running little quarrels in our household is over the use, and misuse, of tools.   In my opinion, kitchen knives are for preparing and consuming food -- not opening packages from UPS.  In my opinion, Phillips-head screwdrivers are for use on Phillips-head screws -- not as awls or paper punches.  Lois, on the other hand, believes that handiness trumps original purpose.  So be it; ne'er these twains shall meet, but thankfully a marriage is made of firmer stuff.

Democratic government, alas, is a more fragile thing.  Its price is not just eternal vigilance, but careful maintenance.  Misusing any of its many tools of maintenance is dangerous.

Take social research -- polls, focus groups, data analysis.  Think of such research as a handy digital camera to be used for capturing, with fair accuracy, what the public is thinking at any given moment about certain questions.  Properly used, that camera takes good pictures, sharp, in focus, capturing even subtle details.  It's a top-of-the line model, with complicated settings for various situations, not a generic point-and-shoot.  Its best pictures emerge when it's used by trained professionals.  Then you can study them and draw some conclusions beyond the obvious, such as that they were taken on a sunny day, or in mountains, a city, whatever.  But if the photographer has used a filter, or run the image through Photoshop before showing it to you, the image you see will be false. Nevertheless, the social research "camera" can be a useful tool in politics and in government.

But there are polls, and there are polls. George Lakoff, an expert in linguistics and social research, has written a paper about two California polls on the same issue whose results differ enormously.  This was the situation: The California constitution requires that certain legislation must have a two-thirds majority in the state legislature in order to pass.  Thus -- as has been the case recently when the state struggled for solutions to a grave financial crisis -- 37% of the legislators have been able to block remedial legislation supported by 63%.  A referendum has been proposed to amend the constitution so that only a simple majority -- one vote more than half -- would be needed.  As is usual these days, people on both sides decided that the issue should be poll-tested.

Depending upon how the questions were phrased -- whether filters were placed on the camera lens, and if so, which filters -- the polls disclosed that 72% of voters favored the idea; that 63% favored it; that 58% favored it, and that  56% opposed it.  Same question; different words; same polling methods, dramatically different results.

How could this be?  An important part of the answer is that the legislation that now requires a two-third majority for passage covers all bills affecting state revenue by taxation. Opponents of the amendment -- essentially the 37% minority in the legislature, and their supporters --  know from experience that tax is a powerfully negative word.  And so their pollster phrased the questions in ways that seemed to ask. would you be willing to pay more taxes  if the legislature were able to impose them with only a simple majority rather than the two-thirds vote required now? 

The proponents' pollster, on the other hand, simply asked if they favored or opposed a constitutional amendment that said: "All legislative actions on revenue and budget must be determined by a majority vote."

That's the one that got 72% support.

Lakoff's paper provides a key to understanding the phenomenon of yesterday's Tax Day protests.  A TV journalist -- a real journalist, not a performer -- asked a guest expert why these people were protesting when in fact, if they were typically middle class, their income had increased in the last year, the percentage they paid in taxes had decreased, and the dollar total of their tax bill had decreased?

The answer lay not in tax law, but in the Lakoff lesson.  The right wing has learned how to control the vocabulary of the debate, the phrasing of the questions, the filters on the lenses, and used that control to turn on hot-buttons of racial hatred, class envy and self-deceit. That's what took to the streets yesterday.  "Taxes" is just another bad word for what really ticks them off.

With that influence bubbling up from below, and corporate wealth percolating down, elections are wrongly won and lost. American democracy, or what's left of it, declines the more.

Answer to Another Blogger's Questions

Rob Kall, a liberal radio host and commentator, raises provocative questions on his Op-Ed News website.  They are questions liberal Americans must answer if they are to remain relevant and especially if they advocate, as I do, the establishment of a new, independent Progressive political party.

Here is what Kall wrote:

"At this time, when the House's progressive caucus completely folded in the face of Obama's health care sell-out, after promising to hew to the public option, I have to ask... who are the progressive leaders?

"Who are the leaders who are doing what leaders do...
    •    Organizing and Planning Actions
    •    Defining Vision and Mission
    •    Identifying issues
    •    Creating the Core, Important Conversations
    •    Fund raising
    •    Building the base
    •    Influencing politics?"

Despite the widespread liberal anger at Rep. Dennis Kucinich, the last of the House hold-outs on health care, I still consider him to be a national leader of the Progressive platform.

Any number of prominent intellectuals, beginning with Noam Chomsky, would surely lend their voices to the cause. 

But who are the leaders who could fulfill all of Kall's bullet points? Some of the points themselves rule out present-day office holders. Intellectuals tend to lack the organizational skills to lead big social movements.  Who, then? Howard Dean stands at the top of my list of candidates.

Here's why:

He already has an organization (Democracy for America) with well-planned actions under way on behalf of progressive candidates challenging centrist or right-wing Democrats in party primaries.

As Democratic national chairman, he crafted a 50-state strategy in the 2006 Congressional elections -- opposed and sneered at by the Republican Lite element of the party -- that had unprecedented success in taking away "safe" Republican seats in both houses.  More than vision: mission accomplished.

He has been liberally correct on most of the issues, from Bush's wars to public option as a necessary first step on the way to single payer health care for all.

He's adept at fund-raising.

He can be a hell-raiser and that can inspire the leftward base to be as passionate, in a more constructive way, as the angry mass of Tea Partiers.

He has demonstrated a capacity to "influence politics."

Could he be persuaded to take on this role?  To re-craft his Democracy for America organization as  the Progressive Party of America?  To bring his rogue-left list of candidates with him?  To bring Kucinich and most of the Progressive Caucus into the tent?  To enlist the likes of Chomsky and Chris Hedges and disaffected Democratic liberals?  To mobilize a zealous infantry in all 50 states as he did in 2006? 

"They" said it wouldn't work then.  Screw "them."  Let's do it now!

Howard?  Dr. Dean? Are you with us?

Problem-Solving: 1) Take TV Set and . . .

The open desert of the southwest has become one vast public dumping ground for trash.  The latest fad in desert trash is TV sets.  My guess is that lots of folks are buying the new, flat-screen, HDTV sets and tossing their old ones into the back of the pickup, driving out into the nearest patch of desert, and dumping them.  I've counted six such additions to favorite pieces of desert landscape I've visited lately.

The next step in the existence of these unwanted television machines is that they become targets for the illegal desert shooters.  Just about everyone out here totes heat.  Rather than using the fine, fancy, tax-supported municipal shooting range just outside of town, the Yahoos prefer to go onto land that's used for hiking, grazing and quiet recreation, there to bang away at whatever suits their fancy.  Today I went back to where I spotted the first of the serially dumped TVs.  I counted 23 bullet holes.

Eventually, we'll have a big, gully-washing monsoon rain.  It will flood the arroyos where these things have been dumped and sweep them downstream toward the river.   Perhaps they'll lodge against rocks or other debris along the way.  Perhaps some will reach the river.  There perhaps they'll sink into the soft-sand bottom, or float lazily toward the Mexican border.  Duty-free.  NAFTA for trash.

In a wishful moment, out there in the desert, I thought that perhaps, in a fit of wisdom, my fellow southwesterners were making a comment on the quality of TV programming by casting these devices into the wasteland.  But I know better; they're simply improving the pictures they get while soaking up the bilge that television dispenses. Wisdom is not a widely respected or widely distributed commodity in these parts. Fox programming is a big favorite.

If,  by trashing our desert with TV sets, we are in fact ultimately dumping them on Mexico, some quid pro quo is called for.  Mexico should send it back.  Drug cartels run Mexico.  They ought to half-fill every truckload of dope with trashed American TVs before they drive them across the bridge from Juarez to El Paso.

The drug cartels in Mexico are forever killing people.  Members of rival cartels, civic officials, innocent women and children.  The killers could be employed, instead, finding, collecting and loading American trash for reshipment to the Gringos.  Probably they'd need more people to do this job right than there are killers in their employ.  So the drug cartels, which are so profitable that money is no object, would have to add employees.  Over time, this would lift the Mexican economy.  Wetbacks wouldn't have to flock across the border for Yankee dollars to live on.  They could work at home and save commuting costs.

With the flow of illegal workers into the United States diminishing and eventually stopping, we wouldn't need that border wall.  We could tear it down, Reagan style, and use the material to build shelter for our homeless.  Money already budgeted for further construction could be diverted to the bail-out funds for banks that are too big to fail.

See there? I set out simply to rant about people who throw trash into the desert.  I've wound up solving The Immigration Problem and assuring the health and welfare of our banking system for at least the immediate future.

And it isn't even lunch time.  I'll be able to get a start on finding the cure for cancer.