Musings on a Drab Day: the Dogs of France

I like a lot of things about the French besides their cuisine.  Take their love of dogs, who love them back with a force that only dogs can muster.

Here, I couldn't take Brandi into a restaurant with me unless I were blind and he were my guide dog.  Even then, in a lot of places I'd have a hassle before I got served.

But in France? I remember a fabulous lunch in a nice restaurant overlooking a pretty lake somewhere on the Massif Central. At the table to our left, two 40-ish ladies nibbled at salad while slipping an occasional morsel to the fluffburger dogs, impeccably well behaved, lounging under their chairs.  I remember seeing en chien huddled in the corner of a courtyard outside a cathedral in Avignon.  Thinking it a stray I sought to befriend it and look for collar ID.  With coy dignity it kept itself just beyond my reach, and when I finally abandoned my adoptive instincts, it came to attention even before its master appeared around the corner.  Master and animal understood that it was perfectly safe to leave the dog unattended while the human lit votive candles, or whatever he was doing inside the church.

Once in Paris we stayed at a hotel directly across a cobble-stoned street from a little cinema that specialized in old American films like "Casablanca."  I jogged every morning back then but on our first morning in Paris I chose instead to make nice with  two spaniels being walked by their mistress.  She had excellent English.  We talked dogs.

"You know," she said, with a nod toward the cinema, "I saw the most amazing thing there the other night.  They were showing 'War and Peace,' and a man and his dog took seats near me.  The dog watched the screen intently; when the movie was sad, the dog seemed to weep; when the movie was gay, the dog seemed to smile.  All through the film he watched, rapt.  When the movie ended, I couldn't help but enthuse to the man about how interested his dog was in the motion picture.  'Yes,' the man replied, 'it was quite extraordinary, since he absolutely hated the book.'"

Every dog person knows another dog person who has to spell certain w-o-r-d-s because their dog recognizes names of favorite foods, people or playmates and becomes difficult to control when he hears those words.  I don't for a moment entertain the idea that a dog can make judgements about  an entire book, but I swear that my friend Gregg's dog, Rusty, has a catalog of attributes that make another dog Friend (Saxon, Brandi, Chaco) or Foe (Boo,Cindy, Rascal).

Not far from my house in Pennsylvania a few years back was a tract of woodsy land set aside as a bird sanctuary and a place where dogs and their  people could walk sans leashes.  One of its oldest and most dedicated users was a Scotty named Digby.  When Digby died, his mistress invited all dogs and people who loved to walk there to come to a ceremony where his ashes would be scattered in the stream that ran through it.  A bagpiper played. There must have been 60 dogs and nearly as many people.  All the dogs behaved beautifully, as if they understood this was a solemn occasion that called for best manners.

Some days, when the news is bad and the wars are raging and the politicians are lying and the skies seem especially gray, I like to fetch Brandi and go out deep in the desert, find a rock to sit on, and think about the happy chiens of France.

"Brandi," I'll ask.  "Do you think you'd like 'War and Peace?""

Rush, Rick and the GOP Sex Obsession

When the Republican obsession with s-e-x emerged during the Clinton impeachment fiasco, Freudian analysts both amateur and professional sought to explain it.

Serial infidelities and perversions by some of the President's harshest foes in Congress, and the unnecessarily pornographic nature of the prosecutor Ken Starr's indictment document, spawned what has now become a small industry. 

Back then we had House stonecasters regretting their "constiTOOshunal" responsibility to (tee-hoo, ha-ha, wink) probe deeply into these otherwise personal matters. And we had Starr writing into the indictment so much steamy detail of the Clinton-Lewinsky encounters that even a federal judge (appointed by Reagan) found it tawdry.  One commentator at the time imagined Starr at home every night panting over his text with masturbatory ecstasy.  After all, another noted, Freud himself once commented that "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."

But that was then and now we have people like Gingrich, Cain, Bachmann and Santorum actually running for president, cheered on by commentators like Limbaugh, O'Reilly and Drudge. The collective personal histories of this cast could fill an entire edition of a supermarket tabloid -- multimillion dollar settlements of sexual harassment litigation, youthful spousal indiscretions, non-denial ("I do NOT love sex with men") denials of homosexuality,  religious "cures" of socially controversial sexual orientation, a paramour telling the press, "We had oral sex; he prefers (that) because then he can say, 'I never slept with her.'"  On and on.

Limbaugh, that paragon of personal virtue, and Santorum, whose first act if elected President will be to repeal the 18th and 20th Centuries, take the cake for sexual obsession.

Surely no literate person alive today is ignorant of the great talk-radio blowhard's "slut" and "prostitute" rants against a Georgetown University student. (I think this stuff is actionable and I hope the young lady  sues for gazillions in damages.) But when he asked her to videotape a sexual encounter and send it to him  "so we can all watch," he descended into deviant voyeurism the Freudian analysts can run with for months.

And then there's St. Rick, the supremely Roman Catholic public figure who goes ex cathedra on s-e-x if you ask him the time of day.  His public utterances prompted a commentator to write Sex Education 101 for Republicans, a pre-junior high curriculum proposal that was the most read item on the Common Dreams website last week.  Another hot item was Charles M. Blow's New York Times post on Santorum's 2008 appearance at the Center for Religion and Public Life (repeal the First Amendment!) in Washington, DC.

Asked about his experiences regarding "religion and politics" when he was in the Senate, St. Rick went right to the core of the matter:

“It comes down to sex. That’s what it’s all about. It comes down to freedom, and it comes down to sex. If you have anything to do with any of the sexual issues, and if you are on the wrong side of being able to do all of the sexual freedoms you want, you are a bad guy. And you’re dangerous because you are going to limit my freedom in an area that’s the most central to me. And that’s the way it’s looked at.”

Rick was asked to respond to a columnist's comment that  "Republicans want their payback for Watergate, for Bork, for Iran-contra, even for Woodstock. Like Kenneth Starr, the Republicans are attempting to repeal the 1960s.”

 He said:

“Woodstock is the great American orgy. This is who the Democratic Party has become. They have become the party of Woodstock. They prey upon our most basic primal lusts, and that’s sex. And the whole abortion culture, it’s not about life. It’s about sexual freedom. That’s what it’s about. Homosexuality. It’s about sexual freedom. All of the things are about sexual freedom, and they hate to be called on them. They try to somehow or other tie this to the founding fathers’ vision of liberty, which is bizarre. It’s ridiculous. That’s at the core of why you are attacked.”

Question:

“Do you see any possibility for a party of Christian reform, or an influx of Christian ideas into this [Democratic] party?”

Answer:

“What changed was the ’60s. What changed was sex. What changed was the social and cultural issues that have huge amounts of money because if you look — I haven’t seen numbers on this, but I’m sure it’s true — if you go socioeconomic scale, the higher the income, the more socially liberal you are. The more you know you can buy your way out of the problems that sexual libertinism (sic) causes you. You have an abortion, well, I have the money to take care of it. If I want to live an extravagant life and get diseases, I can. ... You can always take care of everything. If you have money, you can get away with things that if you’re poor you can’t.”

“You’re a liberal or a conservative in America if you think the ’60s were a good thing or not. If the ’60s was a good thing, you’re left. If you think it was a bad thing, you’re right. And the confusing thing for a lot of people that gets a lot of Americans is, when they think of the ’60s, they don’t think of just the sexual revolution. But somehow or other — and they’ve been very, very, clever at doing this — they’ve been able to link, I think absolutely incorrectly, the sexual revolution with civil rights.”

Chatting with a friend in Washington the other day, I mentioned some of this and he chuckled and said:

"Did you hear about the Republican presidential candidate who took a Rorschach inkblot test? The shrink showed him an image and asked, 'What do you see?' 'F--king,' he replied.  Another image. 'F--king.' Next image, same answer.  Next image, same answer.  The shrink threw down his image cards and said, 'You're a pervert!'

"The Republican shouted back: 'Don't blame me! You're the one with the dirty pictures.'"

A Lament

When Prof. Rudolph Fehring of the University of Cincinnati confronted an especially stupid bit of classwork by a student, he was wont to grasp his forehead, close his eyes, and lament, ". . .and they shot  men like Lincoln!"

Voters in Ohio have "shot" another man like Lincoln.  A man of principle, and an articulate spokesmen for them; a man willing, as one Ohio paper put it, "to take a political hit" for sticking to those principles; a man who proudly stood for peace in a land dedicated to endless war; a man who understood, pledged himself to, and fought bravely to preserve every jot and tittle of the Bill of Rights; a man who embodied all the change that might have saved this country as a democracy.

Stay around, Dennis Kucinich.  Keep saying the things you've always said so well, the things Americans need to hear even if they don't want to hear them, don't want to heed them, willingly place their collective heads in the guillotin of an authoritarian, bellicose police state.

Keep saying what you said ten years ago last month, Dennis Kucinich.  Keep saying:

I offer these brief remarks today as a prayer for our country, with love of democracy, as a celebration of our country. With love for our country. With hope for our country. With a belief that the light of freedom cannot be extinguished as long as it is inside of us. With a belief that freedom rings resoundingly in a democracy each time we speak freely. With the understanding that freedom stirs the human heart and fear stills it. With the belief that a free people cannot walk in fear and faith at the same time.
With the understanding that there is a deeper truth expressed in the unity of the United States. That implicit in the union of our country is the union of all people. That all people are essentially one. That the world is interconnected not only on the material level of economics, trade, communication, and transportation, but innerconnected through human consciousness, through the human heart, through the heart of the world, through the simply expressed impulse and yearning to be and to breathe free.
I offer this prayer for America.
Let us pray that our nation will remember that the unfolding of the promise of democracy in our nation paralleled the striving for civil rights. That is why we must challenge the rationale of the Patriot Act. We must ask why should America put aside guarantees of constitutional justice?
How can we justify in effect canceling the First Amendment and the right of free speech, the right to peaceably assemble?
How can we justify in effect canceling the Fourth Amendment, probable cause, the prohibitions against unreasonable search and seizure?
How can we justify in effect canceling the Fifth Amendment, nullifying due process, and allowing for indefinite incarceration without a trial?
How can we justify in effect canceling the Sixth Amendment, the right to prompt and public trial?
How can we justify in effect canceling the Eighth Amendment which protects against cruel and unusual punishment?
We cannot justify widespread wiretaps and internet surveillance without judicial supervision, let alone with it.
We cannot justify secret searches without a warrant.
We cannot justify giving the Attorney General the ability to designate domestic terror groups.
We cannot justify giving the FBI total access to any type of data which may exist in any system anywhere such as medical records and financial records.
We cannot justify giving the CIA the ability to target people in this country for intelligence surveillance.
We cannot justify a government which takes from the people our right to privacy and then assumes for its own operations a right to total secrecy.
Let us pray that our country will stop this war. "To promote the common defense" is one of the formational principles of America.
Our Congress gave the President the ability to respond to the tragedy of September 11. We licensed a response to those who helped bring the terror of September 11th. But we the people and our elected representatives must reserve the right to measure the response, to proportion the response, to challenge the response, and to correct the response.
Because we did not authorize the invasion of Iraq.
We did not authorize the invasion of Iran.
We did not authorize the invasion of North Korea.
We did not authorize the bombing of civilians in Afghanistan.
We did not authorize permanent detainees in Guantanamo Bay.
We did not authorize the withdrawal from the Geneva Convention.
We did not authorize military tribunals suspending due process and habeas corpus.
We did not authorize assassination squads.
We did not authorize the resurrection of COINTELPRO.
We did not authorize the repeal of the Bill of Rights.
We did not authorize the revocation of the Constitution.
We did not authorize national identity cards.
We did not authorize the eye of Big Brother to peer from cameras throughout our cities.
We did not authorize an eye for an eye.
Nor did we ask that the blood of innocent people, who perished on September 11, be avenged with the blood of innocent villagers in Afghanistan.
We did not authorize the administration to wage war anytime, anywhere,anyhow it pleases.
We did not authorize war without end.
We did not authorize a permanent war economy.
Yet we are upon the threshold of a permanent war economy. Yet the defense budget grows with more money for weapons systems to fight a cold war which ended, weapon systems in search of new enemies to create new wars. This has nothing to do with fighting terror.
This has everything to do with fueling a military industrial machine with the treasure of our nation, risking the future of our nation, risking democracy itself with the militarization of thought which follows the militarization of the budget.
Let us pray for our children. Our children deserve a world without end. Not a war without end. Our children deserve a world free of the terror of hunger, free of the terror of poor health care, free of the terror of homelessness, free of the terror of ignorance, free of the terror of hopelessness, free of the terror of policies which are committed to a world view which is not appropriate for the survival of a free people, not appropriate for the survival of democratic values, not appropriate for the survival of our nation, and not appropriate for the survival of the world.
Let us declare our love for democracy. Let us declare our intent for peace.
Let us work to make nonviolence an organizing principle in our own society.
Let us recommit ourselves to the slow and painstaking work of statecraft, which sees peace, not war as being inevitable.
Let us work for a world where someday war becomes archaic.
That is the vision which the proposal to create a Department of Peace envisions. Forty-three members of Congress are now cosponsoring the legislation.
Let us work for a world where nuclear disarmament is an imperative. That is why we must begin by insisting on the commitments of the ABM treaty. That is why we must be steadfast for nonproliferation.
Let us work for a world where America can lead the day in banning weapons of mass destruction not only from our land and sea and sky but from outer space itself. That is the vision of HR 3616: A universe free of fear. Where we can look up at God's creation in the stars and imagine infinite wisdom, infinite peace, infinite possibilities, not infinite war, because we are taught that the kingdom will come on earth as it is in heaven.
Let us pray that we have the courage to replace the images of death which haunt us, the layers of images of September 11th, faded into images of patriotism, spliced into images of military mobilization, jump-cut into images of our secular celebrations of the World Series, New Year's Eve, the Superbowl, the Olympics, the strobic flashes which touch our deepest fears, let us replace those images with the work of human relations, reaching out to people, helping our own citizens here at home, lifting the plight of the poor everywhere.
That is the America which has the ability to rally the support of the world.
That is the America which stands not in pursuit of an axis of evil, but which is itself at the axis of hope and faith and peace and freedom. America, America. God shed grace on thee. Crown thy good, America.
Not with weapons of mass destruction. Not with invocations of an axis of evil. Not through breaking international treaties. Not through establishing America as king of a unipolar world. Crown thy good America. America, America. Let us pray for our country. Let us love our country. Let us defend our country not only from the threats without but from the threats within.
Crown thy good, America. Crown thy good with brotherhood, and sisterhood. And crown thy good with compassion and restraint and forbearance and a commitment to peace, to democracy, to economic justice here at home and throughout the world.
Crown thy good, America. Crown thy good America. Crown thy good.
                                                                                *   *   *
Dare not to say, America, dare not to even think that he wasn't tall enough to be President.  He is a giant.

Why Don't We Listen to Those in The Know?

Most Americans who actually know something about the Middle East -- including fluency in its languages -- are appalled by the ease with which AIPAC and its allies in the endless wars movement have duped our media into once again shilling for a wrongful war over there.

The idea that Iran is developing a nuclear war capability -- absolutely false, and even the U.S. and Israeli intelligence factories admit it -- is being repeated nolo contendere on front pages and TV broadcasts every day.

AIPAC (the American Israel Political Action Committee) waved its magic checkbook again this week, and again a horde of our politically powerful, led by Dr. Kidglove himself, rushed to toady up  to them at their meeting in Washington. Kidglove fell all over himself assuring the assembled Jewish hawks that he was covering Israel's ass. The nub of what he said was that the only issue dividing Israel and the U.S,. is not whether to bomb bomb bomb Iran, but when. Let's wait a while, he urged his friend, Bibi Netanyahu. A nuclear Iran just isn't acceptable, so let's do the big bombing thing before there is such a thing as a nuclear Iran.

Never mind that this is an even more bellicose stance than that of the Bush administration, which Democrats used to decry.  Never mind that it's unprovoked, preemptive war, which is an international crime.  Never mind anything other than the relentless, obscenely profitable war industry, a worldwide alliance of which AIPAC is only one very visible part.

Chris Hedges, journalist and author, has lived and worked in the Middle East as  bureau chief and correspondent.  He spoke to the "Occupy" protesters outside the AIPAC meetings last weekend and this is what he said:

What is being done in Gaza, the world’s largest open-air prison, is a pale reflection of what is slowly happening to the rest of us. It is a window into the rise of the global security state, our new governing system that the political philosopher SheldonWolin calls “inverted totalitarianism.” It is a reflection of a world where the powerful are not bound by law, either on Wall Street or in the shattered remains of the countries we invade and occupy, including Iraq with its hundreds of thousands of dead. And one of the greatest purveyors of this demented ideology of violence for the sake of violence, this flagrant disregard for the rule of domestic and international law, is . . . AIPAC. . . . AIPAC does not speak for Jews or for Israel.

I am no friend of the Iranian regime, which helped create and arm Hezbollah, is certainly meddling in Iraq, has persecuted human rights activists, gays, women and religious and ethnic minorities, embraces racism and intolerance, and uses its power to deny popular will. And yes, it is a regime that appears determined to build a nuclear weapon, although I would stress that no one has offered any proof this is occurring. I have spent time in Iranian jails. I was once deported from Tehran in handcuffs. But I do not remember Iran orchestrating a coup in the United States to replace an elected government with a brutal dictator who for decades persecuted, assassinated and imprisoned democracy activists. I do not remember Iran arming and funding a neighboring state to wage war against our country. Iran never shot down one of our passenger jets, as did the USS Vincennes—nicknamed Robocruiser by the crews of other American vessels—when in June 1988 it fired missiles at an Airbus filled with Iranian civilians, killing everyone on board. Iran is not sponsoring terrorist strikes within the United States, as our intelligence services and the Israeli intelligence services currently do in Iran. We have not seen five of our top nuclear scientists since 2007 murdered on American soil. The attacks in Iran include suicide bombings, kidnappings, beheadings, sabotage and “targeted assassinations” of government officials and other Iranian leaders. What would we do if the situation were reversed? How would we react if Iran carried out similar acts of terrorism against us?

Juan Cole is professor of history at the University of Michigan; recognized throughout the world as an expert on the Middle East, where he has lived, studied and taught; author of several peer-reviewed books and a translator of Arabic and Persian languages.  He writes:

Returns in Iran’s 9th parliamentary election since the 1979 revolution show that Ahmadinejad's lay populists have taken a drubbing,  and that hard line supporters of clerical Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei are ascendant. A week and a half ago, in a major policy speech, Khamenei said:

“The Iranian nation has never pursued and will never pursue nuclear weapons. There is no doubt that the decision makers in the countries opposing us know well that Iran is not after nuclear weapons because the Islamic Republic, logically, religiously and theoretically, considers the possession of nuclear weapons a grave sin and believes the proliferation of such weapons is senseless, destructive and dangerous.”

It has been alleged that Ahmadinejad is a mass-murdering hard liner, seeking nuclear weapons with which to destroy Israel. This puzzling emphasis on Ahmadinejad comes despite the president’s relative lack of power in the Iranian system. The commander in chief of the armed forces is Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Who sets nuclear policy? Ali Khamenei. In Iran, the “president” is more like a vice president (think Joe Biden) than a real executive. Ahmadinejiad could noit even fire an intelligence minister (Haidar Moslehi) he disliked. Khamenei reinstated him.

(Now) Khamenei’s hand has been significantly strengthened. And he has signalled to the Iranian people yet again that he won’t use that strength for belligerent purposes or to pursue a nuclear warhead, which the Iranian ayatollahs consider a tool of the devil– since you can’t deploy it without killing large numbers of civilian non-combatants.

So despite the consistent anti-nuclear position of the most powerful man in Iran; because of the mistranslation of a non-policy statement he made about the Netanyahu regime several years ago; despite the fact that on the ground inspections in Iran by the international nuclear inspection teams found no evidence of an Iranian weapons program; despite the fact that whatever nuclear technology Iran has (enrichment of uranium at far less than weapons levels) was sold to them by the United States 40 years ago; because the media and Congress and the White House eagerly buy the lies and misrepresentations of AIPAC, the United States now has an official policy that is perilously close to unilateral, preemptive war on another sovereign nation.  What madness!

That's the very word -- "madness" -- used by William O. Beeman, yet another world-recognized Middle East expert and academic, who is chairman of the department of anthropology at the University of Minnesota. Beeman points out that the former head of Mossad, Meir Dagan, has called an Israeli preemptive strike on Iran “the stupidest thing I have ever heard.”  AIPAC, says Beeman, "has a completely unrealistic view of the interests of Israel. They reflect only the views of its most rabid right-wing politicians.”

Unless a great many more Americans wake up to what Hedges, Cole, Beeman and others are telling us, we'll soon be pasting those plastic ribbon decals on our SUV's to "Support Our Troops" in yet another unwinnable, unspeakable, illegal, immoral and devastating war in the Middle east.

When will they ever learn?

Beware of Yanks Bearing Gifts of 'Democracy'

Neal Shine, the nonpareil city editor of the Detroit Free Press, used to say of certain politicians: "He has the reverse Midas touch: everything golden that he touches turns to shit."

Paul Craig Roberts, the former Nixon administration official who has become one of the most enlightened foreign policy critics in these parts, points out in a recent post how the reverse Midas touch applies to the United States role in the Middle east.

Syria has a secular government as did Iraq prior to the American invasion. Secular governments are important in Arab lands in which there is division between Sunni and Shi'ite. Secular governments keep the divided population from murdering one another.

When the American invasion, a war crime under the Nuremberg standard set by the US after WWII, overthrew the Saddam Hussein secular government, the Iraqi Sunnis and Shi'ites went to war against one another. The civil war between Iraqis saved the American invasion (but) the consequence of the US invasion was not democracy and women's rights in Iraq, much less the destruction of weapons of mass destruction which did not exist as the weapons inspectors had made perfectly clear beforehand. The consequence was to transfer political power from Sunnis to Shi'ites. The Shi'ite version of Islam is the Iranian version. Thus, Washington's invasion transferred power in Iraq from a secular government to Shi'ites allied with Iran.

Now Washington intends to repeat its folly in Syria.Washington's hostility toward Assad is hypocritical. On February 26, the Syrian government held a referendum on a new constitution for Syria that set term limits on future presidents and removed the political monopoly that the Ba'ath Party has enjoyed.

The Syrian voter turnout was 57.4%, matching the voter turnout for Obama in 2008. It was a higher voter turnout (despite the armed, western-supported rebellion in Syria) than in the nine U.S. presidential elections from 1972 through 2004. The new Syrian constitution was approved by a vote of 89.4%. But Washington denounced the democratic referendum and claims that the Syrian government must be overthrown in order to bring democracy to Syria.

Washington's allies in the region, unelected oil monarchies such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar, have issued statements that they are willing to supply weapons to the Islamist rebels in order to bring democracy -- something they do not tolerate at home -- to Syria.

For Washington "democracy" is a weapon of mass destruction. When Washington brings "democracy" to a country, it means the country's destruction, as in Libya and Iraq. It doesn't mean democracy. Libya is in chaos, a human rights nightmare without an effective government.

Washington installed Nouri al-Maliki as president of Iraq. He lost an election, but remained in power. He has declared his vice president to be a terrorist and ordered his arrest and is using the state police to arrest Sunni politicians. Syria's Assad is more democratic than Iraq's Maliki.

Or, to paraphrase a character in Walt Kelly's comic strip Pogo, "Declared Democracy on 'em, eh? Didn't know we wuz even mad at the rascals." 

It's a Grim Choice That Confronts Progressives This Election

Progressive voters are stuck with Hobson's choice in the 2012 Presidential election and most of us don't like it.

Voting Republican is an even worse choice.  A lawyer friend said he will "hold my nose" and vote to re-elect Obama.  My conscience won't let me do that because of his dismal, possibly criminal, record on civil liberties, torture, detention, rendition and war. I will cast my protest vote for the Green candidate, because I can in good conscience endorse that party's platform.

But that isn't an easy choice to make.  I suspect that many progressives will refuse to support Obama with money this time around, yet will vote for him in November.

The actor and social justice activist, Mike Farrell, who contributed to the 2008 Obama campaign, refused to do so this year.  When the campaign asked him why, this is what he told them:

Frankly, I hope President Obama wins re-election because I fear what will happen to this country if the Republicans control the White House as well as Congress.  But I am sickened by many of the decisions the President has made, particularly as regards foreign affairs and what falls under the rubric of  'national defense.'

I despise the use of drones and believe the practice of using a "war" rationale to kill "terrorists," including American citizens, without any attempt at due process is destroying any semblance of the law-abiding, international law respecting, human-rights honoring nation we pretend to be.

In addition, since you asked, Iran poses no problem to the U.S. and whatever concern it creates for Israel is exaggerated beyond reason by Netanyahu and the right-wingers in his coalition.  For our President to bow to the whims of the Israeli leadership because of domestic political concerns is embarrassing and demeaning to our country.  It also serves to further alienate us from parts of the world that see us as Israel's sponsor and henchman in maintaining the illegal and counterproductive occupation of the people of the West Bank and the ongoing attempt to crush those in Gaza.

The President's caving on the issue of settlements was an embarrassment that painted a clear and unfortunate picture of the power dynamic between himself and Netanyahu.

I cling to the belief that President Obama is a good, decent and principled man, but his lack of willingness to stand up when courage and principle require it is disheartening.  I want to see the man lead.

Mike Farrell

That is an excellent summary of the progressive voter's dilemma in 2012 and, unfortunately, it applies not only to the President but also to his party and most of its candidates as well.

For example, to the unanimous applause of progressives, the consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren is seeking the U.S. Senate seat from Massachusetts that once belonged to Ted Kennedy.

Now, some progressive writers are expressing concerns that she, like so many others in the Congress to which she aspires, has fallen into the hawkish clutches of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which literally dictates the failed American policy in the Middle East, and wants the U.S. to join in an attack on Iran.

The following paragraph on her campaign website is particularly bothersome:

As a United States Senator, I will work to ensure Israel’s security and success.  I believe Israel must maintain a qualitative military edge and defensible borders. The United States must continue to ensure that Israel can defend itself from terrorist organizations and hostile states, including Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, and others.

If I were a Massachusetts voter, I would probably cast my ballot for Warren, hoping that in office she would moderate her position on Israel and Palestine, much as, say, Dennis Kucinich modified his position on women's rights to make their own health choices.

But, like Mike Farrell, I am dismayed that it is the progressive voter who has to compromise his principles by voting for the lesser of evils. We of the left have effectively surrendered control of the political vocabulary and process to the extreme far right.

And that's a damned shame.

Speaking as One Infiltrator to Another . . .

I almost turned back at the machine gun nest; the weapon was (or seemed to be) pointed directly at me.

Whistling past the graveyard, I forced myself to walk into the Essex Wire Co,. plant outside Jackson, MI.

As the newest editorial employee of the Detroit Free Press, I had been deemed likeliest to succeed at penetrating the security around the Essex plant to apply for a job inside as a scab worker.  The company, a major supplier to the auto industry, had risked taking a strike in union-powerful Michigan; violence ensued and Gov. George Romney called out the National Guard.  Hence the machine-gun nest.

I got the job, despite my fumbling with the manual dexterity test.  I used my real identity but a made-up job history.  My real job inside the plant was to determine if Essex had used an infamous professional strike-breaking firm then based in Mississippi to continue operating when the union workers walked out. This would have been a violation of state labor law at the time.

On my first day at work, I tried to balance learning the intricacies of machines that could sever limbs with learning something about my co-workers without arousing suspicions about my motives.

After work, the moment my borrowed, clunker car left the employee parking lot, it was tailed by a pick-up truck with a bed full of armed union pickets.  I was losing the race to the Interstate when a state police car came out of hiding and placed itself between me and my pursuers.

The next day, Gov. Romney announced that his staff had brokered an end to the strike.  My spy mission was over. But I was reminded of my brief career as an infiltrator when Peter Gleick, chairman of a scientific society ethics committee, acknowledged using deception to obtain and make public the documents proving the climate science fraud of the infamous right-wing Heartland Institute. Gleick posed as a member of the institute's board.

He resigned as chairman of the American Geophysical Union's ethics committee after disclosing how he obtained the Heartland documents.

I have been a longtime follower and critic of Heartland and its science whores, like the Infamous Idsos. And so I applauded the release of the purloined documents, which were much more damning of the denier side than the trove of stolen e-mails from British climate scientists that came to be known as "Climategate."

"I deeply regret my actions in this case," Gleick said when he resigned from the ethics panel.  If I had found proof of violations of the state labor laws in that Essex plant, and written about them in the Free Press, I'd have had no such ethical qualms. I know all the "ends justify the means" arguments pro and con, as did, say, the Chicago Tribune editors and reporters who bought a Loop tavern to "sting" extortion plots by a ring of corrupt cops.

Journalists and scientists, in my opinion, have obligations to higher truths than those the ethicists purport to be defending in their criticisms of Gleick, who said he was motivated "by my frustration with the ongoing efforts — often anonymous,  well-funded and coordinated — to attack climate science and scientists." Fossil fuel profiteers like the Koch Brothers fund outfits like Heartland to protect and increase their obscene wealth, at the expense of the environment that sustains life on this planet.

Rick Santorum's whacky "Earth should serve man, not the other way around" theology to the contrary notwithstanding, climate change is one of the most important issues confronting mankind at this moment.  The very survival of the planet and its life forms is at stake.

I come to praise Peter Gleick, not to bury him.

Lesbians! Feminists! COMM-unists! The Sky Is Falling!

From Anne Gregory of the Ft. Wayne, Ind., Journal Gazette, via onetime Girl Scout Fleabane, comes the following text of a letter from Indiana state Rep. Bob Morris, R-Fort Wayne, to fellow lawmakers.

* * *

February 18, 2012
Members of the Republic (sic) Caucus
Dear Fellow Representatives:

This past week I was asked to sign a House Resolution recognizing the 100th Anniversary of Girl Scouts of America. After talking to some well-informed constituents, I did a small amount of web-based research, and what I found is disturbing. The Girl Scouts of America and their worldwide partner, World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts (WAGGGS), have entered into a close strategic affiliation with Planned Parenthood. You will not find evidence of this on the GSA/WAGGGS website—in fact, the websites of these two organizations explicitly deny funding Planned Parenthood.

Nonetheless, abundant evidence proves that the agenda of Planned Parenthood includes sexualizing young girls through the Girl Scouts, which is quickly becoming a tactical arm of Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood instructional series and pamphlets are part of the core curriculum at GSA training seminars. Denver Auxiliary Bishop James D. Conley of Denver last year warned parents that "membership in the Girl Scouts could carry the danger of making their daughters more receptive to the pro-abortion agenda."

A Girl Scouts of America training program last year used the Planned Parenthood sex education pamphlet "Happy, Healthy, and Hot." The pamphlet instructs young girls not to think of sex as "just about vaginal or anal intercourse." "There is no right or wrong way to have sex. Just have fun, explore and be yourself!" it states. Although individual Girl Scout troops are not forced to follow this curriculum, many do. Liberal progressive troop-leaders will indoctrinate the girls in their troop according to the principles of Planned Parenthood, making Bishop Conley's warning true.

Many parents are abandoning the Girl Scouts because they promote homosexual lifestyles. In fact, the Girl Scouts education seminar girls are directed to study the example of role models. Of the fifty role models listed, only three have a briefly-mentioned religious background – all the rest are feminists, lesbians, or Communists. World Net Daily, in a May 2009 article, states that Girl Scout Troops are no longer allowed to pray or sing traditional Christmas Carols.

Boys who decide to claim a "transgender" or cross-dressing life-style are permitted to become a member of a Girl Scout troop, performing crafts with the girls and participate in overnight and camping activities – just like any real girl. The fact that the Honorary President of Girl Scouts of America is Michelle Obama, and the Obama's are radically pro-abortion and vigorously support the agenda of Planned Parenthood, should give each of us reason to pause before our individual or collective endorsement of the organization.

As members of the Indiana House of Representatives, we must be wise before we use the credibility and respect of the "Peoples' House" to extend legitimacy to a radicalized organization. The Girl Scouts of America stand in a strong tradition that reflects with fidelity the traditional values of our homes and our families. The tradition extends from coast-to-coast and back through the past one hundred years. That said, I challenge each of you to examine these matters more closely before you extend your name and your reputation to endorse a group that has been subverted in the name of liberal progressive politics and the destruction of traditional American family values.

I have two daughters who have been active in the Girl Scouts of Limberlost Council in Northeastern Indiana. Now that I am aware of the influence of Planned Parenthood within GSA and other surprisingly radical policies of GSA, my two daughters will instead become active in American Heritage Girls Little Flowers organization. In this traditional group they will learn about values and principles that will not confuse their conservative Hoosier upbringing.

Respectfully,
Bob Morris

     * * *
Respectfully?

Grassroots Press: A Hike Made in Hell

My friends at Grassroots Press (http://www.grass-roots-press.com/) have posted an account by a constituent of a mythical hike with the Worst Congressman in History, Stevan Pearce (R-NM).

Pearce, who is owned by the oil, gas and ATV industries, opposes protection of southern New Mexico's magnificent mountain and high desert canyon country by designating them wilderness areas, despite a series of public hearings that disclosed overwhelming public support of the notion.

Here's what Greg Lennes of Las Cruces had to say on the Grassroots Press website:

Congressman Pearce accepted my invitation to enjoy a scenic hike to Fillmore Canyon in the beautiful tranquil Organ Mountains. We met at the trail-head. He was dressed in his hunting camouflage with a Remington 7600 pump action thirty-ought-six rifle. He also had a Dan Wesson 445 Revolver. I was startled and asked him why he accepted my invitation. He stated that he wanted to show me the illegals and Mexican cartel members hiding in the mountains.  As we walked he railed against the Bureau of Land Management calling them all “kooks.”

Our first stop was the La Cueva cave where Mr. Pearce commented that the hermit, Agostini-Justiniani was killed by the Mexican cartel during a drug deal. I mentioned that this happened in 1869. He responded he had a reliable source in two former long retired border patrol agents.

When we arrived at the stunning Fillmore Canyon waterfall, Mr. Pearce expressed his worry that we were walking into a trap. He pulled out his Wesson. Then I heard a gun firing at a nearby bush, and a yellow-billed dropped dead. As I looked at Mr. Pearce he had his Remington repeatedly shooting at the upper reaches of the canyon. A dune sagebrush lizard fell on his head. Pearce yelled that they are coming to get us and it’s time to leave or face death.

When we finally returned to our vehicles, Mr. Pearce lectured me that this should be a lesson to me that we can’t designate the Organ Mountains as a wilderness area. Instead he said he will propose to the Congress the closing of the mountains to all civilians and deployment of the National Guard to remove all the criminal elements concealed in the Organs. I woke up questioning if this was reality or a nutty nightmare.

Mr. Lennes's uncanny verisimilitude has only one flaw:

In real life Mr. Pearce would not have hiked: he'd have driven a big, snarling, smokin' ATV which might even have torn up the nest of the last remaining burrowing owl in the entire region.

After all, this is the guy who said we shouldn't use the abundant wind of the southwest to solve our dependency on fossil fuel (where he made his fortune).  Why?

"Aesthetics," he said.  "Some people think wind towers are ugly."

We Used to Toss These Guys Into Asylums and Throw Away the Key

Since the Republicans are swimming in money, they ought to use some of it to hire a team of psychiatrists to test Rick Santorum.

The party's rank file (sic) deserve to know just how insane this guy is.

His crazy religious prattle is one thing.  I'll leave it for clergymen and theologians to parse.

But his comments -- in Detroit of all places! -- in defense of the widening income gap raise questions about whether he should be running around loose, let alone running for the presidential nomination of the GOP.

Here is some of what he said:

“I’m not about equality of result when it comes to income inequality. There is income inequality in America. There always has been and, hopefully, and I do say that, there always will be.

“We should celebrate (it) like we do in the small towns all across America — as you do here in Detroit. You celebrate success. You build statues and monuments. Buildings, you name after them. Why? Because in their greatness and innovation, yes, they created wealth, but they created wealth for everybody else. And that’s a good thing, not something to be condemned in America.”

Detroit has the highest poverty rate of any major city in this economically troubled nation.  It has the highest unemployment rate.  It has 90,000 vacant homes and buildings.  Some of them are public schools less than 10 years old.  It has closed more than half its schools. (Rick thinks that's just fine.  Public education, he says, is antiquated and useless.) That Santorum would choose this city as the forum for his paean to the growing gap between very rich and very poor -- with fewer and fewer people in between -- is the essence of insanity.

Who dresses this guy in the morning?  No wonder they put sweater vests on him; they're easier to manipulate than, say, a straitjacket.

Rick's utter nonsense was reported by the stenographers who pose as journalists these days as if it had some legitimacy --as if it were news.

Of course these same stenographers have ignored virtually simultaneous warnings by qualified academicians and scientists that U.S. income inequality threatens our very continued existence as a free nation.  The warnings come not from Keynesians like Paul Krugman and Simon Johnson, who have been shouting the alarms for years.  They come from center-right straight shooters like Francis Fukuyama, senior fellow at Stanford’s Center on Democracy.

Fukuyama wrote an essay in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, entitled, The Future of History: Can Liberal Democracy Survive the Decline of the Middle Class?  His answer: probably not.

His chilling prognosis:

There are a lot of reasons to think that inequality will continue to worsen. The current concentration of wealth in the United States has already become self-reinforcing: the financial sector has used its lobbying clout to avoid more onerous forms of regulation. Schools for the well-off are better than ever; those for everyone else continue to deteriorate. Elites in all societies use their superior access to the political system to protect their interests, absent a countervailing democratic mobilization to rectify the situation. American elites are no exception to the rule.  (Emphasis mine.)

In a functioning democracy, it is the role of government to impose that countervailing force on the economy.  The force is called regulation.

It is not a dirty word, although idiots like Santorum would make it so, along with "liberal."

Two things can save this country:

1. A return to liberal democratic government that properly regulates powerful business and financial interests.

2. Locking up the likes of Rick Santorum before they really hurt someone.

Payroll Tax Deal Isn't a Good Deal for Workers

Come all you young workers and listen to me:
Don't hang your affections on the payroll tax tree.
For the thieves will still rob you and take what you have;
They'll postpone the theft till you're closer to the grave.

* * *

So the Congress has reached an apparent "compromise" on the payroll tax "issue." Tighten your sphincter and keep the vaseline handy.

Kidglove will tell you it's a win for the common wage-earner.  Nonsense.  It was the best he could do, politically, to inject some quick money into the economy. 

The fair way would have been to take more from those who have more and use it for job-creating public works.  That is, end the Bush tax cuts for the very rich and make them pay something closer to their fair share of what it takes to operate this country.

Yes, it's the same old 1% v. 99% battle.  The 1% owns the pols of both parties who are making the decisions, young workers, that will affect you for the rest of your lives.

Here's how it works: the financial industry -- the same folks who gave you deregulation, sub-prime mortgages, the bursting of the housing bubble and the Great Recession -- covets the huge sums the government is collecting to pay for Social Security and Medicare.  It's your money.  But if the Republicans could "privatize"  Social Security, you'd turn it over to the Too Big to Fail Crowd to "invest" for you.  Wall Street bonuses would get bigger, Wall Street "investment" scams would become more lurid, and everyone would suffer except the One Percenters.

So far, at least, the thieves haven't been able to push privatization through even the bought-and-paid-for Congress.  The thieves still have to get re-elected, and they're afraid that Social Security and Medicare are  too popular to do away with at this time.  So they're building a bogeyman.  Having already stolen what used to be our trust fund by shifting Social Security into the general revenues, they're now playing mirror games with the accounting process to project Social Security going broke sometime in the relatively near future.  "We've got to 'save' Social Security," they're telling us, "by taking it out of the hands of the government."  They want to give your money to Wall Street, instead.

Now comes the "payroll tax" deal. It simply hands you today some of the money you've been putting aside for your retirement tomorrow. The Kidglove crowd contends that it will make the economy better by putting more spending money in your pocket -- roughly $83 a month for middle-level American workers.  With food and fuel costs skyrocketing, the likelihood is that most of you will spend the extra money.  So the economy will in fact get a bit of a short-term stimulus. 

But the loss of half of your contributions to your future Social Security and your future Medicare will be noticed in a very short time by those in power who have long wanted to do away with "entitlements" for workers.  "Aha!" they will say.  "We told you so!  Social Security is going broke even faster than we feared!  We've got to privatize it now in order to save it." This logic reminds me of the famous episode in the Vietnam war where an American commander said, "We had to destroy the village in order to save it."

But it's the inevitable outcome of the Kidglove regime's cave in and apply a band-aid strategy, which ultimately plays into the hands of the Republicans and their One Per Cent constituency.

You're going to need that vaseline.





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These Are the Damned Fools Who Will Prod Us into War

It really is "the gang that couldn't shoot straight," this gaggle of whackos, nincompoops and used-car hustlers Israel has enlisted to to do terrorism that can be blamed on Iran.

The clumsiness of its ill-trained surrogates must irritate the hell out of the Mossad's real pros. In fact, the performances by the the goofballs tasked with "justifying" Israel's forthcoming war on Iran are fooling nobody, except possibly Joe Liebermann and the rest of the AIPAC-owned pols in Congress.

Take, for example, the recent botched bombings in India, Georgia and now Thailand.  For two days Israel has thundered about this "evidence" that Iranian "terrorists" have targeted "Israelis and Israeli interests."  The U.S. media promptly became an echo chamber for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak. On NBC last night, Brian Williams and Jim Miklaszewski were so het up about the Iran "threat" that I ran outside and scanned the skies for Persian missiles.  Only the U.S. Fifth Fleet, they warned me, stands between Iran and "the rest of the world."

In Washington, a State Department briefing called attention to  Monday's incidents in India and Georgia, and ominously connected them to recent "Iranian-sponsored" and "Hezbollah-linked" plots to attack Israeli and Western interests in Azerbaijan and Thailand.

Never mind that Will Hartley, chief terrorism expert at Jane's in London, said the attacks in India, Georgia and Thailand "have all been highly amateurish, and lack the sophistication that would normally be expected from an operation executed by either Hezbollah or Iran's own external operations wing, the Quds Force."

Never mind that a Thai government official said "we need more analysis" to determine who was behind the attack in Bangkok and whether Iran was involved.

Israeli media also reported that Mossad teams are in Bangkok and New Delhi to investigate the recent explosions. What chutzpah!  Imagine if Iran had sent Quds teams into Oklahoma City when the federal building was bombed!

One of the "terrorists" in Bangkok blew off his own damned leg! And we thought the Texas hustler was a nutso for laying a ton of hit money on a guy who was under cover for  United States narcs in a drug investigation. If this is the quality of "spy" and "terrorist" Iran is siccing on Israel and "the rest of the world," where's the "threat?"  Bring the Fleet home and wait for Iran to self-destruct.

Ah, but Bibi Netanyahu and his buds in Congress are in no mood to wait .  An Israeli journalist reported -- probably accurately -- that Bibi's government wants to start obliterating Iran no later than April.  If that happens, you can bet Washington will be "all in" by May.

"USA! USA!  USA! .  . . "Support Our Troops!" . . . "United We Stand!" . . .