What's Left of a River Runs Through It

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Awakening (Perhaps)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let It Snow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

False Prophets for Profit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Artist at Work

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Black Ops and Red Herrings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2 Boys, 2 Books

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

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

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

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

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

State of the Union (I)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

State of the Union (II)

By Mort Persky

OK, the truth. Just tell the truth!

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Just God

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Air America, r.i.p.

Once in Philadelphia there was a 24-hour all-classical music station, and my hearing was still good enough to enjoy it wherever I drove, especially during the interminable traffic jams on a dreadful road called the Schuylkill Expressway.

Advertisers abandoned it because its audience shrank; older people, its largest listener segment, died off and younger ones preferred to listen to rock. Especially to listen to rock.  Or to listen to Rush Limbaugh telling them what to think.  WFLN went the way of the eight-track tape.

Why, I often wondered, when Limblow's shouts about feminazis and Bill Clinton's sexual proclivities could be heard through an adjoining motorist's open window, was there not a talk-show antidote to Rush and his right wing fellow air polluters?

And then one day there was.  It was called Air America and it gave us such intelligent, witty and perceptive commentators as Al Franken and Rachel Maddow -- thinking people's talk radio.  Some real and excellent journalism was committed on its wavelength.

Air America folded last week, for want of advertising revenue and other sources of funding.

I join the progressive punditry in lamenting its death, which many commentators with far more knowledge of radio than I possess have called a "suicide."  Others say the death was inevitable because there is no audience for progressive talk radiio -- it is by nature too open to dissenting views, too willing to consider nuance and subtle differences in priorioty, to appeal to a mass audience.  On the one hand this, and on the other hand that.  What with cell phones,  GPS  and a steering wheel, today's motorist doesn't have enough hands for progressive talk radio.

A friend who is a prize-winning veteran of public and progressive radio, falls in the "suicide" group.

"Air America was atrociously run from the gitgo," she told me. "I’ve seen it previously in lefty radio start ups: terrible business model, no adults in the room, doomed. Most radio shows take decades to find an audience. In Rush’s early days, accommodation was made for such a build up. These days there’s practically no room for that anymore, and A.A. really tried to rush things.  Besides, the right has so dominated the AM airwaves for so long that they pull all sorts of stunts to keep the lefties away, and AA wasn't wise to the stunts.

"But if it's done right, there really is a lib radio audience  -- and some of the the shows have found their way onto the same networks as Limbaugh, and (infamously right-wing) Clear channel etc.  Take Randi Rhodes, for example, or Tom Hartman, Stephanie Miller -- their shows are surviving. Hartman is the anti-Limbaugh, a self-infatuated pontificator of the left.  Miller is very funny. Rhodes  is actually a serious student of politics with a flair for realpolitik."

I note that she said they're "surviving."  Limblow and his clones are thriving.  A clever entertainer can do that in talk radio. Ken Hamblin, a onetime civil rights marcher and newspaper photographer, reinvented himself as a right-wing black radio personality and thrived in Denver for years.  He became wealthy, the act palled and now he's retired and jet-setting around from San Francisco. 

But someone else always comes along to take up the bleat and get rich doing so.  There's a big, deep, angry pool of haters out there, ripe to hear the message. Makes 'em feel, y' know, powerful.

The Razor's Edge

It is time for the administration to heed Occam's Razor and form new, simpler, more direct policies.

The efforts at bipartisanship in legislating health care reform led to a hopeless tangle of sops to competing interests.  It should be abandoned.

Abiding by the principle that the simplest solution or strategy is usually the best, here are some ways for the Democrats in Congress and the executive branch to show some real leadership:

1. Millions of jobless Americans are in worse shape financially than Wall Street was when big government made the big bail-out.   Solution: Commit just as much money as was given to the banks to creating a federal job bank.  Whatever jobs need to be done that can be done through public works should be done, by putting jobless Americans on the federal payroll to do them. Find something in the public good to employ every jobless American. Don't fret the cost. As a number of top economists outside the administration have told us, this is no time to worry about federal debt.  It is time to worry about citizen debt, citizen hunger, citizen discontent. 

2. Get serious about ending war, closing military bases abroad and bringing troops home.  The faster that can be made to happen, the faster the money wasted on killing abroad can be invested in saving and improving lives at home.

3. Craft a simple piece of legislation that applies Medicare to everyone.  No strings.  Mandate that every American of any age shall be covered by exactly the same program that now covers Americans 65 and over.  Let the greedy damned insurance companies sell "gap" insurance as they do now -- but make them do it on a federally controlled exchange, with simple standards for comparison of costs and benefits.

4. One by one, regulate those aspects of private enterprise in which the state has a controlling interest under the constitution.  Make the legislation simple and without loopholes.  Start with carbon emissions; they make people sick.  All cap, no trade. 

5. Defeat the Supreme Court's edict that corporations are more important than people by legislating public funding of all federal elections.  This can be financed simply: a small, mandatory surcharge on individual tax returns, and a substantial tax on the advertising budgets of corporations. 

6.  Put a word limit -- say 750 words -- on every new piece of legislation offered.  End government by windbags.  Keep it simple. 

7.  Start today, and define the goals in the State of the Union Address.  Do it now.  When the Corporate Congress takes over later this year no actions in the people's best interests will be possible.

Catch 2010

It is organic to liberalism that its adherents argue amongst themselves as arduously as they do with their adversaries.

Thus the liberal blogger, lawyer, and expert on Constitutional law, Glenn Greenwald, sees the Supreme Court decision on corporate campaign spending in a somewhat different light than many other liberals.

Greenwald:

"Critics emphasize that the Court's ruling will produce very bad outcomes:  primarily that it will severely exacerbate the problem of corporate influence in our democracy.  Even if this is true, it's not really relevant.  Either the First Amendment allows these speech restrictions or it doesn't.  In general, a law that violates the Constitution can't be upheld because the law produces good outcomes (or because its invalidation would produce bad outcomes). 

"Those who want to object to the Court's ruling need to do so on First Amendment grounds.  Except to the extent that some constitutional rights give way to so-called 'compelling state interests,' that the Court's decision will produce 'bad results' is not really an argument.

"More specifically, it's often the case that banning certain kinds of speech would produce good outcomes, and conversely, allowing certain kinds of speech produces bad outcomes (that's true for, say, White Supremacist or neo-Nazi speech, or speech advocating violence against civilians).  The First Amendment is not and never has been outcome-dependent. The Government is barred from restricting speech -- especially political speech -- no matter the good results that would result from the restrictions.  That's the price we pay for having the liberty of free speech.  And even on a utilitarian level, the long-term dangers of allowing the Government to restrict political speech invariably outweigh whatever benefits accrue from such restrictions.

"The reality is that our political institutions are already completely beholden to and controlled by large corporate interests (Dick Durbin:  "banks own" the Congress).  Corporations find endless ways to circumvent current restrictions -- their armies of PACs, lobbyists, media control, and revolving-door rewards flood Washington and currently ensure their stranglehold -- and while this decision will make things marginally worse, I can't imagine how it could worsen fundamentally.  All of the hand-wringing sounds to me like someone expressing serious worry that a new law in North Korea will make the country more tyrannical.  There's not much room for our corporatist political system to get more corporatist.  Does anyone believe that the ability of corporations to influence our political process was meaningfully limited before yesterday's issuance of this ruling?"

I cede to Mr. Greenwald the First Amendment argument.  I continue to disagree with him about the outcome of the court's ruling.   Things will "worsen fundamentally."  Here's why:

The solution to what the court has done is legislative.  It behooves Congress to enact Constitutional laws that protect both the integrity of the election process and the right of free speech. But no-holds barred spending guarantees that corporate-controlled candidates will win still more seats in Congress.  This militates against our ever achieving fair elections, that is,  elections in which the "compelling state interest" in the health, welfare and liberties of  "We the People of the United States" are protected against competing interests that have vastly more money to spend.

It's Catch 2010.  Only a fairly-elected Congress can find a fair and democratic solution to the campaign finance dilemma.  Now we never will have a fairly-elected Congress to do so.