A Tale of Two Booklists

It's the instant experts of Media Zoo who are crazy.  Jared Lee Loughner's list of favorite books is a principal fixation in their ill-informed psychoanalysis of the alleged perpetrator of the Tucson horrors.

Pontificators on every point of the spectral periphery find evidence in the books Loughner liked to support their own prejudices about what motivated his terrible actions.

I was struck by the fact that most of the books on Loughner's list were also on the favorite books list of my oldest grandson, dead now for five years.  My grandson's list was longer and broader than Loughners: he was so avid a reader that his mourners established an online library as a memorial to him.

Logan was 23 when he died.  He had risen early on his day off to help cook food for the homeless of the Florida city where he lived.  Then he drove his battered old minivan around town delivering it to parks and shelters, to tent-towns behind bilboards and to nasty neighborhood where Whitey wasn't welcome.  He spent the evening at  a long and sometimes contentious meeting of groups opposed to war, to plan an upcoming anti-war demonstration.

They discussed speeches, guerrilla theater and readings.  Logan cautioned that their arguments be low-key, factual and intellectually persuasive -- like the letters to the editor he wrote to newspapers all over Florida.

I am struck by the similarities between Logan and Loughner: their ages, the book list, their mutual interest in atheism, their disgust with our government.  Logan abhorred guns, wanted all of them beaten into plowshares.  Loughner, friends said, had no interest in guns until last November, when he abruptly purchased not just a gun, but a weapon of mass destruction with a 33-shot magazine. Logan dropped out of junior college for financial and family reasons; Loughner was booted out.  Both were angry.  Both believed that their anger was justified.  Logan's was rooted in Howard Zinn's view of American history, with its emphasis on the officially sanctioned brutalization of minorities beginning with the Original Americans themselves.  The bases of Loughner's anger have been described as disjointed and obtuse.

If the book list led Loughner anywhere, it was to the shopping mall where he is alleged to have committed mass murder, and to the jail cell where he awaits trial on charges that could lead to an execution chamber.

Logan's book list led him to help the homeless, the disadvantaged, the troubled; to vow to return to school and become a teacher of history; and to preach peace. The authorities speculated that after his long, hard last day he dozed at the wheel on his way home, struck a median strip and rolled his vehicle.  He had neglected to fasten the seat belt. Hundreds attended his memorial service on a beach from which his ashes were scattered into the sea he loved.  His boss shed tears for a wise yet fun-loving  young man who always had a surprise up his sleeve --  and who always provoked his elders to think about "things" in new and different ways.  "I didn't always agree with him," the boss said,"but he sure made me think and see things in a new light  and I loved him for that."  His fellow war resisters described a passionate young man who hated war and violence and injustice. A succession of young men in their late teens and early adulthood spoke lovingly of a powerful force who reached out to them in their troubles, made sense to them, mentored them, gave them a shoulder to cry on and a hand to pull them up.  They used the  phrase, "He saved my life," time and again.

There was a faint, fine line between Jared Lee Loughner, 22, and Logan David Brooks, 23.

Yet one saved lives and one took lives.

Perhaps, Media Mouths, we should look not at book lists, but inside ourselves.

'I Hope You Jump in Rain Puddles'

I remember how it was, covering this kind of breaking news.  We had to anesthetize ourselves against normal human emotional pain.

Where were you when you first heard about the assassination of John Kennedy? About the planes flying into the twin towers?

There were reporters to be dispatched, assignments to be made,  facts to be double-checked, directories to be consulted, neighbors to be found, experts and authorities to be interviewed.  There was no time for tears.

Old habits die hard.

Today the numbness has worn off.  Others have dispatched reporters,  made assignments, interviewed neighbors and authorities, made their reports.

Today I am weeping.

My tears were triggered by, and are especially for, a little girl. She was the youngest and most innocent of the victims in the Tucson madness yesterday.

Christina Taylor Greene was born on September 11, 2001. She was part of the  Faces of Hope: Babies Born on 9/11 project. Her entry reads: " I hope you know all the words to the Star Spangled Banner and sing it with your hand over your heart. I hope you jump in rain puddles."

The tears began the moment I read that.

The profound, simple poetry of hope, written by a little girl.

Back in the numbness, I read the pious prattling of the politicians: Palin, Boehner, McCain, Obama.  Verbal Novacaine.

And then I read, "I hope you jump in rain puddles."

Through the tears I saw, dimly, but I saw it.  I saw the old vision of hope, before the likes of Obama turned the word into a parody of itself, into the cheap talky-talk of our sound byte world.

Hope is not audacious.

Hope is a rain puddle.

A little girl gave us this profound truth.  Will it die with her? Will the insanity that ended her life continue to fester and grow in this brutalized country of ours?

Is there still a thing called hope?

Can we actually join hands and jump in rain puddles together?

Can we?  Will we?

Appointees: How Exciting! How Encouraging! Snore.

Dr. Kidglove, the elected head of the United States of Goldman Sachs, has filled two important vacancies on his White House staff.

I give you our London Correspondent, an expatriate Yank: 

I see that the Pres has chosen Larry Summers' replacement,  Sperling by name.  Currently working for Timmy Geithner and former consultant to Goldman Sachs. How exciting! How encouraging! Snore!

In 2008 ol' Gene was paid eight hundred and eighty-seven thousand dollars. . .
. . . for part-time work . . .

. . .on a charity  project!

What planet would it be where somebody gets paid almost a million bucks in a single year for part-time work of any kind, never mind "charity" work? 

Wish I could ask Mr. Sperling how, in carrying out his new duties, he purges his mind of thoughts about whether his conduct in office might affect Goldman Sachs' willingness to put him back on the payroll in the future.

Even on a foggy day, the view from London obviously is more clear than that from, say, inside our infamous Beltway around Washington, DC.  No propagandist (journalists no longer exist inside the Beltway) for American media has been so perceptive in reporting on the Sperling appointment.

Expatriate Chicagoan that he is, Dr. Kidglove reached into the Windy City"s Daley dynasty to replace Rahm (F-Word) Emanuel as chief of staff. Bill Daley, brother of one Mayor Daley and son of another, is the appointee.

The same Bill Daley who, as Clinton's secretary of commerce, led efforts on behalf of the NAFTA treaty, which created the "great sucking sound" of American jobs being vacuumed out of the United States and into cheap-labor countries.

The same Bill Daley who opposed creating a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to protect mere citizens from being driven into bankruptcy by the predators of Wall Street.

The same Bill Daley who is on record as saying that the watered-down, Republicanized, pharmaceutical company-favoring, insurer-enriching,  barely-better-than-nothing health care bill is too far left.

The same Bill Daley who for seven years was a senior executive at JP Morgan Chase, the triple-A farm club of Goldman Sachs and the Too Biggest to Fail of all the Too Big to Fail banks that you and I bailed out with our hard-earned tax dollars.

My fellow Americans, assume The Position.

Stock Tip for 2011: Invest in Petroleum Jelly Manufacturers

They're off!  First out of the gate in the race to crazy is Lindsey Graham, senior Senator from South Carolina, who wants to build permanent military bases in Afghanistan. He'll be passed within a furlong by other, newer nut cases, but for the nonce, he's out front.

The  cost of a typical, six-hectare U.S base in the Middle East -- with operations center, residential blocks, communications hub, storage facilities, training center, medical center, repair facilities, logistics center, canteen, recreation facilities and a doghouse (yes, a doghouse is standard) -- runs about $100 million, give or take a few tens of millions.  If Haliburton is involved, add another 30 to 50 million in vigorish.  Graham doesn't say how many permanent bases he wants to build, but a good guess would be that just building them would add about $4 billion to the total cost of the Afghanistan war.

The $4 billion is a spit in the bucket of a war that will have cost more than $366 billion by the time this is posted.  It's increasing at a rate of roughly $5,000 per second. Altogether we've spent $1.2 trillion since 2001 in order to kill nearly 6,000 United States military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan,  and more than 900,000 civilians, journalists and members of allied (called "coalition") military units.

According to the latest National Intelligence Estimates, the $366  billion Afghanistan war  has left large parts of the country in danger of falling to the Taliban.  Kabul, the capital, is still under Afghan government control, but most of the roads in and out of the city are controlled by the Taliban.   The Afghan prime minister, Hamid Karzai, recently told Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. commander there, "If I had to choose sides today, I'd choose the Taliban."  This from our most dependable ally in the country.

So that's what $366 billion of military buys.  Four billion dollars worth of permanent bases won't do a damned thing to change that.  It will enclose uncounted numbers of American troops in heavily-armed enclaves which Afghanistan's expert guerrilla forces will bleed dry by the death of a million razor cuts -- as they did to the Russians before us and the British before them.  The BBC, ABC and several other international news agencies conducted a poll recently that showed 40 per cent of the populace in Afghanistan approved of attacks on U.S. troops, 30 per cent didn't care one way or the other as long as nobody disturbed the opium fields, and most of the rest didn't understand the question.

Only a handful of defense contractors would profit from the construction of Graham's  permanent military bases in Afghanistan.  But the movement to build them is just the first of many reminders to come that the United States military-industrial complex remains the greatest single power on earth.

We have military bases in 63 countries.  They comprise nearly a million buildings and equipment edifices.  Our Pentagon is the largest single land-owner in the world.  Its budget -- spending will top $800 billion in 2011 -- is greater than the total military budgets of all the other nations in the world.

The most realistic recent study of universal health care in the United States -- that is, of guaranteeing free health care to every single American -- estimated the cost at $110 billion a year. That's one-eighth of what it costs to operate our killing machine for a year, a cost that has been increasing, on average, by 16% per year.

The same politicians, Sen. Graham in the forefront, who approve the costs of killing and in fact want to increase them with $4 billion worth of useless permanent bases tell us that we cannot afford the $110 billion to keep Americans healthy.

One of the first acts of the new Congress will be to cut spending to pay down our national debt.  Social security funding will be reduced.  Our doctors'' Medicare payments will be reduced.  Retirees' prescription costs have already risen because pharmaceutical companies are raising prices and Medicare is cutting benefits.

We'll cut education spending to the bone, raise the payroll taxes of the working poor, cancel any vestiges of oversight of financial institutions so that they can continue to bankrupt individual ciitzens while paying record bonuses to the executives who almost ruined the entire economy two years ago.

My fellow Americans, assume "the position."

Cuckoo, cuckoo, well you sing, cuckoo!

We have passed through the Looking Glass.  The inmates run the asylum.  Up is down.  You cannot get  there from here.  You cannot get anywhere from here.  We live in absolute, unmitigated,  bat-shit insanity and for us  it is normal.

Judith Miller was a reporter for the New York Times.  She wrote and the newspaper published unverified government lies about  Iraq, Al Qaeda, weapons of mass destruction, aluminum tubes and yellow cake.  The government wanted these lies to be repeated as truth. The lies propelled us into wars. The wars have cost well over a trillion dollars now and the cost is rising at a rate of thousands of dollars per second.  Nearly 5,000 American lives and hundreds of thousands of Arab lives have been lost in Judith Miller's wars.  Even the commanders of those wars acknowledge there is no end in sight.

When her lies were exposed as lies, Miller said: "My job isn't to assess the government's information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself.  My job is to tell readers of The New York Times what the government thought."

Julian Assange created a website called WikiLeaks that makes public official documents that governments, especially our government, don't want us to see.  The documents are absolutely authentic; nobody has ever questioned their authenticity. The videos, like the one showing the murder of civilians and Reuters journalists, are real; nobody has ever questioned their reality.They were filmed from real helicopters firing real bullets and missiles; the victims shed real blood and died real deaths, leaving real corpses to be buried by real grieving survivors.

Yesterday on the ranking garbage network on TV  Miller criticized Assange because he "didn't care at all about attempting to verify the information that he was putting out or determine whether or not it would hurt anyone."

From Alice in Wonderland:

"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.

"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."

"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.

"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."

Deep in the Heart of Myopia and Cowardice

In these United States, the bad guys are relentless and have unlimited funding.  The good guys dislike the smell of their own sweat and still believe that virtue has amorphous power to prevail against all odds.

No wonder the democratic republic founded on a thesis of checks and balances died a dozen years ago and nobody noticed.

Illustrations abound.  Nay, they inundate us daily.  They flood us, overwhelm us, numb our senses, beat us into a miasmic mass of helpless resignation.

A microcosm: southern New Mexico is blessed with public lands whose unique characteristics are less spectacularly beautiful than, say, the Grand Canyon; whose historical importance is less obvious than, say, Mesa Verde's; whose archeological value is less self-evident than, say, the great pyramids; whose thundering silence, unchanged openness, vistaed hopes and majestic instancy feed only souls hungering after solace, not not egos bottomless with greed.  They deserve preservation, these lands; protection from the predations of the land-rapers, a license of passage to generations unborn. 

I came to live here because of these lands.  They are my church, my place to recover from wounds, to think, to simply be.  I want to share them with anyone and everyone who will respect them, cherish them, leave them simply to be.

Of course I joined the movement to protect them in perpetuity from from human abuse.

Proposals were written, hearings were held, viewpoints were aired, money was spent, alliances were formed, lies were told, facts were presented, "stakeholders" were asked to comment, experts were called to pontificate, ignoramuses were allowed to prattle, legislation was written and more hearings were held.

At the last of these, the same old well-funded prevaricators, distorters and transmogrifiers turned out in force, spewing the same old bilge that had been refuted many times before.  Sen. Tom Udall, the junior of New Mexico's senators, both of whom supported the wilderness legislation, played prosecuting attorney.  His skilled cross-examination stripped each of the nay-sayers of any remaining vestige of credibility.

The legislation, which had already passed the U.S. House of Representatives, seemed headed toward passage by the Senate and signature into law by the President.

But the corporate and private interests that control us do their real work not in public hearings; they work behind the closed doors of the inner offices inside the Beltway.  There the pressures were brought to bear upon our gutless public servants that caused the wilderness bill to languish unvoted on.  The lame duck congressional session ended and  decades of dedicated citizen legwork within the system died.

The lemmings of Teabagistan are chortling with glee in the usual venues of ignorance: call-in radio and ungrammatical letters to local rags that purport to be newspapers, bumper stickers and bill boards, church message boards and crude trade association pamphlets. 

By the time a new people's movement of enlightened conservationists can be formed -- IF such can ever be re-formed --  the lands will have been devastated, raped of their historic, cultural and natural beneficence.

Just on the matter of public land management alone, similar dramas of dreams deferred are playing out in Utah, Idaho, Montana and throughout the west.  Take Utah:  some of our most precious heritage lands have long been coveted by the Midases of extraction and the Huns of off-roading.  A death-bed sell-out in the last days of Bush II gave the destroyers license to do their worst; it has taken nearly two years for the Dr. Kidglove administration to reverse the Interior Department rules that allowed their criminal acts.  But without supportive action by the whores of Congress, this will come to naught.

The bad guys will win, as they always do in these United States, simply because they do not relent, and they have unlimited finances. And because they really don't have any opposition.

No sweat, right?

Stuck Like a Dope With a Thing Called Hope

Chris Hedges, a journalist, has emerged as one of the most important writers in early 21st Century America. He speaks the truths Americans are entitled to know, but do not want to hear.  His anti-war speech in 2003 touched off an infamously hostile reaction at the commencement rites at Rockford (Ill.) College -- whose most famous alumna, ironically, was the Nobel Prize winning peace advocate, Jane Addams. A Yale Divinity School graduate, Hedges became one of the finest war correspondents in American Journalism. His employer, the New York Times, staunch defender of two reporters who peddled government lies to justify invading Iraq, refused to stand by Hedges after that speech.  Now Hedges is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute,  a lecturer in the Council of the Humanities, the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University, and an author of important books.  What follows is a transcription of a speech he gave to the assemblage of anti-war veterans and activists preparing to be arrested for civil disobedience at the White House gates on Thursday, December 16. As a new year dawns, it is imperative that all Americans begin to understand its message. -- T.W.


                    By Chris Hedges

Hope, from now on, will look like this.

Hope will not come in trusting in the ultimate goodness of Barack Obama, who, like Herod of old, sold out his people. It will not be realized by chanting packaged campaign slogans or attempting to influence the democratic party. It will not come through our bankrupt liberal institutions-- from the press, to the withered stump that is the labor movement.

Hope will only come now when we physically defy the violence of the state. All who resist, all who are here today, keep hope alive. All who succumb to fear, despair and apathy become an enemy of hope. They become, in their passivity, agents of injustice.

It is not having a positive attitude or pretending that happy thoughts and false optimism will make the world better. Hope is not about chanting packaged campaign slogans or trusting in the better nature of the Democratic Party. Hope does not mean that our protests will suddenly awaken the dead consciences, the atrophied souls, of the plutocrats running Halliburton, Goldman Sachs, ExxonMobil or the government.

If the enemies of hope are finally victorious in this nation, the poison of violence will become not only the language of power but the language of opposition. And those who resist with nonviolence are the last thin line of defense between a civil society and its disintegration.
Hope has a cost. Hope is not comfortable or easy. Hope requires personal risk. It is not about the right attitude. Hope is not about peace of mind. Hope is action. Hope is doing something. The more futile, the more useless, the more irrelevant and incomprehensible an act of rebellion is, the vaster and more potent hope becomes.

Hope never makes sense. Hope is weak, unorganized and absurd. Hope, which is always nonviolent, exposes in its powerlessness, the lies, fraud and coercion employed by the state. Hope knows that an injustice visited on our neighbor is an injustice visited on all of us. Hope posits that people are drawn to the good by the good. This is the secret of hope's power. Hope demands for others what we demand for ourselves. Hope does not separate us from them. Hope sees in our enemy our own face.

Hope is not for the practical and the sophisticated, the cynics and the complacent, the defeated and the fearful. Hope is what the corporate state which saturates our airwaves with lies seeks to obliterate. Hope is what this corporate state is determined to crush. Be afraid, they tell us. Surrender your liberties to us so we can make the world safe from terror. Don't resist. Embrace the alienation of our cheerful conformity. Buy our products. Without them you are worthless. Become our brands. Do not look up from your electronic hallucinations. No. Above all do not think. Obey.

The powerful do not understand hope. Hope is not part of their vocabulary. They speak in the cold, dead words of national security, global markets, electoral strategy, staying on message, image and money. The powerful protect their own. They divide the world into the damned and the blessed, the patriots and the enemy, the privileged and the weak. They insist that extinguishing lives in foreign wars or in our prison complexes is a form of human progress.

They cannot see that the suffering of a child in Kandehar or a child in the blighted urban pocket of our nation's capitol diminishes and impoverishes us all. They are deaf, dumb and blind to hope. Those addicted to power, enthralled by self-exaltation, cannot decipher the words of hope any more than most of us can decipher hieroglyphics.

Hope to Wall Street bankers and politicians, to the masters of war and commerce, is not practical. It is gibberish. It means nothing. And this is because they kneel before the idols of greed and money.

If we resist and carry out acts, no matter how small, of open defiance, hope will not be extinguished. If all we accomplish today is to assure a grieving mother in Baghdad or Afghanistan, a young man or woman crippled physically and emotionally by the hammer blows of war, that he or she is not alone, our act will be successful. But hope cannot be sustained if it cannot be seen.

Any act of rebellion, any physical defiance of those who make war, of those who perpetuate corporate greed and are responsible for state crimes, anything that seeks to draw the good to the good, nourishes our souls and holds out the possibility that we can touch and transform the souls of others. Hope affirms that which we must affirm. And every act that imparts hope is a victory in itself.

(from Auden)

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

Oliverian Twists in Washington: Glee Over Gruel

The gleeful din in the dingy outposts of leftish television has been deafening.  Obama lives!  Days of triumph!  Democratic legislation passes!  Don't ask, don't tell repealed!  Benefits  approved for for 9-11 first responders! Nineteen new judges confirmed! Unemployment benefits extended!

Give a starving man a loaf of stale bread and he'll consume it with relish and gratitude.

Alas, democracies cannot and do not thrive on stale bread.

The ecstasy of getting a few watered-down paps to the liberal conscience signed into law is supposed to compensate us for the agony of two years of extension of the worst Bush policies on abuse of executive privilege, human rights, civil liberties, government secrecy, war, corporatocracy and social justice -- all of it crowned by the most criminal sell-out of an entire people since Peter Stuyvesant "bought" Manhattan island., the so-called tax "compromise."

The devil, as always, is in the details.  The first responder benefits, for example, passed only after the funding was reduced to such a pittance than even the most misanthropic of right-wing Republicans could accept it.

The judges who were confirmed, when put under a microscope, are closer in judicial philosophy to John Roberts than Louis Brandeis. Those whose histories disclose even the slightest hint of progressive understanding of the profundity of our Constitution are deemed "controversial" by the lemming media and held hostage by the neanderthal Senate, even though most of them were unanimously recommended for confirmation by the Senate judiciary committee. (After two years, 59 Obama judicial nominees have been confirmed, the lowest number in almost a century.)

Pre-passage tinkering by the corporate-owned right-wingers who control the Senate created modifications and amendments -- those old devil details -- that made milksops of what Dr. Kidglove so ornately signed into law. As one savvy Senate-watcher remarked the other day, "Before the days when every routine bit of legislation required 60 votes to even be considered, this entire lame duck docket could've been taken care of in one random week of the regular legislative session."

How right he is!  The 60-vote canard is the great ugly duckling behind which Dr. Kidglove has hidden his worst shortcomings, deceptions and surrenders.  "Tsk, tsk, it's too bad that I couldn't even suggest true health care reform -- single-payer -- because those nasty people would threaten to filibuster and I don't have the 60 votes required io. . ." 

"Well, I had to give up the public option because there weren't 60 . . ."

"The stimulus bill isn't perfect, but since we didn't have 60 . . ."

Bovine excrement Doc, Rachel, Keith, Larry, Harry, Nancy. . . . It still requires  51, not 60, votes to enact legislation in the Senate.  Dr. Kidglove's party controlled that many votes, and more than enough votes in the House, to pass truly progressive legislation on matters of enormous importance to all Americans.

I applaud the extension of civil liberties to a small minority of members of the military.  I applaud the provision of assistance, however minimal, to first responders in the terrorist attacks.  I applaud efforts to improve the safety of our food -- although the details of the actual legislation don't make me feel any safer. 

But despite all the happy, happy happy talk on lefty TV these days, these facts remain:

The DREAM Act is a pipe dream; Dodd-Frank financial regulation cannot be enforced; we have no climate bill, no immigration reform, no budget, and no hope of improving, rather than dismantling, the health care law.

And unless Julian Assange turns up some documents with the devil details in them, we have no way of knowing what secret sell-outs Dr. Kidglove and his gutless henchmen made on future votes, just to get  the pablum people have been cheering this week.

How green is my mold?  Never mind!  Bread is bread when you're starving.

A Christmas Carol for The Year That Was

Silent night . . .

Before they can be hired, Fox News "journalists" have to pass a beliefs test designed by the network's top boss, right-wing Republican Roger Ailes, to prove their political conservatism.  Recently, a management memo ordered  all "news" employees  not to mention "climate change"  or warming temperatures without immediately stating that critics dispute the data on which these notions are based.  They are not permitted to state that climate change data are peer reviewed by other qualified scientists; or that their "critics"  either lack suitable scientific credentials or are bankrolled by Exxon-Mobil and other major extraction industries  with an implicit understanding that their "science" will produce company-friendly conclusions.

Holy night . . . .

On Christmas Day, a child-soldier, who has never been convicted of a crime, will be held in solitary confinement for 23 hours, and not permitted proper exercise for the hour outside his cell  in a military prison.  This will mark his seventh month of such confinement, which physicians and experts in international law have defined as torture. Acting  on his belief that every citizen has a moral obligation to shed light on immoral actions of his government, Pvt. Bradley Manning  allegedly gave electronic data to WikiLeaks that the government wanted to hide. Manning is being force-fed anti-depressant medication in the hope that it will prevent his committing suicide. He has not been tried on any charges; he has not even been granted the pre-trial hearing that is mandated by  Article 32 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which is neither uniform, nor just.

All is calm . . .

The Justice Department has acknowledged it plans to increase the number of its Gestapo-style raids on the homes and offices of peace activists and critics of government policy. Such raids allegedly were legalized by the 6-3 Supreme Court decision in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project.  It held that speech and advocacy otherwise protected by the First Amendment was a crime if government agencies found it to be "coordinated with or under the direction of a foreign group listed by the Secretary of State as 'terrorist.'"

All is bright. . . .

As of Dec. 16, at least 293,685 people have been killed in warfare around the world this year. The United States incursions into Iraq and Afghanistan continue to be among the leading killers of civilians, along with the civil strife in Somalia and the Sudan, and the drug cartel wars in Mexico.

Round yon Virgin, mother and child . . .

One in six Americans will go hungry this Christmas, or have to forego other necessities such as heat or medicine, in order to buy food.

Holy infant so tender and mild . . .

For eight years our government has held detainees at Guantanamo without charge or prospect of trial, while administering to them a dangerous drug that an Army doctor characterized as "pharmacological waterboarding." 

Sleep in heavenly peace . . .

While gloating Republicans watched, President Obama signed into law legislation that provides:
 $1.1 million in personal tax cuts for the heads of five banks that required $142 billion of taxpayer bailout money;
  $1.3 million in personal tax relief for Rupert Murdoch, the billionaire who owns Fox "News" and other media cash cows;
   $400 a year tax increases for America's poorest workers;
    tax cuts totaling $35.41 billion for the 400 wealthiest Americans;
     slashes in funding for Social Security and Medicare, the only sources of income and health care for millions of elderly Americans;
      and massive tax cuts for the corporations that ship American jobs overseas.

Sleep in heavenly peace.

Americans bought 1.2 million greeting cards this holiday season that contained images of polar bears.  That's about five times as many images as there are living polar bears in the entire world. The bears are an endangered species whose habitat has been reduced more than 21 per cent by the global warming that Rupert Murdoch's media empire denies is happening.  Now the wealthiest corporations in history -- American energy companies -- are about to begin massive drilling in the Arctic Wildlife refuge, which will destroy a critical habitat of the bear.

Silent night, holy night . . .

Nearly 20,000 people have been killed in the last five years in Somalia, many of them with some of the 40 tons of weapons the United States has shipped into the country.  Somalia  has not had an effective government since 1991.  This year, the warring factions have begun exporting violence to neighboring countries like Uganda, where a series of July bombings killed 70 civilians.

Shepherds quake  . . .

In the Darfur region of Sudan,  more than 1.5 million people will spend Christmas lacking the outside assistance they need for basic survival -- food, shelter, water and sanitation facilities.  Several hundred thousand have died either as the result of combat between rival insurgents, or from starvation and disease caused by the fighting.  International aid agencies have been expelled.

, , , at the sight . . .

In April an explosion at a British Petroleum drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico killed 11 men,  injured 17 and set off the worst oil spill in American history.  The environmental damage was incalculable; the extent of despoilation of marine and wildlife habitat may never be known.  After months of accepting at face value BP's propaganda about the leak, the U.S. government finally filed a lawsuit on Dec. 15 against BP and eight other companies involved in the disaster.

Glories stream from heaven afar .  .  .

Already one of the poorest, least developed nations in the world, Haiti was struck on Jan. 12 by the worst earthquake in the hemisphere in 200 years.  More than 300,000 people died.  Port au Prince, the capital, was virtually destroyed.   International aid has largely failed to reach the people who need it, many of whom are homeless refugees, because of crime, corruption and inept management.  Later in the year a cholera epidemic killed at least a thousand more Haitians.

Heavenly hosts sing hallelujah . . .

The United States Supreme Court ruled in 2010 that corporations are people with unlimited powers of free speech, including the right to spend whatever it takes to rig elections and put only corporate-friendly hacks into office at every level of government.   Sixty-one per cent of the Roberts court's rulings have been pro-business, as opposed to 42 per cent for all of the courts that preceded it. 

Christ the savior is come . . .

June of 2010 was the fourth consecutive warmest month on record globally. Temperatures were 1.25 degrees F. above average, 2.2 degrees F. in the northern hemisphere.  In Moscow alone, 11,000 people died of hyperrthermia, edema, or other heat-related causes. A consensus of scientists held that these weather events could not have taken place if atmospheric carbon dioxide  had been at pre-industrial levels.

Christ the savior is come.

In 2010, The State of Texas required sweeping changes in textbooks for the state's schools.  They will reflect that no Hispanic American ever achieved anything worth recording in history texts, but Phyllis Schlafly and the National Rifle Association did.  That the civil rights movement was rooted in the violent philosophy of the Black Panthers, not the non-violence of Martin Luther King.  That the Founding Fathers intended the United States to be a Christian country.  But because Thomas Jefferson, a leading Founder, coined the phrase, "Separation of church and state," his name has been stricken from the list of "figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century," replacing him with St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone. And science teachers must teach the creation myth as an alternative to real science.

Merry Christmas!  God bless us, every one.

Oh Newcomer, Oh Autocrat! Oh Unbounded Joy!

Lois and I are in training.  Brandi seems to deem us reasonably quick studies.

We have learned:

--The poopin' ground is NOT the place we suggested; it's over there, between the goldfish pond and the cholla.

--Always leave the crate door open.  His lordship does not approve of being locked in, yet must have quick and easy access to it and his toys when he returns from his constitutionals.

--Kibble is not a meal until it has been supplemented with a little boiled chicken and rice.

--The playpen fence is the puppy equivalent of those rock-climbing walls you see in human sporting stores.

--All burrs must be swept up along the path of the daily walks Outside in The Big World.  His excellency gets very upset by burrs lodging in his footpads.

--Every living thing should be awake no later than 6 a.m.  Breakfast is immediately after play time which is immediately after the morning constitutional, which is RIGHT NOW!  Lunch is immediately after the late morning nap.  His lordship likes fresh water with his meal and that means NO spilled kibble going all squishy in there.

--The preferred post-prandial activity is chewing on a shoe -- preferably one that cost over $100 a pair only last week.

--If one is tempted to be vexed by some of his excellency's demands, one will be subjected to lavish canine kisses on the nose and behind the ear.  These not only drive away vexation, but probably can cure cancer, gout and jungle rot.


--His wonderfulness places one foot inside the food dish to hold it down because that's what his great-to-the-tenth power grandfather did to hold down HIS food, which he obtained by hunting.

--Hopping about like a little wallaby is his worship's way of telling us that he wants to go outside and play -- RIGHT NOW!

--Nap time is whenever and wherever his directorship ordains it to be.  We might think that draped over the floor mop is a curious way to sleep, but we're not puppies. Just as there is no such thing as too much oregano, so also there can never be too many naps in a day.  His high cuteness is not to be disturbed during naptime.

--All visitors to the household are understood to have come for the exclusive purpose of playing with his excellency.  They should come prepared for that role and should understand that all those puppy nips will leave not scars, but badges of honor.


--Don't tug at the leash.  His perfectness is obliged to sniff, taste, tug, paw at and, in extreme cases, urinate upon every new thing he sees.  Since everything he sees is new to him, walks and other quotidian tasks might take a while.  Be patient.

Brandi the boxer-shepherd, born Oct. 8, 2010, has succeeded the late Saxon the rottweagle as Lord of our Manor.

The king is dead.  Long live the king.

The Day Utter Irrationality Led to the Right Conclusion

Federal District Judge Henry E. Hudson of Virginia may have called it right when he ruled the individual mandate provision of the new health care law unconstitutional.

He showed his true colors, however, when he went on to prate about "unbridled exercise of the federal police powers."  The SCOTUS Gang of Five, which is better at rewriting the Constitution than understanding it, will uphold Judge Hudson's verdict when the appeals process reaches them. They will also applaud Hudson's obiter dictum even as real Constitution scholars hold that he came to the right decision for the wrong reasons.

His fellow Republicans have been condemning what they call Obamacare for all the wrong reasons ever since the first House draft of the proposed legislation became public.  Why should they change now?

The fault is not in the stars but in ourselves, that we allowed our overlings to sell their souls and seal our fate.  The entire mess of pottage called health care reform cannot work without the requirement that everyone must buy insurance.  If that is unconstitutional, then the entire law falls apart.

This was inevitable from the very moment that Dr. Kidglove decided not even to try to enact the only true health care reform: government, single-payer health care for every single one of us.  Having thus capitulated to the devil, he then compounded his crime by giving up without a whimper the one compromise that might have produced a decent health care bill: the public option.

Like the committee seeking to build a horse and producing a camel, the Democratic geniuses in Congress came up with the individual mandate provision that has now been struck down. My fellow Merkins, we are  back where we started, stuck with the worst health care system of any nation outside of the Third World. 

David Leonhardt,  one of the lead whores in the New York Times's growing stable of corporate  propagandists, recently wrote that the opposition to health care "stems from the tension between two competing traditions in the American economy. One is the laissez-faire tradition that celebrates individuality and risk-taking. The other is the progressive tradition that says people have a right to a minimum standard of living — time off from work, education and the like.

"Both traditions have been crucial to creating the most prosperous economy and the largest middle class the world has ever known. Laissez-faire conservatism has helped make the United States a nation of entrepreneurs, while progressivism has helped make prosperity a mass-market phenomenon."

Where has this guy been for the last 20 years?  On the moon?

When Uncle Henry dies because he can't afford the surgery that could save his life, or the medicine that could prolong it, console his survivors by reminding them that he was part of "the largest middle class the world has ever known."

When Tiny Tim starves to death because Daddy got laid off by a firm that shipped his job overseas, and now his unemployement benefits have run out, reassure the grieving father about the greatness of American entrepreneurship.

David, take your mass-market phenomenon and shove it up your crass-market rectum.

We have opposition to real health care reform in this benighted land because (1) our electorate is  ignorant beyond compare and (2) the richest 2 per cent of us and the corporations they own are greedy beyond Midas. People -- real, breathing, bleeding, helpless, hapless, hurting, jobless,  hungry, foreclosed, debt-drowned, naive, trusting, clueless, deprived, deceived, powerless people -- aren't even on their radar.

Buy insurance stock, if your conscience allows you to profit from the misery of your fellow man.  You, too, can be part of the falsest prosperity , the most rapidly vanishing middle class in the history of the world.

And you won't be bothered by "federal police powers." 

Unless you're one of "them."  We  know who "they" are, don't we Judge Hudson? Tea Party People?  Dr. Kidglove?  They are us.

Reflections on the Return of a Cooper's Hawk

Every year for six or seven years now, a Cooper's hawk has set up his command post on my backyard gate.  He arrives within 10 days on either side of the winter solstice and departs shortly before the vernal equinox.

He is one small part of the natural rhythms of our planet that fill me with awe and curiosity about the universe.  I welcome his annual visit for many reasons, even if his diet consists largely of the songbirds whose warbles, trills and tintinnabulations bring me joy. He also hunts small mammals and rodents whose presence is less pleasant.

Just today the hawk reclaimed his hunting grounds for another winter season. I believe it is the same hawk, who established his hunting rights as a fledgling and has now grown to maturity.  If this is so, the actuarial tables for birds of prey tell me that unless disaster strikes him down, he'll be hunting from my back gate for another five to seven years.

There are those of humankind who would bring disaster upon him.  In Pennsylvania, where I once lived, the Kittatinny ridge of Blue Mountain overlooks one of the world's busiest migratory flyways for raptors.  Once, every fall, the "sportsmen" of the area would gather on Kittatinny's slopes with their arsenals and slaughter thousands of the "varmint" birds as they flew the gauntlet their genetic codes sent them to.  Many of the shooters believed the myth that raptors were  killers of livestock, poultry and game birds. There are photographs of 15-foot high piles of dead raptors  on the Blue Mountain valley  floor.  Now the magnificent predators are protected along a 13,000 acre preserve of public and private lands.  Some 20,000 to 40,000 pass safely through the corridor every Aug. 15-Dec. 15, or winter safely in its forests and crags.

In 2005 there was a decline in population of the voles and other prey of the great gray owl.  The owls expanded their territory southward in quest of food.  The great gray is a solo diurnal hunter; a few strays wandered from the northern Rockies as far south as the Organ Mountains of southern New Mexico.  Two or three times, along a wide arroyo on a high desert mesa, my dog Saxon and I spotted a great gray on its early morning hunt.  What an awesome sight!  Statue-still, it surveyed the open desert for a lizard or rodent; when it spotted one a hundred or more yards away it rose silently with a single flap of its great, six-foot wingspan.  Airborne, it glided down the arroyo, perhaps four feet above the ground, until it pounced on its pray.  With the meal clasped in its talons, it sat silently for a few minutes, wings slightly spread to shield its kill from other predators. The great bird vanished within a week of its appearance, never to be seen again in that locale.  I hope it flew back home  to Colorado or Montana.  I would hate to think some "sportsman" shot it.  Diurnal raptors cannot be legally hunted, but illegal shooting is widespread.

Man, the greatest predator, takes it upon himself to rid the world of other predators.  Shooting gray wolves, or lobos, is illegal in Arizona and New Mexico where the nearly extinct animals have been reintroduced.  The packs are back on the brink of extinction, thanks to the illegal shooting of pregnant females and alpha males. 

Man, arrogant and short-sighted,  is the only mammal on Earth who meddles with Nature's scheme of things and willfully causes great mischief within the natural order.  Often his ignorance is self-destructive. For example, carnivores are  vulnerable to pesticides, insecticides, and other human-made toxic chemicals. In a process called  bioaccumulation. chemicals passed up the food chain from plant to plant-eater, and from plant-eater to meat-eater, become more and more concentrated in the tissues of each succeeding animal. At the top of the food chain, we are poisoning ourselves.

In our greed and hubris, we do this malevolence to our planet and its living things even as we disparage the science that illuminates our guilt.

A moment ago I glanced out the window.  My hawk lunged from his hunting lodge atop the garden gate and darted off in pursuit of prey.  He's part of a kill-or-be-killed segment of the natural order, and he does what he has to do to survive, to bequeath his genes to another generation of beautiful predators, to keep the cycles turning. He does not deny what he is; he simply is.

Man, like the hawk and the owl, compulsively seeks gratification, but not because the preservation of the species requires it.  Mankind changes at its whim what is and has to be in a blind pursuit of immediate profit or  or short-term satisfaction, never mind the ultimate cost or consequences for generations to come.

What fools these mortals be.

Fly, my hawk.  Fly.