Leave the Clocks Alone!

It's over a week now since we fiddled with the friggin' clocks but my aging, aching body still has not adjusted.  Why the hell do we go through this nonsense twice a year?

Y'all want the kiddybucks to have more daylight when the school day ends? Start classes an hour earlier the last month or two of the school year.

Y'all think it helps the farmers? They hate it as much as I do.

The big canard is that it saves energy.  No serious research supports that notion.  Most studies have found about one per cent less energy use after the clocks have been messed with.  In many places energy use actually goes up.

Daylight Saving (no s) Time they call it.  How the hell do you "save" daylight? The sun provides what it provides, no more, no less, and no amount of tinkering with the damned clocks can change it.  So why have the stinkin' politicians foisted this idiocy upon us?

My body doesn't care what the  clocks say.  It wants breakfast at breakfast time.  It wants lunch when the sun declares high noon.  It wants dinner at the normal, civilized hour. It does not want to be rushed into indigestion just because a batch of slack-jawed troglodytes in some state legislature decided to shove the clock hands ahead an extra turn.

Proper sleep is precious to geezers like me.  We forgo the extra cup of coffee we crave, we control our sugar intake, we walk an extra block a day, we avoid "bad" fats even if they taste good, we consume horrid potions from the druggist -- all in pursuit of a good night's sleep.  And for a few months of the year it works and we rise with the sun and feel good about starting the day.

Then the "spring forward" insanity arrives and we can't get a decent night's rest and we wake up knowing that it's seven o'clock but the damned clock says it's eight and for the rest of the day everything is out of whack. DST increases arthritis pain, causes acid reflux and destroys the taste buds.

No wonder the world is full of terrorists.

Mein Trumpf

Our Little Blond Hitler is his own Joseph Goebbels.  He will be the first to tell you (as Goebbels told Germany in 1933) that he alone among the country’s politicians understands the situation and draws the necessary hard and firm conclusions. “I’m the worst thing that ever happened to ISIS,” the neo-fuhrer told Barbara Walters.

He is hard and firm on such matters as:

—We must torture, using methods far more cruel than mere waterboarding, because torture will keep us safe.  Never mind the international laws against torture; we will make new laws; we will BE the law.

—We must build walls to keep our people secure and pure.  Those who would cross our borders are rapists, pillagers and thieves.  They must be kept out and those who have come here illegally must be deported.

—Muslims, like Jews in Hitler’s Germany, are evil and must be disposed of.  Remember, it is OK — even desirable — to kill the families of our enemies.

—Making America great again, as Hitler made Germany great again.

Our Little Blond Hitler has said: “I think apologizing’s a great thing, but you have to be wrong. I will absolutely apologize, sometime in the hopefully distant future, if I’m ever wrong.” Also: "My IQ is one of the highest — and you all know it! Please don't feel so stupid or insecure; it's not your fault."

The neo-fuhrer demonstrated his IQ by telling us, “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”

When some in the media actually questioned this wisdom, he assured us,“You know, it really doesn’t matter what the media write as long as you’ve got a young, and beautiful, piece of ass.” 

Others have even suggested that the thuggery of some of his adherents at political assemblies is remindful of Hitler’s infamous brownshirts.

Our Little Blond Fuhrer will have none of it.  “My rallies are love fests,” he said.

Who needs a Goebbels?

Where the Sound of Silence Comforts

There’s nothing quite like politics to make one appreciate the silence of our desert.  Its creatures slither and creep, flit noiselessly across rock and sand, hunt by stealth and by night.  Survival dictates that they not waste  energy being active during the heat of the day.  A great place for quiet contemplation.

When Bush 43 was re-elected, we hastily packed up the RV and retreated to a deep desert outpost miles away from even the smallest hamlet.  Virtually total isolation, there to lick our wounds and seek solace in the friendly silence.

Now, with the lumpen image of Trump everywhere, I take Brandi every morning into a favorite nearby desert hideaway and wonder how any civilized country could possibly have sunk to the depths where presidential candidates actually debate in public about penis size.

Political insults about body parts aren’t new in America — Lincoln’s long arms, for example,  prompted a chorus of lewd remarks from his opponents. But the overall tone of the Republican campaigns has become so churlish, so childish that no precedent comes to mind.  It is a bottomless pit of slime.

The two Democrats, by comparison, have behaved in far more seemly fashion,  even though one of them has a disdain for truth that rivals the Republicans’.  Clinton’s smarmy proclamations of being “progressive” don’t help one’s digestion, either.

Better to bask in the sunshine and silence of el desierto. Here, a solitary roadrunner pauses arrogantly beside a mesquite bush before dashing across the dirt jeep track.  There a rare burrowing owl chatters defiant protection of her nest.  Blue desert beetles scamper across pebbly terrain where mule deer deposited scat a few hours earlier.  Bits of coyote fur still cling to a cholla.  

Today, clouds are skittering across a sky that’s usually all blue, but there’s no rain in them.  Maybe in a day or two, if the el nino  winds keep up.  Their whisper is the loudest sound around us, unless an aircraft intrudes on its way to or from the local airport.

By accident I glimpse a jackrabbit stark still in the shade of a desert shrub.  If I move it will bolt, but we just stare at one another.  Finally Brandi catches a whiff of it and forces the action.  The jack speeds away, Brandi gives chase for four or five steps, then gives up, knowing he can’t catch those things. At five he’s an old desert hand and he, too appreciates the silence.

He finds a sunny, sandy spot and stretches out for a nap.

Prattle away, you preening, puerile jackasses and your coterie of talking heads.  We can’t hear you.  You can’t touch us out here in our desert.

Chris Hedges and Gas-Pump Reality

It has become clear, as the important American journalist and polemicist Chris Hedges has long argued, that elections can’t fix what’s wrong with this country.  

Elections are the milksop for deluded Americans of the middle and lower classes.  They’re shows, orchestrated fictions designed to make us feel like we”re participating in a democratic process.  

Hedges quotes Sheldon Wolin in “Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism.”

“One cannot point to any national institution[s] that can accurately be described as democratic, surely not in the highly managed, money-saturated elections, the lobby-infested Congress, the imperial presidency, the class-based judicial and penal system, or, least of all, the media.”

In the United States today, Hedges writes, “Corporate power is unassailable, and it rolls forward like a stream of lava.” It is in his view a system that ultimately must implode.

Even as he excoriates the American left for its vacuous cowardice, Hedges has repeatedly called for a new American revolution.  Now he fears that “the revolt may be right-wing. It may have heavy overtones of fascism. It may cement into place a frightening police state. But that a revolt is coming is incontrovertible. The absurdity of the election proves it.”

As I pumped gas the other day, a guy at the next pump remarked on the upcoming “Super Tuesday” primaries.  He was a non-union worker driving a battered pick-up. (He had to be non-union, because union workers are as rare as penguins here in southern New Mexico.)  “I’m for Bernie,” he said.  “Hillary’s a f——-g bitch.” He and all his fellow workers are lifelong Democrats, he said, but if the party nominated Clinton “we’ll all go over to Trump.” 

He reminded me of what Hedges had written that very day:

“There are tens of millions of Americans, especially lower-class whites, rightfully enraged at what has been done to them, their families and their communities. They have risen up to reject the neoliberal policies and political correctness imposed on them by college-educated elites from both political parties: Lower-class whites are embracing an American fascism.

“These Americans want a kind of freedom—a freedom to hate. They want the freedom to use words like “nigger,” “kike,” “spic,” “chink,” “raghead” and “fag.” They want the freedom to idealize violence and the gun culture. They want the freedom to have enemies, to physically assault Muslims, undocumented workers, African-Americans, homosexuals and anyone who dares criticize their cryptofascism. They want the freedom to celebrate historical movements and figures that the college-educated elites condemn, including the Ku Klux Klan and the Confederacy. They want the freedom to ridicule and dismiss intellectuals, ideas, science and culture. They want the freedom to silence those who have been telling them how to behave. And they want the freedom to revel in hypermasculinity, racism, sexism and white patriarchy. These are the core sentiments of fascism.”

I suggested to my gas-pump neighbor that instead of switching over to Trump, he and his friends might want to consider the Green Party candidacy of Jill Stein. He didn’t know who Jill Stein was and didn’t care.

“We got rights,” he said.  “But people like Hillary don’t give a shit about us.  We’re gonna go with somebody who cares about us.”

I finished filling my tank and moved to drive off.  “Have a nice day,” he said, waving to me.

Nightmares

There are nightmares. . .

You can’t swim, your arms won’t move, you are clinging to a bit of flotsam in a fast-flowing river, carried toward a water fall . . .

. . . and nightmares. . .

The plane’s  pilot has died of a heart attack, you are speeding toward the side of a mountain, your seat-belt buckle is jammed . . .

. . . and nightmares . . .

You are running from a hideous monster when your feet become mired in quicksand . . .

. . .and nightmares . . .

It is election day, 2016, and the choices on the presidential ballot are Hillary Clinton (D) and Donald Trump (R).

Whither SCOTUS, Absent the Great Taker?

A small spaceship landed on the National Mall three or four years ago.  A dyslexic Martian emerged and flagged down passers-by.  “Lead me to your taker,” he said.  They led him to Antonin Scalia’s office in the Supreme court building.

Scalia died as he liked to live — comped.  There is no code of ethics for SCOTUS justices, who have lifetime appointments.

With Scalia’s death while a free guest at a luxury ranch in Texas, President Obama is required by the Constitution to nominate a successor.  The Senate is required by the Constitution to vote on confirming that nominee.

Obama has promised to fulfill his Constitutional role with due diligence.  The Republicans in the Senate are threatening to refuse to do their duty.  Many of these Republicans were in the Senate when Ronald Reagan nominated a Supreme Court justice (Kennedy) in the last year of his presidency.  Their position today is 180 degrees from their position when Reagan was a lame duck president. 

But hypocrisy is par for the Republican course, just as taking freebies was par for Justice Scalia’s course even when his taking represented a clear conflict of interest.

It is impossible to overstate the damage Scalia did to the fragile notion of American democracy during his tenure on the high court.  Probably his most evil legacy is Citizens United, the ruling that engraved in stone the myth of corporate personhood and enabled Big Business and Banking to buy the United States government, lock, stock and loophole.Through his opinions and influence on his fellow conservative members of the court, he foisted on the American people extremist views of presidential power, constitutional originalism and right-wing Catholicism as personified in the secret society Opus Dei, of which he was a proud member.  

Once, Americans of the patriotic left would have rejoiced in the opportunity for a Democratic president to appoint the successor to the intellectual leader of the Supreme Court’s conservatives.  Now, alas, his nominee must face the confirmation procedure in a Senate with 47 members who committed treason by openly trying to undermine the official diplomacy of the head of state.

Even if the Republican obstructionists back down from their vow to refuse even to consider Obama’s nominee, it would take a small miracle to move the nominee through the vetting process of the Senate Judiciary Committee.  Then, at least five Republicans would have to cross party lines to vote for confirmation.  I count nine Republicans who, in my opinion, possibly might have the courage, integrity and intellect to weigh a nominee’s qualifications with fairness.  Thus, if the matter gets that far, at least five of them might conceivably find in favor of whomever the President presents to them.  

There are more “ifs” in this scenario than there are lies on the Republican presidential debate stage. But it could happen.

Vice President Biden, among many others, says it is not likely that Obama will go out shopping for the most liberal jurist he can find when choosing a nominee.  The Obama court, if it came to be at all, would not be as reliably liberal as the Roberts court has been reliably conservative. 

But it would almost certainly have a more ethical justice than Scalia the mastertaker, and it would surely have more judicial probity than the blatantly political court he so powerfully influenced.

Perhaps it would even have the wisdom to revisit Citizens United and decide that, no, Exxon-Mobil is not a “person.”

Next Malheur Fight: In the Courtroom

Now that the last of the Christo-fascist jingoes has left the Malheur National Wildlife refuge in Oregon, the feds should make a fast and thorough inventory of the damage done there and then use every facet of the law to collect indemnity from them.

Like the Texas indictment of the nutsos who put together the fradulent video of Planned Parenthood leaders, extracting full payment for damages from the so-called “occupiers” would amount to poetic justice.  Most of our collection laws were crafted to empower banks, corporations, predatory lenders and other legalized thieves to squeeze every last nickel of filthy lucre out of the beaten-down public.  How gratifying it would be to use them to recoup what the public lost in the “occupation” of land that belongs to the public — to you and me.

Damage to or theft of native American artifacts, illegal roads and fences, burned or degraded documents, lost usage days to would-be visitors, lost work-time for refuge employees — all of these and other costs to the public should be accounted for and collected,  by garnishment, impoundment of assets, fines and all the other legal means collection agents use in their harassment of vulnerable consumers.

The depredations of the jingoes during the 40 days of Malheur can be assigned a fair market value in dollars.  What cannot be measured is its more insidious, long-term damage in fueling the vast right-wing conspiracy to place federal public land in the hands of state government, making it easier for extraction industries and other polluting profiteers to get their greedy hands on it, and shovels under it.

The Koch Brothers’ massive virus, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) , is on the case.  ALEC wrote and engineered the passage of the Transfer of Public Lands Act in Utah in 2012.  It required transfer of vast tracts of our land — yours and mine — to the state by 2015.  This did not take place, of course, because the United States Constitution clearly states that when federal and state laws conflict, the federal statute must prevail.

Right-wing state legislators  introduced 36 ALEC land-grab  laws in western states in the first six months of 2015.  According to the Center for Western Priorities, only six of these passed. Meanwhile, Koch money and ALEC resources are funneling into a complex web of court cases on behalf of anti-government whackos like Cliven Bundy.

Recently, the Koch octopus engaged a high-powered law firm to research new, untried arguments for taking our land — yours and mine — away from us and the agencies (like the BLM, National Park Service etc.) that manage them on our behalf.  

These people are smart and unprincipled.  They know that the new ploys aren’t likely to fly in the  appellate courts of the West, especially the Ninth Circuit.  They’re trying now to plot a way to fast-track a land-grab case to the Supreme court, where they know they can count on a 5-4 majority.

Meanwhile, the Bundy gang and all the defendants in the Oregon mutiny are assured of Koch money and resources for their legal fees. Reimbursing us for their shenanigans there would be chump change now.

The Battle of Malheur Refuge isn’t over.  In fact, it has just begun.

Pro Gun, Anti Kenyan: God Is on Their Side

Gun-toting Florida yahoos killed two people and wounded ten others in an Orlando nightclub the other night but, hey,  Second Amendment! Second Amendment!

This happened barely a week after similarly-protected patriots gunned down a fellow patron and wounded seven others at a strip club in Tampa.  Second Amendment! Second Amendment! Right to bear arms! 

This is Florida, after all, the state that made George W. Bush the President of the United States.

Florida.  Where you tote ungrammatical signs to a hospital campus and stomp and hoot and holler to keep on life support a brain-dead woman whose husband wants only to end the misery. Life is sacred — until you go out to a nekkid lady club and shoot some innocent beer-swilling lecher at the bar.

Red-neck Florida is Trumpland.  Rubioland.  Marco doesn’t know the difference between a sunni and a shiite but he wants to make our foreign policy for the Middle East.

At the New Hampshire theater of the absurd for the Republican clowns, Rubio said,  "We should be putting people into Guantanamo, not emptying it out." Not to be outdone, Donald Trump said: “"I would bring back waterboarding, and I'd bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding." Ted Cruz said waterboarding ain’t torture but he didn’t think that he, as president, would “bring it back.”  Brother Bush, another gift of Florida to American public life, said  "The next president of the United States is gonna have to get the United States back in the game, and if a preemptive strike is necessary to keep us safe, then we should do it." For starters, he said, let’s bomb North Korea.

Even in New Hampshire, there are people who actually applaud such contemptible nonsense.  Ignorance is not confined to warm states.

The GOP candidates pretty much agree that it’s bad for millions of low-income Americans to have access to affordable health care, particularly if that access results from action by a black president.  They agree that immigrants are bad, especially Muslims and brown people from south of the border. But John Kasich thinks it would be bad to engage in massive deportation, as Trump would,  because that would “break up families.”  And because families are important, the clowns also pretty much agree that you shouldn’t go letting queers get married.  Ted Cruz says that makes God really really angry. All of the candidates are good pals with God.  Trump claims a firm friendship with The Almighty even if he can’t quote accurately from the Bible.  

They might dot their i’s or cross their t’s a bit differently, but they’re absolutely united on one thing: Americans have a Constitutional right to their by gawd guns!  Second Amendment! Second Amendment!  So what if some yahoo shoots up a nekkid lady bar every now and then?  Who cares how many hoody-garbed, Skittles-eating black dudes get what they deserve? But what about all the school shootings?  

They’re Obama’s fault, of course.  Damned Kenyan got no bidness in the White House, that’s for sure.

THIS Is Foreign Policy Expertise?

Frankly, m’dear, I’m damned sick and tired of the cliches the TV clowns and print propagandists toss at me during this political madness.

On one of the most recent entertainments, these fools told me, Hillary Clinton, the former Secretary of State, displayed her “command” of foreign policy at the expense of Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, her opponent for the Democratic nomination for president.

Let us look, for a few fleeting moments, at her command of foreign policy and its consequences — for after all, executive decisions do have consequences:

As Secretary, she told a round-table of corporate executives “It’s time for the United States to start thinking of Iraq as a business opportunity.”  Even five years ago, her “business opportunity” — she supported George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, the worst foreign policy decision in american history — had cost 4,500 Americans and more than a million Iraqis their lives.  Men, women, children — lots of children — it mattered not to her.  It was a “business opportunity.”  

She led the campaign for forcible regime change in Libya, despite opposition by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. (Responding to the gruesome sodomizing of Muammar Gaddafi with a bayonet, Clinton laughed and said, “We came, we saw, he died.”  Hilarious.)

Our calamitous policies in Iraq and Libya escalated the rise of Islamic State and expanded the conflict in the Middle East. Now, the Obama administration is reportedly changing the rules of engagement to allow more civilian casualties in the “war” against Islamic State. A senior military official predicts that “you’ll see a little more willingness to tolerate civilian casualties in the interest of making progress” even though the Geneva Conventions  explicitly prohibit the disproportionate killing of civilians. Clinton has promised to escalate the wars in Syria and Iraq, including a no-fly zone in Syria. Since Islamic State doesn’t have an air force, her no-fly zone is likely to producte heightened tensions through incidents involving Russian planes flying over Syria. Taking her election tough-talk further, on a recent television appearance she  declared, “We have to fight in the air, fight on the ground and fight them on the Internet.” 

With an eye toward the campaign against a war-hawk Republican, Clinton dismisses Sanders as a foreign policy naif, whereas she is proud of her foot on the accelerator of our failed policy of endless war.

She is, in fact, proud of results like these:

Afghanistan: Her High Hawkishness has created  millions of refugees for the rest of the world to worry about. More than 220,000 Afghans have died died since the 2001 U.S. invasion. American taxpayers have paid  more than $700 billion for this, not counting along-term medical bill that could run as high as $2 trillion.

Libya: About 30,000 people died and another 50,000 were wounded in Hillary’s intervention and civil war. Hundreds of thousands more are refugees. Our initial cost was $1.1 billion but he fighting continues. Another billion in tangential and longer-term costs is likely.

Ukraine: The numbers: 8,000,dead, 18,000  wounded. Hillary’s thinly-veiled coup d’etat to oust the pro-Russian, admittedly corrupt but democratically elected government has left a country riven, its people starving, and a NATO-Russo conflict moving the world 20 degrees closer to nuclear war than it was before she meddled. 

Yemen: Civilian casualties: more than 6,000 dead and and another 27,000 wounded. Ten million Yeminis don’t have enough to eat, and 13 million have no access to clean water. Yemen is highly dependent on imported food, but a U.S.-Saudi blockade has choked off most imports. The war is ongoing.

Iraq: Beyond the million dead in our 2003 invasion, more than 2 million have fled the country and another 2 million are internally displaced. The cost to U.S. taxpayers of the action Hillary enthusiastically voted for is now more than $1 trillion, but it may rise to $4 trillion once all the long-term medical costs are added in. And the war isn’t over: its latest incarnation is bloody conflict with the Islamic State, which emerged from the Sunni insurgency against the U.S.-installed government.

Syria: More than 250,000 have died in the war, and half the country’s population has been displaced — including four million Syrian refugees abroad. The country’s major cities have been ravaged. Like the others, Hillary means to prolong this one as long as the military-industrial complex that funds her campaign continues to profit from it.

Look, too, at, say, Somalia for more blood on Hillary’s hands. Note also that weapons looted from Hillary’s Libya failure largely fuel the wars in Mali, Niger, and the Central African Republic.

If this is the leadership Clinton’s foreign policy experience offers, wouldn’t it be simpler to just drink the poison Kool Ade?

Thoughts About the Iowa Caucuses

It’s a far cry from the days when the leading Democrat in Clinton County, Iowa, drove his battered old station wagon around town button-holing pals to attend something called “the caucus.”  Not even the local press and radio paid much attention.

Yesterday virtually every pundit and pontificator in the country was in Iowa to report on the  caucuses and what, if any, portent they had for the ultimate nomination of presidential candidates.  Sanders supporters were thrilled, Hillary’s not so, by the dead heat on the Democratic side.  On the darker side, Cruz and Rubio appear to have taken a lot of the wind out of Trump’s sails.  But if there’s anything besides money that Trump has plenty of, it’s wind, so perhaps not too much should be made of the Republican results. 

Despite the prattling of the press about the differences on the Republican side, they’re all cut from the same bolt of cloth.  The election of any of the top three finishers in Iowa would be the last nail in the coffin of American so-called democracy, especially with the presumption of Republican control of both houses of Congress.

Perhaps the most encouraging conclusion to be drawn from Sanders’s tie with Clinton in Iowa is that the American left is not absolutely comatose.  There may be a breath or two of life in it. In the unlikely event that the Vermont senator goes on to capture the nomination, voters in the United States will actually have a real choice in November. How refreshing that would be!

The strongest support for Sanders seemed to be in the areas around the three major universities (Ames, Iowa City, Cedar Falls/Waterloo).  That’s encouraging, as well.  It suggests that liberalism might still be alive among young Democrats. 

A democracy is not a democracy without a viable left.  In Amerika the left has been on life support for decades, sinking recently into Stage IV metastasis. Rekindling liberalism among young adults would be a huge step in the right direction, yet even so, it might also be too little, too late.

The corporate oligarchy is so rich and powerful, its tentacles so strongly entwined around so much of life in these United States, that a rebirth of progressivism on the campuses and in the streets might be no more than interesting white noise.

But at least a Sanders campaign for the presidency, with a throng of energetic young liberals propelling it, would force American voters to talk about some of the complex problems in the world today, and some of the grand failures of recent U.S. administrations.  

It’s too early, really, to think wishfully about a Sanders run.  Once the Wall Street money kicks in after New Hampshire, The Republican Lite crowd will take over the Democratic primaries, Clinton will capture the nomination, and I will vote for Jill Stein for President. 

Meanwhile, I’m still chuckling over last night’s best laugh line.

“I’m a progressive,” Hillary said.  

Much Ado About Absolutely Nothing

The biggest jackass in the pack will be missing when the other Republican candidates for president take the stage for another braying contest tonight.

The fools who bother to watch this nonsense should thank their lucky stars for the absence of Donald Trump. I am reminded of the rubber stamp my friend Tom Houston kept in his desk drawer, to use on whatever documents the public relations flacks brought to his attention at the Detroit Free Press.  “WGAS” it said.  (For “Who Gives a Shit?”)  But I digress.

You can bet that, no matter if someone onstage tonight actually utters something meaningful to the national interest, all the media attention will be focused on the blowhard billionaire who wasn’t there.

As someone who knew good journalism and practiced it, I lament how low the craft has fallen.  Day after day, front pages, TV screens and airwaves are filled to overflowing with bilge about The Donald.  Bernie Sanders’s substantive plans to depower Wall Street, provide health care to everyone who needs it and take the first steps toward restoration of democracy in the United States go unreported, or treated as minor quirks of an inconsequential old socialist.

Election campaigns always have been silly season for American media.  Even when good journalists did good reporting on candidates for public office, they were easily distracted by silly fluff.  So what if Adlai Stevenson had a hole in his friggin’ shoe sole?  So what if Richard Nixon had “five o’clock shadow?” So what if Dennis Kucinich wasn’t very tall?  So what if Jimmy Carter thought he saw a swimming rabbit?  So what if . . . . No wonder someone made a fortune in America selling a game called “Trivial Pursuit.”

We have become a trivial nation.  The only qualification to vote is that you be old enough (or, in many states, white enough).  Voters aren’t expected to know anything about the vital issues.  In fact, the more ignorant they are, the better the pols like it.  Never mind if they can find Afghanistan on a map.  They by god know if a candidate wears a little American flag in his lapel!

When Barry Goldwater suffered his landslide defeat in the 1964 presidential election, the Koch-Scaife fascist billionaires’ club got together and formulated a plan to assure that it would never happen again to the conservative cause.  It was a brilliant plan whose key was pouring unimagined amounts of money into the political process to buy control of the country, which would assure them of a twenty-fold or more return on their enormous investment.  Their plan was at once grassroots, nationwide and global.  It has succeeded so grandly that, in all probability, the right-wing stranglehold on Amerika can never be broken.

Two of the most effective elements of the plan were to (a) take control of local school boards and (b) create think tanks to brainwash voters.  As a result, we have schools in which boys and girls learn that St. Ronnie Reagan single-handedly won the Cold War, but do not learn how as far back a Woodrow Wilson, American presidents lied us into war by creating things like the Creel Commission.  Scaife and Koch money created think tanks like American Heritage and the Cato Institute to dupe the media and the gullible public into supporting measures that are antithetical to their own best interests. Now we are trapped in a policy of endless war costing trillions while cutting back on essential social services in the name of austerity.

We are a nation of blind, silly fools.  And so we natter and prattle about Donald Trump boycotting Fox’s so-called debate.

What we ought to do is employ a giant rubber stamp: WGAS.

I Miss "My" Cooper's Hawk

The Cooper’s hawk would arrive every January to roost on our back gate, hunting.

A handsome bird was he and his flight a beauty to behold.  Incredibly swift, yet maneuverable, dodging branches till he snared his airborn prey.  He and his fellow accipiters are sometimes called “blue darters.”

He would often leave a half-eaten white-winged dove carcass inside the patio walls.  His calling card. Lois hangs hummingbird feeders on a juniper in the patio.  The Coop was the hummingbirds’ pal, holding at bay the larger birds that liked to raid the hummers’ nectar.

Now, for the third winter, the hawk hasn’t appeared on the back gate. Lois has to refifl the hummingbird feeders more frequently than she did when he hunted here.  

I can’t help but wonder if the no-show Cooper’s hawk is one more anecdote in the litany of natural examples of climate change and habitat disruption.  A New Mexico State University doctoral candidate doing research on the Coopers has found a surprising abundance of them in the Albuquerque urban area where he’s working. 

The researcher, Brian A. Millsap, told me, "I do think its possible Cooper's hawk population outside of Albuquerque in NM is declining. The Breeding Bird Survey (a nationwide annual monitoring program for birds coordinated by the U.S. Geological Survey) suggests that might be the case, with Cooper's hawks declining by over 1 1/2 percent per year over the past decade over most of NM (see: http://www.mbr-pwrc.usgs.gov/bbs/tr2013/tr03330.htm).  Of course this is a pretty coarse survey, so these results need to be considered with that in mind.  But my data from Albuquerque support this idea, because about half of the females fledged in town end up filling breeding slots elsewhere."

Millsap is the National Raptor Coordinator for the Division of Migratory Bird Management of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Good science takes a while, and then it takes another while to penetrate the consciousness of the laity.  But birds and animals are equipped to intuit what it takes us months or years to observe and document. Perhaps the Cooper’s hawks know something we’re not even dimly aware of.

In the nearby desert I used to watch big grey owls — Great Horned, probably — gliding down the arroyos for two or three hundred feet,  barely  48 inches above ground level, hunting rabbits or other prey.  No longer.

In a few weeks the avid birdwatcher in the family, a granddaughter, will be visiting and we’ll head over to the Chiricahua mountains in Arizona.  I’ll ask her to keep a casual eye out for the owl and the hawk during her pursuit of more exotic species like the elegant trogon.  Perhaps she’ll tell me that they haven’t vanished at all, that my old eyes aren’t as sharp as they used to be, that my old feathered friends are still to be seen if you look hard enough.

But National Wildlife Federation scientists have already documented that climate change affects waterfowl around the world, changing their habitats, food sources and migration cycles.

They project up to 91 percent reduction in wetlands area in the Prairie Potholes region on both sides of the U.S.-Canada boundary in the Great Plains. This is one of the most important waterfowl breeding areas in North America. Populations of mallards, gadwall, blue-winged teal, northern pintails, canvasbacks, redheads and ruddy ducks are imperiled.

Science is only beginning to look deeply into how climate change can affect wildlife habitat. An Australian study found that current methods like wildlife reserves and bird sanctuaries may not be relied upon to sustain species as the climate changes. 

If only the scientists could interview “my” Cooper’s hawk, wherever he has gone.  Brian Millsap, for one, would love to hear his story.