Happy April Fools' Day!

Weird and Weirderer


Julius Caesar invented the Julian Calendar in 45 BC to reform the earlier Roman Calendar, which was based on the moon and found to be inadequate. Caesar’s new calendar introduced the concept of leap years every four years, as we have now. Regular years had 365 days, and leap years had 366, so the average year was 365.25 days. The Julian Calendar started the new year in March.

It worked fine for a while, but the actual solar year is about 11 minutes short of 365.25 days, so after a few centuries people noticed that particular days kept coming later in the year. Pope Gregory XIII fixed this in 1582 by removing leap years that are divisible by 100. This only happens three times every four centuries; we did it in 2000, which, under the Julian Calendar, would have been a leap year, but, under the Gregorian Calendar, was not. (Is everybody following this? There will be a test!) I know you were wondering why there wasn’t a Sadie Hawkins Day in 2000.

Gregory also changed the first of the year to January 1st. Lots of people rejected the new calendar and continued to use the old one. Since their calendar started in March, and since March came later each year, advocates of the new calendar called them foolish. It has been claimed that this is the derivation of the term “April fool.”

Whatever its origin, the world has never had a shortage of fools, in April or any other month. In honor of the holiday, here are some of the latest to claim the title:

Winning. A recent survey by Public Policy Polling found that among independent voters, Charlie Sheen would beat Sarah Palin in a presidential race, 41% to 36%.

What’s in a name? Lindsay Lohan has announced that she will join such luminaries as Cher (whose last name used to be Bono), Bono (whose last name used to be Cher), Madonna, and Sting, and will hereafter be known simply as Lindsay. I wonder how Lindsay would do in a poll with Charlie and Sarah.

Don’t make me LOL. The newest edition of the Oxford English Dictionary has added “LOL” (laughing out loud) and “OMG” (oh my God), favored abbreviations of the text and tweet generation, to its list of words, citing them as “noteworthy” and saying they can now be found “outside of electronic contexts.” The OED also accepted the coinage of the term “muffin top” to describe the roll of fat that collects above the waistband of a pair of tight trousers. How did we ever do without that one?

Look! Short sleeves! Ramzan Kadyrov, the governor of the Russian Federation province of Chechnya (you know, the one bordered by Ingushetia, Stavropol, and Dagestan provinces and the country of Georgia), has imposed a dress code of “modest attire” for female citizens. What’s the penalty for violating this code? “Unknown men dressed like law enforcement officials” drive around in cars and shoot violators with paintball guns. “Ouch! He got me right in the muffin top!”

Teapot Dumb Scandal. Democrats have been singing in unison about how extreme the Tea Party is. Senate Republic[an] Leader Mitch McConnell disagrees. “Anybody who follows national politics knows that when it comes to a lot of the issues Americans care about most, Democrat[ic] leaders in Washington are pretty far outside the mainstream,” Mitch averred. “Despite the Democrat[ic] leadership’s talking points, these folks [the Tea Bags] are not radicals. They're our next-door neighbors and our friends,” he said. Maybe so, but they’re losing popularity. A CNN poll released March 30th shows that 47% of U.S. adults now have an unfavorable view of the Tea Party, while 32% have a favorable view. This is a flip-flop since January, when the percentages were 33% favorable and 26% unfavorable.

States’ wrongs. The Tea Party has pretty much taken over the House of Representatives, but that isn’t enough for some of its supporters. Rep. Ron Paul, R-TX, the father of Sen. Rand Paul, R-KY, and a darling of the Teapot crowd, has taken a page from the 1950s backlash against the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education decision, which determined that “separate but equal” schools for Whites and Blacks were unconstitutional. Many Southern members of Congress took the position then that states had the right to “nullify” that decision if they didn’t agree with it. Paul, Sr. dug that dead horse up and beat on it at an Iowa home-schoolers’ event. “The chances of us getting things changed around soon through the legislative process is not all that good,” he complained ungrammatically. “And that is why I am a strong endorser of the nullification movement, that states like this should just nullify these laws.” I’m sure the feds are just as prepared to contest the point today as they were in 1956.

Way to go, Bernie! What do Exxon Mobil, Bank of America, General Electric, Chevron, Boeing, Valero Energy, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, ConocoPhillips, and Carnival Cruise Lines have in common? According to Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-VT, they are ten of the worst offenders when it comes to avoiding taxes. The Republicans in Congress have been complaining that U.S. corporate tax rates are too high, but they fail to mention the volumes of deductions and incentives and other loopholes in the tax code that allow huge corporations to avoid taxes even when they make large profits. The Center for Responsive Politics added that the ten companies Sanders targeted together spent $117 million on lobbying in 2010 – presumably to keep their tax breaks.

Call 911! An unidentified man pulled into Birdie’s Food and Fuel in LaPlace, LA, last month to fill his gas tank. The cost of regular, he said, was $3.049, but while he was pumping, the price in the little window changed to $3.189. The man complained to a store attendant, who just shrugged his shoulders, so he decided to appeal to a higher authority: he called 911. No charges were filed against the man for tying up the emergency line, and it turned out that he was getting his gas at the lower price anyway. A month later, $3.189 sounds mighty cheap!

Lost and found. A contract security guard found a package outside the federal building where he works in Detroit last February. He brought it in and put it in the “lost and found” area, where it sat unclaimed until March 18th, when someone decided it should be x-rayed. Yes, it was a bomb. The bomb squad recovered and detonated it. The building houses offices of Sen. Carl Levin, D-MI, the Social Security Administration, and, embarrassingly, the FBI. The rent-a-cop was suspended.

He’s back! Finally, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the former Republican chief executivator of California, is returning. Just three months after he said “Hasta la vista, Baby!” and handed over the reins to Jerry Brown, Ahnold and Marvel Comics icon Stan Lee announced that an animated TV show and a comic book will chronicle the adventures of a former body-builder, actor, and California governor turned crime fighter called, of course, The Governator. No fooling!

Hanging NPR in Effigy - III

NPR Doesn’t Always Tell the Truth

“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.” –Abraham Lincoln, 1809-1865.

In my defense of National Public Radio I have been very critical of the far right-wing media and their infidelity to the truth, especially their dalliances with such floozies as the “birther” nonsense. I have pooh-poohed Faux News’s claim to be “fair and balanced” while praising NPR for being “extremely fair to all points of view, bending over backwards to give every side a voice.”

Well, I have to admit I once caught NPR in an intentional lie.

I was working 68 miles away from my home, and Morning Edition and All Things Considered were welcome companions on my daily commute. I was able to track down the All Things Considered program to which I refer: it was aired on April 1, 2005, and you can listen to it here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4571982.

I know I risk giving fodder (good grief, I have to stop using these horse metaphors!) to those who would like to tear NPR apart, but I can’t withhold the truth.

The trusted, mellifluous tones of All Things Considered host Robert Siegal informed me of a real crisis occurring in the forests of New England. He said maple syrup sales were at an all-time low because of calorie-conscious consumers and foreign competition. Then he told me something about sugar maple trees that I didn’t know:

“Untapped maple trees can explode like gushers causing injury and sometimes death. If untended, quiet stands of nature’s sweetness can turn into spindly demons of destruction.”

He explained that the depressed market for the syrup had caused tree owners to neglect tapping their trees – with dire consequences:

“The Vermont Health Board reports 87 fatalities, 140 maimings, and a dozen decapitations from sap-buildup explosions this year. That’s the highest ever.”

I should explain that I live in New Mexico, where there are few sugar maple trees, if any. I’ve visited New England, but only in the summer, long after the sap-tapping season. So that night, I brought up the subject to my girlfriend, who once lived in Maine.

“Oh,” I said. “I learned something today on NPR that I didn’t know. I’m sure you’re familiar with it, but I never knew that if you don’t tap sugar maple trees they explode!”

My girlfriend is something of a skeptic anyhow, but the look she gave me reflected more than skepticism. She pointedly asked me if I knew what the date was.

I must have been daydreaming or looking at the scenery as the story continued, or I might have figured it out for myself. Mr. Siegal explained that the maple syrup industry has been hurt “by a cheaper syrup knock-off from, of all places, the islands of the South Pacific. Here in Venoboff, formerly Danish Samoa, workers are making a cheaper maple syrup substitute. It’s called table syrup. They saw apart used maple tables, chairs, knickknacks. The expense of importing these pieces of furniture halfway around the world is more than made up for by abundant cheap labor, by the lack of unions, health care, government oversight.”

Danish Samoa? Don't expect NPR to tell the truth all the time. Not on the First of April, anyway.

Hanging NPR in Effigy - II

Eggheads and Know-Nothings

“Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.” –Thomas Jefferson, 1762-1826.

I was born during the administration of Harry Truman, but the first sitting president I remember was Dwight Eisenhower. He was a Republican, and the Democrat who opposed him both times he ran, in 1952 and 1956, was Adlai Stevenson.

Stevenson: egghead.

Eisenhower’s vice presidential running mate, Richard Nixon, called Stevenson an “egghead” during the 1952 campaign. I was not quite five years old, but I remember the fuss about it on the radio. (We didn’t get a television for several more years.) At the time I thought it was a very funny word. My mother tried to explain it to me, but I remember wondering why they were calling Stevenson an egghead when both he and Eisenhower were obviously quite bald.

“Egghead” was an epithet for an intellectual, and in some circles it was quite a disparaging term. Adlai Stevenson was smart and well-educated, Nixon was saying, and that made him suspect. I must admit I’ve never really understood that sentiment. But Eisenhower and Nixon won, both times.

Is that the problem with National Public Radio? It’s for eggheads? Is there something wrong with that?

Eisenhower: just bald.
(Wikipedia photos)

Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-TN, who led the crusade to pass HR-1076 to defund NPR, found it necessary to point out that NPR listeners were better educated than the U.S. population as a whole, and that they made more money. I would think parents who heard her statistics would encourage their children to listen to NPR. Apparently, in some circles, it produces the opposite reaction.

Blackburn and Republican Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia both claimed that NPR’s news coverage was biased. Blackburn said taxpayers (she is quick to speak for all taxpayers) didn’t want to pay for programming “they do not agree with,” and Cantor said federal funding shouldn’t be used “to advocate one ideology.”

What the hell are they talking about? I’ve listened to the NPR news programs for decades, and I’ve always found them extremely fair to all points of view, bending over backwards to give every side a voice. The richness, depth, and diversity of the subjects NPR covers, compared to other news programs, are like a sip of Guinness Stout after a couple of cans of Coors Light. I’m assuming that it’s the news that offends Blackburn and her cronies and not Lake Woebegone or Click and Clack or Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me.

I can only assume it is that very richness, depth, and diversity that rankles the right. If you compare NPR with Faux News, you’ll find the former giving perspectives from several points of view while the latter repeats a single theme of gloom and doom and “us and them.” Perhaps Blackburn, et al, are afraid their followers will lose their way if they’re exposed to NPR. As the World War I song puts it, “How ‘Ya Gonna Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree?)”

Maybe I’m missing something. Maybe NPR is an insidious agent of subversive thought and not a refreshing compendium of interesting items from a diverse and complex world.

Nah. I just can’t go there. I’m sorry. As several Democratic representatives said during the debate, NPR is a national treasure.

There is one matter that wasn’t elaborated during the debate. HR-1076 prohibits local public radio stations from purchasing programming from NPR or any other source. My local station airs several non-NPR shows like “Democracy Now” and “Counterspin.” Perhaps it’s programs like this the Republicans are targeting under the blanket of NPR. No one ever accused Amy Goodman of being non-partisan.

But I don’t think that’s all of it. I think the raucous right really has a problem with Morning Edition and All Things Considered. They make people think. People who think don’t follow blindly and they ask too many questions. And that’s dangerous.

Ignorance is simply not knowing something, and can be corrected by instruction or research. Stupidity, though, is intentional ignorance, and is much more difficult to correct. Unfortunately, the United States has a long tradition of self-righteous stupidity that long pre-dates Nixon’s “egghead” epithet.

The “Know Nothing” party of the mid-Nineteenth Century wasn’t named for its lack of knowledge, but for its secrecy. It was an anti-Catholic, anti-immigration group of Protestant males of English heritage. When questioned about the party, members were instructed to reply, “I know nothing.”

What the Know Nothings feared was change, and the undermining of perceived authority and the status quo. The Scopes trial in 1925 reflected the same fears. In fact, fear itself is often the motivation of those who appear to reject rationality. If you don’t believe in global warming, you don’t have to worry about it. If you pass a law making English the official U.S. language, and build walls along the borders, maybe all those strange people with their strange words and strange foods who have moved into your neighborhood will go away.

National Public Radio celebrates new ideas and discoveries. It provides us with voices from all sorts of places expressing all sorts of opinions. Perhaps this is the problem: it engenders fear.

So how do ya keep ‘em down on the farm? Don’t let ‘em even hear about Paree!

Hanging NPR in Effigy - I

Hypocrisy on Parade

“Hypocrisy: prejudice with a halo.” –Ambrose Bierce, 1842-1914.

“Jobs, jobs, jobs!” the Republicans said in the last campaign. Increasing employment would be their mantra, their crusade, their sacred priority.

How’s that working out for them? Well, as soon as the new session started the House of Representatives dug up the dead horse they call “Obamacare” and beat on it for several days, finally passing a repeal that is just as dead as the horse in the Senate. They balked and bridled (sorry about these horse metaphors) at passing a continuing resolution for spending during the current fiscal year, which is already half over, demanding draconian cuts and only postponing the inevitable for two weeks, and then another three weeks – which will be up very soon. And last week, on St. Patrick’s Day, they took time to debate an “emergency” bill that never saw the inside of a committee room to cut funding for National Public Radio, and passed it, 228 to 192.

Jobs, it seems, are on the back burner while these more important matters are dealt with.

The NPR fiasco was billed as an emergency because it would save money. This was a brazen lie, but one that didn’t seem to embarrass anyone who presented it.

House Resolution 1076 would cut off federal funding for NPR, and would prohibit public radio stations across the country from using their federal funding to purchase NPR’s – or anyone else’s – programs. They would have to use the money they collect from listeners in those long, boring pledge drives to create their own programming in-house.

Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-TN, doled out the time for the Republicans. She started out by telling the truth: she said HR-1076 was “a bill to get the federal government and federal taxpayers out of the business of buying radio programs they do not agree with.” That was the real purpose of the legislation, not saving an insignificant amount of money.

Rep. Doug Lamborn, R-CO, was the original sponsor of the bill. He was less honest.

“According to NPR,” he said, “federal funding to supplement operations amounts to less than two percent of its annual budget. Some have said this Congress should not bother with such a small amount of money. Only in Washington would anyone say $64 million is not worth saving.”

Aha! Now we have a dollar amount. This is roughly equivalent to the cost of the 110 Tomahawk missiles that were fired at Libya on Saturday, or about twice the amount it cost us to buy the F-15 fighter jet that crashed there on Monday.

“You have to start somewhere,” Lamborn continued, “if you’re truly serious about getting our fiscal house in order.”

Yeah. Truly serious. We only need to find 218,749 cuts of equal size to zero out our $14 trillion national debt.

The House majority leader, Rep. Eric Cantor, R-VA, weighed in next.

“…we’ve seen NPR and its programming often veer far from what most Americans would like to see as far as expenditure of their taxpayer dollars,” he said. Later he asked, “Why should we use taxpayer dollars to be used to advocate one ideology?”

Cantor, too, was being truthful. It’s the content, not the cost, that riles him and his colleagues.

Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-NY, tried to shame the Republicans with satire for bringing up such a trivial “emergency.”

“Crisis averted, ladies and gentlemen!” he began. “What a relief! What a relief! I’m glad we got the economy back going. I’m glad we’ve secured our nuclear power plants. I’m so glad the Americans are back to work. We’ve finally found out our problem! We discovered a target we can all agree upon! It’s these guys! This is the problem! It’s Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers!”

He held up a poster of the silly but popular brothers on NPR who give callers advice on problems they’re having with their cars. Weiner’s humor provided a short but welcome break in the dismal doings.

Rep. Blackburn brought out some statistics. She said about 65% of NPR listeners have bachelor’s degrees, compared to only a quarter of the population as a whole. She said NPR listeners have a median household income of about $86,000 annually, compared to a national figure of about $55,000, and could easily afford to cover the cost of buying NPR programming. Then she propounded the underlying fallacy:

“This debate is about saving – taxpayer – money!” she prevaricated strenuously. Then she assured us that “the American taxpayer has said, ‘get NPR out of our pockets!’”

I am always reluctant to accept the claim of a party that was elected by a majority of a minority (the 2010 election brought out less than 41% of eligible voters) that it speaks for “the American taxpayer” or “the American people.”

I have primarily been quoting Republicans, because their statements were so outrageous, but congressional debates are like tennis matches, with each side getting a shot in turn, and a succession of Democrats interspersed the GOP remarks to point out the high quality of NPR programming, its growing listenership (if that’s really a word), and the fact that the bill would not reduce the amount of money going to local stations; it would just restrict the use of that money. There would be no significant savings gained by passing it.

Blackburn demurred, pointing out that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and three other federal agencies give direct funding to NPR amounting to some $1.5 million to $3 million per year.

(Aha! Another real number! If we cut $3 million, we’d only need 4,666,665 cuts of equal size to pay off the national debt.)

“Our country does – not – have – the – money to spend on this!” Blackburn insisted, emphasizing each word and working up to a real harangue: “NPR does not need the money; they will not be able to get these grants; we will save those dollars! The American taxpayer (there she goes again) has said, ‘Get your fiscal house in order!’ This is a step in that process. I know they (the Democrats, presumably, and not the American taxpayers) don’t like it, but you know what? This is something, this is something we can do, this is something we will do, this is something the American people (t.s.g.a.) want to make certain that we do, so that we get this nation back on a firm fiscal and sound fiscal policy. The day has come that the out-of-control federal spending has to stop! A good place to start is by taking NPR out of the taxpayer pocket!”

Enough of that. Here are two of the more rational comments:

Rep. John Dingell, D-MI, the longest serving member of the House, said, “The majority continues to force members of this body to waste the time and energy of the House, a critical asset of this nation, on political witch hunts with respect to health care and the environment. Now we find that we’re adding public broadcasting to this list. Public broadcasting is a national treasure. It provides us impartial, honest coverage of facts and news. It provides information not available elsewhere, and, yes, it sheds a little bit of culture on our people, something which, probably, my Republican colleagues find offensive. It has done so at very low cost to the public…”

Rep. James Moran, D-VA, said, “This has nothing to do with the deficit. It’s an infinitesimal fraction of our national debt. It jeopardizes nine thousand jobs and it distracts us from solving the real problems this nation faces while trying to destroy one of the primary sources of an enlightened electorate.”

What is this all really about? Obviously it is not about money. What is it about “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered” and all those other great programs on NPR that is such a burr under the Republican saddle? (I promise: no more horse metaphors.)

I’ll try to examine that question in my next post. Right now I’m worn out from all the invective.

Have We Had Enough of This Nonsense?

What an Unfortunate Waste of Time

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” –Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1890-1969.

The three-ring circus currently playing in the House of Representatives, on Faux News, and on all those clear-channel radio stations that carry Rush Limbaugh and his clones isn’t just annoying and reprehensible, it’s keeping our country from its true destiny as the exemplar of liberty and the leader of human progress.

The United States of America has a dark history of ethnic, sexual, religious, and economic inequality, but we have made great progress in righting those wrongs over the 234 years of our existence. The Ranting Right would like to reverse that progress.

We have built our economic stability by creating a large middle class through universal education and protections for those who work. The Party of No and its new fringe group, the Party of Hell No, are doing what they can to “dumb down” the populace and stifle the demands of labor.

We have made astonishing advances in science and technology that have made our country wealthy while improving every aspect of our daily lives, including the purity of our air, water, food, and medicine. All these improvements are at risk in the hands of the Backlash Boys of the radical right.

We have created a regulated capitalist economic system that encourages entrepreneurship while restricting the fraud and abuse to which unfettered economies are prone. Several decades of Grand Old Party initiatives gradually dismantled the protections put in place after the Great Depression, the inevitable fraud and abuse occurred and almost caused Great Depression II, and now the Republicans are doing all they can to convince the electorate that it was the fault of the Democrats.

But what’s worse than any of the errors in this catalogue is the current GOP message that the United States is bankrupt, financially and morally, and that it has lost its pre-eminence in the world.

This is not true. Over the course of our history we have come together to fight a revolution, survive an incredibly bloody civil war, and make the sacrifices necessary to win two world wars. Meanwhile we have continued to make things better for each new generation despite booms and busts and social strife. We have two and a half centuries of “can do” tradition and indomitable spirit. Our inventions and innovations have been the envy of the planet, as has been the liberty enjoyed by our people.

Yes, we’re having a hard time – a very hard time. The people on the bottom are the ones feeling it the most. Increasing gas prices, for example, may be a nuisance to the wealthy, but they are disastrous to the poor and much of the working class. The last gas price increase was the trigger that ignited the collapse in 2008, and most people haven’t yet recovered. Now the price is rising again, not because of reduced supply, but because of speculation – again.

Meanwhile, the new majority in the House is passing cuts that hurt these same people in other ways. We’re in dire straits, they say, and we have to cut unemployment compensation, Pell grants, Head Start, homeless veteran programs, and on and on.

It’s as if Dad, who had maxed out the family credit cards by purchasing a new Cadillac SUV, a wide-screen TV, and season tickets to the Cardinal games, were to call a family meeting and suggest that the kids needed to cut out their school lunches. It’s upside-down thinking and it’s unconscionable.

Even if we were to cut out the entire discretionary budget we wouldn’t be able to get out of this hole. We have to increase our revenue. The Republicans got a lot of votes last November by promising to create more jobs, but what have they done? Well, they’ve tried to repeal the health care act and cut funding for research and development, and they’ve taken pot-shots at some of their favorite targets such as National Public Radio and Planned Parenthood. In Wisconsin they’re targeting teachers and other public employees. In Georgia they’re trying to tax Girl Scout cookies.

Where are the jobs?

Well, they’re not where they used to be. New jobs are going to have to come from new industries. The federal government can help create those industries in two major ways: by educating the workforce and supporting research and development. If we cut spending in those areas, we’ll be cutting our collective throat.

We also need to help those who already have jobs. The best way we can do that is to reform the tax code, to reduce the tax burden on those who are struggling and cut out the tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations.

And, yes, we need to cut duplicative and inefficient spending. That may well include welfare and housing and employment programs that overlap each other, but it should also include the many wasteful corners of the unaudited military budget and some of the corporate welfare in the farm budget.

I don’t usually agree with Sen. Tom Coburn, the Oklahoma Republican, but thanks to his efforts we now have a partial list of government programs, and it is revealing a lot of waste and duplicate effort. Consolidating such programs could reduce administrative costs without hurting those they are intended to help. But this won’t be enough to do the job.

One nice result of helping those who are unemployed get jobs and those who are employed increase their financial security is a reduction in welfare, Food Stamps, utility assistance, health care and rental subsidies, and unemployment expenses. And gainful employment is the only way we can increase revenue and begin chipping away at the debt and its concomitant interest expense.

So should we freak out, give up, throw in the towel, admit defeat? Certainly not. We were making good progress ten years ago when Bush, Jr. took over. With a little luck and a lot of common sense, we’ll start making progress again.

The United States is not broke. The United States has not lost its place in the world. All of our problems are temporary and can be remedied, not by draconian cuts that hurt the working class but by confidence and investment in our people.

Republicans, Teabags, and corporate media hacks: Stop wasting our time!

Whoops! Blogger Makes Blooper!

Boy, did I get taken in. In my previous post I showed a picture of this sign from the Westboro Baptist Church that read "God Hates Happy People." Well, it was a fake. Somebody has set up a web site (http://www.says-it.com/wbc/) where you can type in your own message. I was so busy looking for examples of placards this despicable group has displayed that I didn't check the site out carefully enough.

Mea culpa. These yoyos may have had a sign that said God hates happy people -- they've quite a repertory of "God hates" messages -- but the photo I posted is a fake.

For more counter-Westboro signs see as well http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/the-3o-best-anti-westboro-baptist-church-protest-s

A Law We Can Live With

Having a First Amendment Isn’t Easy

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” –The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Two unrelated news items I saw this week point out the difficulties we brought upon ourselves by adding the above words to our Constitution. Please be assured that I am in no way advocating the slightest change to those words; I’m just pointing out that the exercise of those freedoms can be annoying and even a source of outrage.

 “The freedom of speech” can be a prickly thing. It includes, as these news items make clear, the right to be despicable and the right to lie.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court acknowledged the right of members of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas, to picket gravesite ceremonies of U.S. soldiers. The church’s placards have included such messages as “Thank God for Dead Soldiers,” “God Is Your Enemy,” “Thank God for 9/11,” “God Hates Fags,” “God Hates America,” and, perhaps most telling, “God Hates Happy People.” These are not happy people.

The court ruled eight to one that these hateful messages were protected under the First Amendment. Chief Justice John Roberts pointed out that in this country we have chosen “to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate.”

Of course, he is right. It was the correct decision. We have to live with this kind of thing if we want to maintain our own right to say what we think.

“Our profound national commitment to free and open debate is not a license for the vicious verbal assault that occurred in this case,” wrote the lone dissenter on the court, Justice Samuel Alito. We all tend to agree with his sentiment, but look again at his words: “vicious” is a very subjective adjective while “assault” is quite objectively defined in the law. Although the vast majority of citizens would agree that the Westboro placards represented “vicious verbal assault,” it’s very difficult to prohibit such activities without curtailing the rights of others.

I agree with the chief justice. We just have to live with it.

On a lighter note, while we also have to live with the lack of journalistic integrity of Faux News and the Limbaugh clones, Canada has managed to avoid them. Robert Kennedy, Jr. reports that our neighbor to the north has a law that forbids lying on broadcast news (http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/276-74/5123-fox-news-lies-keep-them-out-of-canada).

“Canada's Radio Act requires that ‘a licenser [I think that should be “licensee”] may not broadcast ... any false or misleading news,’” Kennedy writes. “The provision has kept Fox News and right-wing talk radio out of Canada and helped make Canada a model for liberal democracy and freedom. As a result of that law, Canadians enjoy high quality news coverage, including the kind of foreign affairs and investigative journalism that flourished in this country before Ronald Reagan abolished the ‘Fairness Doctrine’ in 1987. Political dialogue in Canada is marked by civility, modesty, honesty, collegiality, and idealism that have pretty much disappeared on the US airwaves.”

Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? We could sure use more civility and all those other attributes down here.

But, once again, we have chosen to bend over backwards “to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate.” Go ahead and lie, Rush. Keep the “birther” nonsense coming, Faux. The First Amendment’s got you covered.

On the other hand, Rush and his cronies have to put up with people like me.

To paraphrase a slogan that supported the national 55-mph speed limit, “The First Amendment. It’s a law we can live with.”

The Reagan Legacy

Hell, Yes, It’s Class Warfare!

“The ten most dangerous words in the English language are ‘Hi, I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.’” –Ronald Reagan, 1911-2004.

The centennial of Ronald Reagan’s birth was celebrated recently. It gave those who revere his memory yet another opportunity to extol his virtues and his triumphs. Over the years I have been amazed at the reverence in which he is held. Someone even suggested adding his mug to the ones already on Mount Rushmore.

I remember the Reagan Administration with less affection.

My first memory of Ronald Reagan was back in the early days of television, when he hosted a show called, as I remember, General Electric Theater.

“At General Electric, progress is our most important product,” he would say at the end of each show. I was in the third grade or thereabouts, and I found him unctuous and insincere. I don’t know why, but I never really changed my mind about him.

When he was elected governor of California, I thought to myself, “Well, what do you expect from California?” (Later I had the same thought about Arnold Schwarzenegger.) When he ran for president, I thought that surely the citizens of the United States wouldn’t elect “that B-actor.”

Well, they did. Somebody called him “The Great Communicator,” but I never thought he was all that eloquent. I simply did not get it.

His eight years in office were almost as painful to me as the eight years of Bush, Jr. I disagreed with most everything he said and did, and towards the end I thought he was simply getting senile.

His stature in the Republican Party was, and is, just the opposite. He gave his supporters great hope and encouragement, and among them he is still their shining city on the hill. I take a more cynical view: his message, as I perceived it, was, “It’s O.K. to be selfish.” Oh, I know, I’m misreading his call for self-reliance and personal responsibility, but I still see it as, “I’ve got mine and you’re not going to take it away from me.”

It was during his time in office, and in large part through his efforts, that the “Christian Right” became a major force in the GOP, and the traditional fiscal conservatism of the party got all mixed up with “social conservatism” – which I perceived as bigotry and xenophobia. The Republican Party does not have a very big natural constituency because its primary concern is protecting the wealthy, so assimilating what was then called the “moral majority” (which, someone noted, was neither) made good political sense. That alliance has continued for the thirty-some years since.

Reagan increased defense spending significantly, which his supporters still maintain forced the Soviet Union to do the same, resulting in its collapse. I have never understood that logic.

Reagan preached limited government, and his party members drank deep of that Kool-Aid.

But his greatest legacy is what one of his primary opponents (George Bush, Sr., who later became his vice president and then succeeded him in office) called “voodoo economics,” and what the media nicknamed “trickle-down economics.” Its basic tenet is to leave the rich alone so that they will create jobs that will benefit those in less rarefied financial strata. It was nothing new – in the previous century this was referred to as “laissez-faire,” or “let them (the wealthy) alone” economics.

And how is that working out for us? You’ve probably heard a number of statistics that demonstrate how the poor and middle class in this country have been going downhill since Reagan was elected, but now Mother Jones magazine has collected eleven graphs that show that progression, well, graphically (http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph). Citations are provided for each graph so you can check their veracity. Here’s the first one; the others are just as dismal:

Some of these graphs show changes over time, and if you didn’t live through all this, as I did, remember that Reagan (R) was elected in 1980 and 1984; Bush, Sr. (R) in 1988; Clinton (D) in 1992 and 1996; Bush, Jr. (R) in 2000 and 2004; and Obama (D) in 2008.

I think we all recognize and accept that in a capitalist system there will be poor people, rich people, and very rich people, but when the inequality between them continues to widen, there’s truly a problem. The Middle Class has been the bulwark of our country, and it is shrinking dramatically. It’s an old cliché that the rich get richer and the poor poorer, but when it actually happens, it creates havoc, and when it happens at this lightning speed, it spells imminent disaster.

How do we stop this, or at least start “bending the curve?”

I would suggest revising the tax code and reforming campaign financing. I can’t think of anything more important, or more difficult, but if we cannot make significant changes in both of these areas, we face a future of economic decline or political revolt, or both.

The very wealthy spend immense amounts of money to persuade people that it’s really their fault that they aren’t wealthy, too, that if they just had enough “personal responsibility” and weren’t such crybabies, they wouldn’t have fallen in a hole. In Wisconsin, the governor and his cronies are blaming teachers (who, they say, get far too much full-time pay for part-time work and have bloated retirement plans) and other working people for the current recession. Unfortunately, we never have a shortage of gullible people who will accept just about anything that they see on television.

I hope the Mother Jones link gives you some of the ammunition you need to counter these pernicious assertions. We have to fix this before our republic devolves into despotic plutocracy. It’s not far down the road.

You bet it’s class warfare. And Uncle Sam needs you!

Waiting on the Tokamak

Whatever Happened to Nuclear Fusion?

"The discovery of nuclear reactions need not bring about the destruction of mankind any more than the discovery of matches" –Albert Einstein, 1879-1955.

In one of my recent postings I mentioned fusion power as one of the huge technological advances waiting in the wings, and I realized I hadn’t heard much about it recently. I soon discovered that I could date the cessation of information back to the late 1980s, when there was a flurry of interest in a scientific concept called “cold fusion.”

Two scientists claimed they had extracted more energy from a room-temperature experiment than they put into it. The discovery was touted as the Holy Grail, the Lost Ark, and the Jewel of the Nile all wrapped in one enormous breakthrough. The problem was that nobody could replicate the effect, although they kept trying, and are trying still. It gave fusion proper – “hot” fusion, if you will – a bad name as well, and I haven’t seen much mention of it in the popular media since then – and that was over two decades ago.

Well, in the mean time scientists have pretty much put all their fusion eggs into one basket, and it is a really big basket. They’re building a huge “tokamak” (the word is a Russian acronym for words that mean “toroidal chamber with axial magnetic field”) – or what might be described as an atomic oven – in the Provence region of France.

Our existing nuclear power plants are all “fission” plants. Very big atoms like uranium and plutonium can be broken apart into pieces: different atoms that are still pretty big. The resulting atoms, combined, weigh just a little bit less than the big atom you started with, and that little bit of extra “stuff” gets turned into energy.

When you have a whole bunch of big atoms breaking apart at once, you have an atomic bomb. When the big atoms are diluted or separated so that they don’t explode, just a few of them break apart, or “fizz,” every second. The energy that’s created is primarily heat, which can be used to run a boiler and thus a power plant.

The problem with fission is that both the atoms you start with and many of the ones that are produced are radioactive. Some of them remain dangerous for millennia. We are accumulating a lot of spent fuel rods and we have to find a place to store them indefinitely, thanks to fission power.

Fusion, by contrast, is pushing together, not breaking apart. It turns out that four hydrogen atoms, the smallest and most abundant atoms in the universe, weigh quite a bit more than one helium atom, and if you can cram those hydrogen atoms together you get helium and a lot of energy.

The radioactive products of fusion are minimal, short-lived, and easily shielded.

Cramming atoms of hydrogen, more precisely of its isotopes deuterium and tritium, together requires lots of pressure, and the resulting nuclear reaction creates a lot of heat. It takes a lot of energy to create and contain the pressure, and the goal of this huge tokamak project is to get at least ten times that much energy out of the reactor in the form of electricity.

Previous attempts haven’t even broken the one-to-one ratio.

The big tokamak will be built by a consortium of the United States, Russia, the European Union, Japan, China, South Korea, and India. That represents half the world’s population. The project is called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, or “ITER.” “Iter” is a Latin word meaning “way” or “road.” I guess if they had done it in China it would be called the “TAO.”

But there’s a recession, and although all of the partners have made commitments to the building of the enormous structure, budget-trimmers in all those governments are looking for programs to kill or mutilate. From what I can determine, ITER’s funding commitments are intact, but it has no wiggle room for cost overruns and design changes.

Maybe this is the best way to fund the really big research projects. When times get bad, individual nations are likely to put the brakes on projects they fund for themselves. (I could mention the Superconducting Super Collider and Yucca Mountain.) But an international consortium is like a treaty, and it’s hard to renege on committed funding in such a situation.

Anyway, this project is going to be around for a while. It was actually Mikhail Gorbachev’s idea, back when there was a Soviet Union, in 1985. It was 20 years before the site was chosen. The official agreement was signed in November, 2006, and since then the dirt-work has been completed. That may not sound like much, but the raised area where the project’s buildings will be constructed measures about one kilometer by 400 meters, and about 2.5 million cubic meters of dirt were moved to build it. (This is in France, so of course everything is in metric numbers.)

Experiments won’t begin in the tokamak until 2019. It will be a structure of 5½ stories underground and 19 stories above ground. I’ve included an artist’s conception of the machine from the official website (http://www.iter.org/). Look for the tiny man standing on the bottom right to get an idea of the size.

Much of this huge machine will be composed of coils of copper wire to create and control magnetic fields to contain the doughnut-shaped core where hydrogen atoms will be injected under extreme pressure. These coils will be cooled to close to absolute zero, so there is a lot of cooling machinery. The tokamak will also have to have a plumber’s nightmare of piping to retrieve and carry away the heat that’s created, in the form of steam.

There are very few projects with such lengthy commitments. After years of experiments, ITER may reach its goal of producing ten times as much energy as it uses. Then more years will be needed for more research to make the process commercially viable. This long-term approach is welcome in a world that seems to see only the end of the current quarter, or at best the end of the current fiscal year, as the future. We need more of this kind of thinking.

So, fusion is still going to be a part of our future. It’s probably still two or three decades down the road, but by that time we are really going to need it.

As for cold fusion, it’s still out there, too. Just last month two scientists from the University of Bologna, Italy, announced that they had yet another room temperature device that produced more energy than it used. Most scientists are skeptical, as usual. It would really be nice if we could find such a simple process, but if that doesn’t happen, we’ll have to wait on the tokamak.

Liberty at Its Purest

A Fleeting Moment
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." –Thomas Jefferson, 1743-1826.

The most revolutionary part of the American Revolution was the audacious conceit that all governments derive their power from the governed and by the consent of the governed. This was viewed by many as a very dangerous concept. It’s like telling your slave that he holds the key to his fetters.

But we proved it true, as have many who followed our path. When the governed cease to consent, there is no government.

At that very moment, as the former head of state is running for the border with what cash he could stuff in his valise, for that brief instant, the citizens have the purest form of liberty there is.


Cairo, January 28th.           Ramy Raoof on Wikipedia

 
That seems to be happening all over the Arab world. Egypt, with the largest population, followed the lead of little Tunisia, and there are cracks in the foundations of a lot of other governments we thought were stable. It looks now as if Kaddafi of Libya will follow Mubarak of Egypt. It’s like a chain reaction, and accordingly a lot of energy will be produced from it.

And unlike some revolutions, this one came from the governed themselves, leading themselves. There was no Adolph or Fidel or Saddam; there was just a big buddy-list on Facebook.

These people are suddenly free. They have a chance to build a lasting society that is fair to all. They know that if the military or some would-be dictator tries to take over, they can refuse to consent to them, too. They have feasted on liberty and are sure of their purpose. It is a magic time, and it will not last, but the choices made in the first few days will set the course for the new nation – and the mistakes made in the first few days will haunt it forever.

Such opportunities have been lost before. The Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity of the French Revolution turned into a free-for-all of pillaging and murder. The Russian Revolution, which guaranteed to give everything “from each according to his ability to each according to his need,” took better care of the needs of its ruling elite. More recently we have seen the excesses of the Mau-Mau revolt in Africa and the Islamic revolution in Iran, among many others. Choices and mistakes.

There are always emperors and despots and satraps waiting in the wings to seize whatever domains they can. There are always clergy offering the benefits of a God-ruled nation. There are always generals and colonels and non-coms eager to use their weapons to their own advantage. And there are always companies with plenty of money: Do you want it on, or under, the table?

And so liberty is parceled out, sold, and swindled. The bread-and-circuses scams are offered in return for money and power. The backs get scratched. The governed give their consent in many ways. Choices and mistakes.

At this point, no one knows how Tunisia and Egypt and Libya and South Sudan will evolve. Will Jordan and Saudi Arabia be next? Will there be confederations like the old United Arab Republics? Will these new nations be good neighbors or zealous xenophobes? Will this be progress or ruination?

We can only hope that all these countries will savor their instant of pure liberty and use it to benefit their people.








Deficit and Debt II

Cutting the Big Three

"The government deficit is the difference between the amount of money the government spends and the amount it has the nerve to collect." –Sam Ewing, 1921-2001

Now, what do we do about the Big Three – the federal government’s largest budget expenditures?

The biggest, at present, is Health and Human Services, which includes both Medicare and Medicaid. I assume it also includes the spending required under the new Affordable Health Care Act, the biggest portion of which will take effect in 2014.

Medicare is paid for, as we all know from our pay stubs and W-2 forms, by equal contributions from employees and employers. Please note that the chart I referred to in Part I shows only spending.

Medicaid, on the other hand, is almost fully paid for by taxpayers. It provides medical services to those with low and moderate incomes.

I think there are two desirable ways to reduce expenditures for Medicaid. The first is to increase employment and the second is to reform our tax system.

You can see from the chart that spending under this line item has been increasing substantially, and this is a direct result of the economic recession. Simply put, the more people out of work, the more people eligible for Medicaid. The increase also includes a growing number of older citizens whose retirement income is very low. Increased employment will help both of these groups, at least in the long run.

Fixing the tax code could also reduce the number of our citizens who cannot afford medical care and thus need help from Medicaid. It could help those people in many other ways, as well.
For decades, the rich have been getting richer and the poor poorer. The middle class has been shrinking. As reported in the International Business Times last September, “The top 20 percent of American earners – those making more than $100,000 annually – received 49.4 percent of all income generated in the country, compared with the 3.4 percent earned by those below the poverty line.

“That translates to a ratio of 14.5-to-1, up from 13.6 in 2008 and almost double the low figure of 7.69 recorded in 1968.

“The U.S. income gap between rich and poor is the greatest among Western industrialized nations” (http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/66809/20100929/income-gap-census-bureau-poverty.htm#ixzz1D16YL2gf).

People making the minimum wage, even much more than the minimum wage, are having great difficulty providing their families with even basic food, shelter, energy, transportation, and education. They pay exorbitant interest rates because their credit histories are in shambles. Most of the bills they pay have late fees, and they fly so close to the ground with their bank accounts that they often get hefty overdraft charges. They get their utilities cut off and have to come up with large deposits in addition to the arrears. If the family car breaks down they can’t pay to fix it, and that puts their jobs at risk. They never catch up, and it gets worse every year.

These are people who get Food Stamps and utility assistance and other government help, and their children are covered by Medicaid. That’s the price we pay for their inadequate incomes.

No, I’m not a Huey Long-style advocate of redistribution of wealth, but I do believe that our tax code puts an unequal burden on the growing population of the working poor. I think we should exempt more income from taxation.

According to 2011 guidelines from the U.S. Health and Human Services Department, a single person making $10,890 per year or less is in poverty, as is a family of four making $22,350 or less. (These numbers are higher in Alaska and Hawaii, where it costs more to live.) I think it would be reasonable to double those amounts, and let those who make that much or less be totally exempt from income taxes. Millions of our citizens would then be freed from the expensive and enervating annual ritual of filing tax returns. They would get more take-home pay. And they would need less government assistance.

There’s no “poor people’s association” lobbying Congress for special exemptions and loopholes, but there are plenty of groups working for such perquisites on behalf of the wealthy. As a result, the tax code is about the size of a major encyclopedia, with smaller print. I would be in favor of getting rid of most of the loopholes and taxing those who make more than twice the poverty rate on a sliding scale. It would have the effect of reducing that 14.5-to-1 inequity cited above.

O.K. We’ve solved that problem. All we have to do is get those people on the bottom of the income scale to vote for tax reform, right? There sure are lots of them. Well, unfortunately, many of them listen to Rush Limbaugh, watch Faux News, and vote Republican. Many of them think Barak Obama caused their financial distress. Changing that is the real challenge.

Now for the Department of Defense. As I write this, an ocean of Egyptian citizens is assembled in Cairo’s Tahrir Square demanding the ouster of Hosni Mubarak. There are similar uprisings in several other Middle East countries. What this means for the United States of America has yet to be determined, but such turmoil is always dangerous, despite the solidarity we feel towards those struggling to free themselves from repressive governments. The world is a dangerous place, and we need to be ready to respond, anywhere on the globe, to threats of many kinds. We need a healthy, efficient military.

That being said, our military has wasted billions of dollars in recent decades. Congress, which is charged with overseeing its expenditures, sometimes exacerbates the problem. Witness the C-17 transport plane. Its parts are made all over the country, that is to say, within many different states and their several congressional districts. The Department of Defense told Congress it didn’t want any more C-17s because it had a less expensive alternative. Congress voted to buy more C-17s. There are two meanings of the word “oversight,” and sometimes Congress seems to be using the wrong one.

There has always been waste in the Defense Department. We’ve all heard about pricy toilet seats and spanner wrenches. We’ve seen the evidence of obscenely excessive payments to government contractors. We know there are outmoded weapons systems that keep getting funded. But given the immense size of our defense expenditures, even a reduction of just a few percentage points would result in very significant savings, probably more than would be realized from all those things I mentioned in Part I.

Well, the Republican Party, trying to stuff itself back into the garments of fiscal restraint it discarded years ago, is talking tough about defunding NPR, but defense spending, it says, is not on the table. The GOP’s pompous hypocrisy is sometimes more than I can stomach.

The defense budget must be “on the table.” One of the basic tenets of our government – of the Constitution Republicans are so quick to extol – is citizen control of the military. Every new or renewed military program should be subject to strict analysis based on need and economic viability. That’s what we pay our members of Congress for. I don’t care if defense contractors offer them a better deal.

Our two lengthy wars are winding down, we’re told. They will have cost us trillions of dollars. As we withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan it is the perfect time to reassess our defense spending. I’m sure there are significant savings to be found there.

And, finally, let’s look at interest on the national debt. You’ll notice on the chart that Treasury Department spending in Actual 2010 was over $250 billion less than was spent in Actual 2009. Part of that was because of reduced bailout and stimulus funding, but much of it is due to extremely low interest rates resulting from the recession. We’ve been paying off maturing bonds and bills that had high interest rates and issuing new ones with very low rates. That’s a good thing, but it won’t last. As the economy recovers, there will be more demand for investment, and that will cause interest rates to rise.

We’ll have a fine line to walk in coming years as the economy regains strength. As soon as it does we need to start reducing the debt while we do our best to keep inflation under control. It’s clear that we will pay off some of that debt in inflated dollars, but we can’t use that as our strategy. The first thing we have to do, as soon as the health of the economy improves, is provide the government with income that equals its expenditures, in some combination of cost reduction, increased revenue from increased employment, and (gasp!) tax increases.

Then we can start paying down that debt.

Deficit and Debt I

Investing in Our Future

"Everything has a cost. We cannot kid ourselves into thinking that by failing to invest in our future, that we're somehow saving resources -- that we're being clever and somehow saving money." –Gov. Martin O'Malley (D-MD)

If you’re one of those people who think we can solve our national fiscal problems by cutting discretionary spending back to 2008 levels, eliminating foreign aid, getting rid of the Department of Education, cutting back the staff at the House of Representatives, rooting out fraud, waste, and abuse in the Food Stamp program, cutting federal support for National Public Radio and the National Endowment for the Arts, and repealing “Obamacare,” you should take a look at this website: www.federalbudget.com/

This chart showing where the federal government spends its money comes from the National Debt Awareness Center. I don’t agree with all of its principles (it advocates a national sales tax, which I think would be a disaster), but it performs an important public service by updating this colorful chart every month. (I’ve inserted the chart that’s current as I write this. The one on the link is much larger.)

You’ll see that the biggest expenditures are at the bottom, and do not include the items I mentioned above. We spend the most money on the Treasury Department (most of which is interest on the national debt), the Defense Department, and Health and Social Services. In a separate chart below this one is what we spend on Social Security. Those four items are the really big ones.

The reason Social Security is in a separate box is that it’s not a part of the federal budget. It’s still paying for itself, disbursing money it collected in past years, and will continue to do so for a couple more decades. Its eventual insolvency is a serious problem, but one that can be dealt with by raising the limit on the income on which it is assessed. Those who make over $106,800 per year won’t like it, and they do have a lot of political clout, but it is the simplest way to insure permanent solvency of the program. Because everyone came home from World War II and caught up on being fruitful and multiplying, we have a big lump of people retiring for the next few years – like a snake that swallowed a big rat. Raising the maximum wage contribution for Social Security is the least painful way to deal with it, and it can be a temporary increase.

So the immediate problems are human services, defense, and interest on the debt. While axing NPR might make some people very happy, it won’t make a noticeable difference to our deficit. We have to do something about the Big Three.

The current Republican mantra is that our problem isn’t lack of income, it’s excess spending, but that’s simply not true. In order to get a handle on these huge expenditures, we have to increase our income.

It’s common wisdom that we shouldn’t raise taxes during a recession, and I agree, for the most part. It would be like requiring a bleeding patient to donate blood for his own transfusion. So how can we increase our income?

We have to come up with something new. As President Obama put it in his State of the Union address, “None of us can predict with certainty what the next big industry will be, or where the new jobs will come from…. What we can do – what America does better than anyone – is spark the creativity and imagination of our people.”

It might be a breakthrough in solar cells, or high-speed light rail, or cancer research, or three-dimensional imaging, or, after years of promises, fusion power. It might be all of these things and more. It has to be something that helps humanity take the next step. We’ve done it many times before: we’ve had many industrial revolutions in our history, from the Erie Canal to the railroad, the skyscraper, the airplane, the assembly line, penicillin, the transistor, the computer, and the Internet. There’s always a next step.

The president called for increased federal support of education and research, and I agree. And I’d like to see the two combined.

I think the biggest technological advance we could make at this point in our history is finding new ways to educate our children. We do a dismal job of it. Our educational system is still modeled on Henry Ford’s assembly line. We did a much better job when it was modeled on the family garden.

If you grow corn and beans and tomatoes and rutabagas you quickly find that each crop requires different amounts of water, different kinds and application rates of fertilizer, different tillage methods. Some do better in partial shade while others require full sun.

People are similar to plants in that way: children learn in different ways, and the cookie-cutter approach doesn’t work for all of them. Our latest approach has been to define a set of skills students should acquire and then test whether they have done so. We penalize the schools with the highest number of failures, without regard to the many other forces involved. We have stripped our schools of history, music, and art so more time can be spent teaching students to make change and solve simple equations, and they have gotten dumber and dumber. We need something new! Any improvement in the efficiency of our educational system will reap long-term benefits in technical innovation.

There are so many breakthroughs on the horizon, and each one will benefit our economy, but only if we continue to be the ones making a significant portion of the breakthroughs.

The State of the Union, 2011

Nicely Stated

What comes of this moment will be determined not by whether we can sit together tonight, but whether we can work together tomorrow. –President Barak Obama

When I was a kid I attended a church camp and learned a song. It only had two phrases: “Praise ye the Lord” and “Alleluia.” The boys sang one phrase and the girls the other, and we were encouraged to compete with each other with regard to volume. In addition, when one group was singing it stood up while the other quickly sat down. The result resembled a reciprocating engine and achieved noise levels similar to those produced by high school basketball fans stomping on bleachers.

Every time I have watched the State of the Union Address in recent years I have been reminded of that song. The President would say something his party liked and all its members would stand up and applaud. Occasionally he would say something supported by the other party and its members would stand. Often a member, especially of the opposition, thought something sounded good and started to stand, but first hastily glanced at the party leader to make sure it was appropriate. The bouncing up and down and the jerky hesitations were entertaining but didn’t enhance the message.

It was a little different this time. Recognizing the extremes to which partisan bickering has poisoned our national debate, and recoiling from the recent tragedy in Tucson that had stricken close to home, many members of Congress chose to sit next to someone from the other party and not in blocs on their sides of the aisle. It was a symbolic gesture but one that many of their constituents, myself among them, found greatly refreshing.

Oh, yes, the members still bounced up and down, and just about every sentence President Obama uttered was applauded by one group or the other or both. It took him over an hour to give a 30-minute speech. But there was a significant feeling that at least one impediment to comity and compromise had been removed.

President Obama’s speech Tuesday was conciliatory in many ways as well, so Republicans had a number of opportunities to stand and applaud. He obviously recognizes that voters want him to work with the opposition to solve the many problems we face.

Both the Republican rebuttal, given by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), the new House Budget Committee chairman, and the Tea Party rebuttal, from Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN), who can usually be counted on to say something bizarrely belligerent, were unusually cogent and avoided the usual “social conservative” rhetoric that has polluted public discourse for decades. I didn’t hear abortion mentioned in any of the three speeches, and only the president mentioned gays and immigration, and just briefly. Bachmann, who recently described Obama as “the first non-American president,” stayed on-message with the other two and avoided ad hominem and “birther” nonsense.

The message, of course, is that we have great economic difficulties. Each of the three offered solutions, and while they differed to a great extent, it’s clear there is significant common ground. I found this truly refreshing; perhaps it’s because the Republicans now control the House and will be held accountable for its actions.

President Obama called for new investment in technology to bring about the next industrial revolution, citing past achievements in space and the development of the Internet, both of which spurred the economy. He called for improvements in education and the development of new infrastructure such as mag-lev trains and the next generations of renewable energy and high-speed communications, as well as rebuilding existing infrastructure, as ways to make this happen. He extolled the benefits of pure research in a newly-competitive world.

He called upon Congress to revise the tax code. “Over the years,” he said, “a parade of lobbyists has rigged the tax code to benefit particular companies and industries. Those with accountants or lawyers to work the system can end up paying no taxes at all. But all the rest are hit with one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world. It makes no sense, and it has to change.”

Get rid of these loopholes, he said, and the corporate tax rate can be lowered. This would make U.S. companies more competitive with the rest of the world.

He admitted that some government regulations do more to stifle business than to protect the public, while others are unnecessarily duplicative, and offered to work with lawmakers to revise them. But he made it clear that some regulations were necessary, including those recently imposed on the financial industry, and that he would resist efforts to dilute them.

The president got a well-deserved laugh when he said, “I’ve heard rumors that a few of you have some concerns about the new health care law.” The House, of course, has wasted most of its first weeks this session tilting at that windmill. Obama made it clear he wouldn’t allow a return to the status quo ante but agreed that “anything can be improved.” If there’s something wrong with it, he said, “let’s fix what needs fixing and move forward.”

That probably didn’t assuage the Republicans in the least, but it’s certainly a statement of political fact. If the GOP wants to abolish the health care law, it will have to win the 2012 election, and win it big, to do it.

Obama offered a number of cost-cutting measures. Republicans interviewed afterwards decried them as too little too late, but they represent fertile ground for compromise, and that’s a start.

Has civility returned to Congress? There are some hopeful signs. Let’s see if they work together tomorrow.

Our Political Parties - V

Declining to State

You must pick one or the other although neither of them ought to be what they claim. –Bob Dylan.

I’ve scarcely mentioned one the biggest political blocs of all, the self-styled independents. They don’t rate an initial capital letter because they do not exist as a political party. They are defined by what they are not.

In my state, people who don’t choose a party when they register to vote are referred to as “Declined to State.” It makes them sound like they’re trying to hide something. I think “Unaffiliated” is a kinder moniker, and a more precise term.

Whatever you call them, unaffiliated voters are a big percentage of registered voters, about 30%. The biggest group of all, of course, is composed of those who don’t vote or don’t even register. At least the independents participate in the process.

In presidential election years, usually a little over half of the voting-age population actually makes it to the polls. Some years it will break the 60% barrier. In off-year elections, it’s usually less than 40%. (See http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0781453.html for statistics from the years 1960-2008.)

The breakdown of Republicans, Democrats, and independents is roughly one-sixth of the eligible population each. Every year a few members of each of the two major parties choose to vote for the opposition candidate, but most of them stick with their own parties. That means that the independents are actually deciding general elections. The problem is that they have no voice in primary elections.

In order to win, a candidate from either party has to keep his party’s voters motivated and convince a majority of the independents that he is the best choice. Many good candidates who could put such a coalition together never get the chance, because the views of party members don’t always match those of independent voters. The result is a complicated dance to attract party members during the primary season without alienating independent voters who will be needed the following November.

I can understand why many people choose not to participate at the party level. They may see the parties as unnecessarily partisan and vociferous, but ironically they help make them that way by not getting involved and diluting the venom. Others simply find politics uninteresting. I can understand that. I feel the same way about sports, and ballet, and whatever the heck Lindsay Lohan does besides get in trouble. I can’t tell you who won the last World Series, or what teams are still in the running for the Super Bowl, but I can give you a pretty accurate list of the U.S. senators whose seats will be up for election next time, and which ones are likely not to run. Different strokes for different folks.

Some say we should have more than two parties, but no one seems to be able to put a viable third party together. Ross Perot came close, as did George Wallace before him, but there never seems to be a critical mass. Even if someone did succeed in creating a viable third party, I’d bet that it would soon replace one of the existing parties rather than compete with them both.

So I expect independents to remain a major force in our government for the foreseeable future, and I think that’s a good thing. A candidate from either party who sticks too closely to that party’s core message won’t make it. The party faithful may not support compromise, but their candidate has to. Independents haven’t found it desirable or comfortable to register in either party, so neither party line will attract their votes. The large number of independents requires candidates, especially presidential candidates, to espouse a less partisan approach and speak to the issues that concern the unaffiliated at the moment.

Two days after he barely won the 2004 election, George Bush, Jr. said, “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it.” Just after the 2010 election, the new house speaker-apparent, John Boehner, said, “The American people spoke and I think it’s pretty clear the Obama-Pelosi agenda is being rejected by the American people.”

Well, Mr. Speaker, maybe that sentiment will work better for you than it did for Mr. Bush, but I doubt it. “The American People” in this case were a motivated Republican base and a majority of the independents who chose to vote this time around. If there was a mandate, it was for more jobs and a better economy. It remains to be seen if the tactics of the GOP in the House will bring those things about to the satisfaction of the independents who supported its candidates, or if they will decide to do so again in 2012.

Even the biggest landslides in recent history represent the votes of only 25% to 30% of eligible voters, and in no case was the winning party able to duplicate its success two years later.

Those of us who have chosen to be Democrats should remember that if we win next time around and avoid saying that it’s pretty clear the Boehner-McConnell agenda is being rejected by the American people.

Our Political Parties - IV

Ethical Cleansing

I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat. –Will Rogers, 1879-1935.

In my experience, the Democratic Party is like a bus. Those who get on first every four years get to drive, but they have to pay for the gas, too. If they don’t, someone else takes over and the rest of us are happy to be along for the ride. Sometimes we get as far as Washington.

Traditionally, the Democratic Party is the party of Labor, of the common people. Common people may be common, but they’re incredibly diverse, and you will definitely find all kinds of people at a Democratic meeting or rally or barbecue.

A simplistic view of the difference between Democrats and Republicans is that the former are fighting for something and the latter against something. Consequently, the words “liberal” and “conservative” have some validity in describing them. When they’re at their best, the Democrats are working for their vision of fairness and equity, strengthening the middle class, and reducing poverty. At their best Republicans are working for their vision of fairness and equity, protecting the upper class, and keeping Democrats from going overboard in their efforts.

Years ago my brother-in-law signed up to run for country commissioner in our little county on the Republican ticket. If he had signed up as a Democrat, we would have welcomed him with open arms along with anyone else willing to run for the seat. But he chose the GOP, and he didn’t consult with the county chairman or the other powers-that-were at the time. They had already chosen someone else to run for the position and they were not happy with this impertinent upstart.

Despite their best efforts, he won the primary. In retaliation, those powers-that-were redoubled their opposition in the general election. This time, they won. They got his Democratic opponent elected, and considered it a victory.

I have always considered that incident indicative of the differences between the two major parties. It’s one reason I’m a Democrat. When we’re at our best, we encourage participation from all sorts of people and we make rules, sometimes ridiculously complex rules, that give everybody a voice in the process.

In recent years the Republican Party, at least those members led by Limbaugh and his clones and the Tea Party, has been “purifying” itself to make sure everybody in the party who holds office or speaks out toes the party line. Everyone has to be for tax cuts for the rich and famous, prayer in school, capital punishment, and automatic weapon ownership, and against abortion, immigration, health care for the poor, wardrobe malfunctions, and so on.

This purification is sowing the seeds of the party’s demise. My greatest fear is that the Democrats will follow suit.

In the last primary election, MoveOn.org spent a lot of money trying to defeat Blanche Lincoln, the Democratic senator from Arkansas, because not all of her votes fit in with MoveOn’s version of the party line. (She opposed the “public option” for health care.) Sen. Lincoln had a hard fight without such assistance because it was a Republican year and because Arkansas is not a safe Democratic state. She managed to limp through the primary and a subsequent run-off to get the nomination, but was defeated soundly in the general election by Republican John Boozman.

I don’t think Lincoln had a chance this year, but I think MoveOn’s efforts were against the party’s long-term interest. We Democrats need to be inclusive, or we’ll end up pure – and irrelevant. Such “ethical cleansing” on the GOP side will drive people out of the party, and many of them will end up as Democrats – unless the Democrats do the same thing. Then they’ll end up as independents poxing both our houses.

Instead of trying to purge our party, let’s build it up. There’s one constituency of the Republican Party that has been disgruntled in recent years: the fiscal conservatives. Our party has a better record in that regard than the GOP, at least since the Bush, Jr. years. If we take up that mantle, and make it clear that we are for social justice within a financially sound system, some of those disaffected people can feel comfortable on our side of the aisle.

One of the things I find most annoying about the GOP, especially in Congress, is its lockstep mentality. Trying to get Democrats to sing in unison is like herding cats (or as author Ari Berman put it in the title of his recent book, Herding Donkeys). I like that. I’d sure like to see a few more Republican legislators crossing the aisle when they recognize that a pending bill is a good one. But their party tends to be very retributive when this occurs. Consider the fate of Sen. Arlen Specter: a Republican Party that doesn’t have room for Arlen Specter is a Republican Party in trouble.

Capitalists, conservatives, corporations, and the cautious deserve a voice. I think a healthy Republican Party is good for the Democratic Party. Despite its recent gains in Congress and across the country, I don’t think the Republican Party is really that healthy, and I don’t think that’s good for my party either. We are forced to respond to the loud but largely irrelevant tirades of the GOP’s lunatic fringe, and it dumbs down the discussion.

We have very pressing problems in this country, and it will take rational compromise from both sides to solve them. The longer we delay the worse they get.

Our Political Parties - III

The Brand New Party

This piece of rudeness was more than Alice could bear: she got up in great disgust, and walked off; the Dormouse fell asleep instantly, and neither of the others took the least notice of her going, though she looked back once or twice, half hoping that they would call after her: the last time she saw them, they were trying to put the Dormouse into the teapot. –Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), 1832-1898

What a bizarre phenomenon is the Tea Party. It seemed to spring forth, like a toe fungus, in 2008 – coincidently an election year. There is no national headquarters of this organization: every chapter – indeed, every member – seems to be autonomous. Although the message is obscure, the common themes seem to be concern over the national debt and deficit, support for the Constitution, opposition to waste, fraud, and abuse, and a preference for smaller government.

It sounds like just what the Republican Party needs, doesn’t it? At first glance it seems to be an association of fiscal conservatives, a constituency who have found the GOP disappointing in recent years. Perhaps it could be the vessel of retribution for the profligate wealthy, or at least a balance to their astonishing excesses.

But look closer. They all seem to be White folks, generally older White folks, and they all seem to be very mad about something. Surely it is the wild-eyed fiscal insanity of recent years, when stockbrokers and bankers, abetted by free-market legislators who had systematically dismantled long-standing regulations of their industries, went berserk and almost took us into worldwide depression.

Well, no. These people are mad, but not about that.

A group of Teabags actually held a rally in the town nearest to mine last year. I happened to drive by just as it was winding down. I saw that several people were displaying signs, but I could only read one as I passed. It said, “Forget Your Dogs and Cats – Spay and Neuter Your Liberty!” I have no clue what that was supposed to mean, but I’m sure it was heartfelt. It’s typical of the disparate and convoluted messages of the Tea Party.

Look yet closer and you’ll see something else: a tendency to blame Barak Obama for our economic ills. Many of the Teabags profess to be particularly angry at Obama’s bailout of the banks.

Uh, well, uh, that happened a couple of months before Mr. Obama took office, didn’t it?

Shh! Don’t confuse them.

I think the real cause of their anger is Barak Obama himself. He’s a Muslim and he wasn’t born in this country and, well… dammit, he’s Black!

Oh, shoot. We’re back to the xenophobes again.

Nonetheless, Tea Party wingnuts won some primaries last year, and a few of them made it through the general election. GOP establishment types lauded and kowtowed the movement (and provided some generous funding for it), but there’s mutual suspicion between the two groups. They do seem to be in unison, though, when they disparage the President and those who support him.

So, no. This is not a group of fiscal conservatives. Their support of the Constitution is also limited. The distillation of their message seems to me to be that if George Bush, Jr. did it, it was just fine, and if Barak Obama did it, it’s unconstitutional.

I am a Democrat, as should be quite obvious by now, but I really believe we need a healthy Republican Party, or at least a healthy second party. But while bigotry and corporate idolatry may have gotten the GOP a slug of new seats in Congress, those seats are by no means safe. How the Republicans act in the next few months will determine whether the pendulum swings back at the next election, and if it does, the party will find it difficult to regain its present strength.

The Republicans have taken over the House of Representatives, and now they will be responsible for its success or failure. They are in their third day in the majority. They have read the Constitution aloud, promised to repeal the health care act, decided that tax cuts are not subject to “paygo” restrictions, and threatened to shut down the government when it reaches its current credit limit in just a couple of months. The rhetoric is flowing and they claim the November election gave them a breathtaking mandate to do these things. We’ll see.

Perhaps they should have followed the lead of the new Senate, where on the first day a number of Democratic members proposed changes in the Senate rules that would reduce the mind-numbing inaction and institutionalized logjams that have plagued it in recent years. After this heartening display, the Senate recessed (as opposed to adjourning, so that the first day would continue when it reconvenes) until the next day – which it determined will be on January 25th.

The House may get into a lot of trouble before then, but the Senate won’t be making any blunders at all. As the senators left town they looked back at the House, which was trying to put the Dormouse into the teapot.

Our Political Parties - II

The Grand Old Party

Alas, the storm is come again! My best way is to creep under his gaberdine; there is no other shelter hereabout: misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows. I will here shroud till the dregs of the storm be past. –William Shakespeare, 1564-1616

The Democratic Party is the party of Labor, and the Republican Party is the party of Capital. That statement is true, but woefully incomplete.

First of all, it should be obvious that there are a lot more laborers than there are capitalists. As a matter of fact, the percentage of the wealthy in this country has been shrinking considerably in the past four decades, even as the percentage of wealth they control has risen. How in the world can the capitalist party gain the support of so many laborers?

The history of the Republican Party is indeed a saga of strange bedfellowship. It actually started as a vehicle to express moral outrage at the institution of slavery, and moral outrage has been one of its recurring themes since that time.

Republican leaders would probably rather their party be called conservative than capitalist, and there is a lot of common ground between the two terms. Those who have wealth did not get it, and cannot keep it, by being liberal. Such people who are cautious in their financial dealings are likely to be cautious in social matters as well. They tend to dress like each other and look askance at those whose attire is less conventional. They tend to favor keeping the various institutions of society just the way they have been.

Social conservatives tend to resist the endless, unstoppable change that has characterized the history of humankind. I am sure that there were such people who decried the construction of the Pyramids of Egypt as profligate and unnecessary; more recently their counterparts have decried and bemoaned everything from the shocking display of ankles by women, to the pernicious influence of the nickelodeon, to the degenerate fads of pointillism and cubism, to the decreasing amount of fabric devoted to articles of swimming wear, to the debauchery of the music produced by such impertinent dastards as Beethoven, Joplin, Gershwin, Sinatra, Pressley, and Dylan, to the imposition of the designated hitter rule, and on and on.

And that’s not a bad thing. Society needs a certain amount of inertia. As far as I know the construction of the Pyramids was indeed profligate and unnecessary, unless they had a purpose we have yet to discover. Most of us would agree that change is not necessarily for the better. We may decry the loss of civility, the proliferation of filthy talk, the degradation of women, the “dumbing down” of our educational system. We are all conservative to some extent.

What really worries me about the Republican Party are the “values” it currently espouses. Most of these, in my mind, are xenophobic hatred and bigotry: fear or loathing of Blacks, Jews, Muslims, homosexuals, artists, “eggheads,” Catholics, Mormons, poor people, immigrants, Hispanics, and I’m tired of thinking of more because it’s too easy to do.

But many of the people who hold these “values” actually think of them as moral. Many of these people are aligned with the GOP although, thank God, not all Republicans share their prejudices. Nonetheless, it’s pretty hard not to at least pay lip service to these “values,” especially when Rush Limbaugh and Faux News are ready to expose you as heretical if you do not.

To my mind there are a number of different constituencies of the GOP:

1. The very rich and those who wield corporate power.
2. Fiscal conservatives.
3. The well-to-do who have the attitude of “I made mine; let them make theirs.”
4. Those who aspire to be wealthy and think becoming Republicans will help them do so. (It’s amazing how many there are. In my opinion, they are deluded and their party affiliation goes against their own self-interest.)
5. Those who feel threatened by change (including xenophobes).
6. Those who are against abortion.

Probably the largest group is #5, while the smallest is certainly #1. But all the prizes are through door number one, and it is the rich and the corporate power brokers who really exercise the power in the party. As incontrovertible evidence of this, witness the fact that during the recent lame duck session of Congress, every single Republican senator signed a letter to the majority leader saying that absolutely nothing would be passed until all the Bush tax cuts were continued. Barak Obama campaigned to let these expire for everyone with incomes over $250,000, and he was elected by a big majority. During the Senate debate, New York Democratic Senator Chuck Shumer offered to raise that limit to $1 million. There wasn’t a single taker on the GOP side.

That was a display of the real power in the Republican Party.

The cohesion of the several constituencies I’ve mentioned is quite fragile, and I believe it portends the doom of the Republican Party as we know it. Fiscal conservatives, especially, have had a difficult time sticking with the party in recent years while those few powerful people behind door number one have engaged in the biggest hog slop in history.

The 2010 election was a real victory for group #5, but its influence is waning, nonetheless. Today’s young people are far less likely to be bigots than their parents and, especially, their grandparents. African Americans and homosexuals and immigrants and all those other bugbears cause little consternation to the younger generation. As the bigots die off, the GOP will suffer unless it changes its focus. Today’s young people do not listen to Limbaugh or watch Faux News. They listen to music and watch Jon Stewart.

Thank God for that!