Two More Reasons Evolution is a Flawed Theory

Because if evolution were true, would the human race in 2005 really have leaders like these?

1.When asked by the Miami Herald whether he believes in Darwin's theory of evolution, Florida Governor Jeb Bush replied:

"Yeah, but I don't think it should actually be part of the curriculum, to be honest with you. And people have different points of view and they can be discussed at school, but it does not need to be in the curriculum.''

2. When asked by the Arizona Daily Star whether "intelligent design" should be taught with Darwinian evolution in public schools, Senator John McCain replied:

"Let the student decide."

Drawing the Tan Line Against Terrorism

Here's the latest on our government's war on terrorism from Reuters:

A Texas golf course, a Nevada tanning salon and an Illinois candy shop were among small businesses that may have improperly received U.S. subsidized loans intended for firms hurt by the September 11 attacks, an internal government watchdog has found.

Did terrorists secretly attack a tanning salon, and we weren't told about it? Is no one safe getting a few artificial rays? What is this country coming to when you can't tee up in peace? Attacking golf is attacking the heart attack of America!

Well, not that simple. It seems:

The tanning salon's lender blamed the September 11 attacks for hurting the Las Vegas casino industry which employed many of the salon's customers.

So do the watchdogs bark at the absurdity of compensating a tanning salon for 9-11? Not exactly. It's not the absurd and outrageous claim that bothers them. It's finding out that it wasn't even true.

However, the inspector general found the salon's business had grown by 52 percent in 2001 and 32 percent in 2002 and said there was no evidence the owner could not borrow outside of the program. The SBA guaranteed $437,000 in loans to the salon, which were used to expand.

As for the golf course:

The report's examples included the Texas golf course, whose owner was cited by a lender as saying "people were more interested in staying home and watching the attack on television than playing golf."

However, the course was owned by someone else when the attacks took place and the justification for the $480,000 in loan guarantees did not apply to the new owner, the report said.

This was all under a one-year, $4.5 billion program, the Supplemental Terrorist Activity Relief, or STAR, which provided loan guarantees to small businesses adversely affected by the September 11 attacks.

Or who made such claims, however outrageous. For the agency's inspector general found that in 85 percent of the sample of loans it reviewed, a company's eligibility to receive the money through the program could not be verified.

The Small Business Administration still insists it acted properly, but added that it has told lenders it will not honor guarantees on defaulted loans that fail to document the September 11 link.

Yeah, that would be too much.

Still, it's heartening to know that while sick people will be sacrificing their health for the cause as Medicaid and Medicare cuts go through, and students will sacrifice their education if they can't replace the federal loans that were cut, at least a Texas golf course is getting back the money lost when people selfishly watched their fellow Americans die and the Twin Towers come down, instead of doing their patriotic duty out on the fairway.

The Biggest Story Never Told

The news story that haunts me at year’s end is a story that got almost no attention anywhere, and begs to be told more fully. That no news organization has seen fit to do so may simply emphasize the message it seems to send.

It happened in Texas in mid-December. According to reports posted on the websites of two local television stations---the only news stories that googling could find—the Baylor Regional Medical Center in Plano, Texas, told the brother of Tirhas Habtegiris, a 27 year old immigrant from East Africa, that in 10 days they would take her off life support, and therefore she would die.

The woman in question had terminal cancer, but she was conscious. Her brother objected but it didn’t matter. Tirhas wanted to at least be kept alive long enough for her mother to come from East Africa to be with her when she died. But the legal process of getting her there would take longer than 10 days.

On the 11th day, the hospital disconnected her ventilator, and she died within the hour.

Her brother told reporters that he felt it would not have happened if she had health insurance. The hospital disputes this. There is apparently a law in Texas that allows such care to be withdrawn if the patient can’t pay. And there are also laws, called Futile Care laws, that mandate care be withdrawn in certain terminal cases.

If Tirhas Habtegiris was indeed fully conscious and taken off life support against her wishes because she could not pay, then it was an execution. She was given the death penalty for not being wealthy.

But is that what happened? We don’t really know. There were only two brief stories. It came to the attention of people outside Texas only because it was picked up by bloggers at Daily Kos and Booman’s Tribune, and then picked up by other blogs. Google her name and see for yourself.

Why were there only two brief stories? Is it because the facts of this case were other than those these TV stations reported? Is it because such events are so common that they are not newsworthy? Or doesn’t anyone care---in Texas, or anywhere else?

To me, that this story has not been fully reported has more significance than any story that was reported in 2005.

New Orleans Christmas: Heroes and Villains

"Amid ruins, volunteers are emerging as heroes" is the headline of the story by Anne Rochell Konigsmark and Rick Hampson in USA TODAY. It begins:

In his 67 years, Howard Peterson had never seen a Mennonite. But 11 days before Christmas he stood in the ruins of his kitchen, watching a crew of them gut and clean his flood-ravaged house.

Peterson and his wife couldn't afford to pay a contractor several thousand dollars to gut the one-story house, which sat in water for weeks after Hurricane Katrina inundated the working-class Gentilly district. So Peterson, who looks too frail to do spring cleaning, began trying to clear out the house himself. Then the Mennonites came by and offered a hand.

In one sense, it is a perfect holiday story, about the willingness to help and can-do spirit of the people, rather than the impersonal government.

Clearly, charities and NGOs are heroes in New Orleans and government is a villian. The story cites a Harris poll that shows Habitat for Humanity has an 85% positive rating for its work in the Gulf, while FEMA has a 72% negative rating.

But that's not the whole story.

The article highlights a number of NGO's (non-governmental organizations, including those we know of as charities) that are doing vital work that the government is not:

Partly because politicians continue to dither, bicker and accuse, non-governmental organizations - "NGOs" ranging from large, non-profit agencies to church youth groups - are emerging as heroes of the recovery effort.

--snip--
In New Orleans' devastated Lower 9th Ward, FEMA is so unpopular that its workers have been heckled and threatened. Some stopped wearing anything that identifies their agency.

The article quotes experts who enumerate reasons for the effectiveness of NGOs v. the government: NGOs are smaller and more nimble, they listen to what people need, government lost the people's trust early in the Katrina debacle and never got it back, the NGOs are more experienced in dealing with the kind of needs they see in New Orleans, and the kind of people in need,such as the poor, the elderly; various levels of government are bickering, and there is no effective leadership.

All of this is probably true, and the NGOs are to be praised. But the article and its analysis leave out other important points. Government agencies like FEMA have been effective in the past. Why aren't they now? Apart from the cronyism that infects the Bush government, and the corporate philosophy that places image above real leadership, there is the toxicity of "privatization."

A great deal of responsibility for that must be borne by the Bush administration, and earlier Republican administrations, that bled dry the funding for public services conducted by or organized by government---by directly cutting budgets of federal agencies and programs, and by indirectly bleeding state and local governments.

Why did they do this? The "philosophy" as stated was that government is inefficient, but private enterprise has the incentive of efficiency to keep costs down and get the job done, because their profits depend on it.

Certainly the bled dry government agencies have largely failed, especially FEMA and the monstrous money-eating disaster called Homeland Security, where the corporate model meant "branding" the agency was more important than actually addressing its mission and tasks, as a Washington Post series is revealing.

Government is failing because the people in charge expect it to fail. The resources, including people in the agencies with talent and experience, have been stripped. Leadership fails because the Bush administration isn't interested in using government to meet people's needs, because it might just show that government can be effective in doing so.

There is also the conspicuous failure of private contractors in New Orleans to do anything but pig out on fat no-bid government contracts, leaving the real work to non-profits.

It's the same lesson as Iraq, where much of what the military used to do is being ineptly and expensively done by private contractors, who operate above the law (sound familiar?) and at least some of whom are stealing American taxpayers blind.

Anti-government stories play well. But Katrina's lesson should be that only the federal government has the authority and resources, not necessarily to solve all the problems itself, but to lead, organize and coordinate an effective and timely response. When it fails to do so, the tragedy of New Orleans is the result.

Moreover, it has the responsibility to coordinate and effect preventive measures beyond the capacity of local resources. When it fails to do so, the tragedy of New Orleans is the result.
It isn't government that has failed New Orleans. It's the Bush government, and its policy of rewarding its corporate pals. It's privatization and the corporate model to do the public's business that has failed.

The American Christmas Wins the War: A Holiday Happy Ending

It began in earnest several weeks ago, launched by politically and doctrinally extreme Christian fundamentalists, with their designated media loudmouth Bill O’Reilly providing the show-biz fulmination, basically to promote a book by John Gibson, a Fox News producer, called The War on Christmas.

Its other political and economic dimensions were expressed by Agape Press, with their slogan “Reliable News From a Christian Source,” and a logo above which modestly floats a halo.

What most people heard about it was the sudden anger over store clerks saying “Happy holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.” But what it was supposed to be was far more audacious.

In his Agape essay, preacher Ralph Baker announces: “Attention Christians! Christmas is definitely ours.” He attacks retailers and others who have joined “in efforts to steal the true meaning of the Christmas season and replace it with a secularized, paganized, non-religious holiday.” The word “neutered” also appears in conjunction with “secularized.”

He continues: “There is an alliance building right now among major Christian ministries -- such as the American Family Association (AFA) -- to identify and target those companies who want our money but not our Christ. .. This is not just another economic boycott effort. It is a witness to the world that Christmas is important to the world because Christ is important to the world. This is exactly why the world has paused for 2,000 years and acknowledged the baby in a manger. That little baby has meant billions of dollars to retailers. It is time that they acknowledge Him.”

So the idea was economic intimidation, which is certainly the vulnerability that business presents, as anxious as they are about anything affecting retail in the very serious season where they make upwards of half their sales for the year.

There is another economic factor that bleeds over into politics. Baker begins his essay by pointing out that polls show George Bush won in 2004 because people were upset by homosexual marriage. This therefore is supposed to be another such issue. It has the special advantage of being a new one, which means political fundamentalist groups can raise lots of money by scaring people with it.

For even true believers get a little soft on the old issues that don’t raise fears so dependably, out of sheer boredom and weariness. The political preachers need something new and alarming to scare people with, so the gullible will send them brand new scads of hard-earned money reflexively, compulsively. It’s the political religious right’s version of impulse shopping---with the impulse being to get the buzz of righteousness, and quell the fear and distaste for the power of the evil ones.

Stuck somewhere in this mess is the perennial charge that the true meaning of Christmas is being lost. Usually the culprit is the profit motive, but Gibson and others added regulation and political correctness. They have lots of Swift-Boating examples, many of which have been debunked, though finding overbearing acts of misinterpretation by clueless bureaucracies is not that difficult.

As Christmas approaches, the noise is abating as this attempt has deflated. Yet these groups have found a real danger, and a real war on the American Christmas---in the mirror. They have met the enemy, and it is them.

The most alarming core of fanaticism is the same as at the core of the attempt to change the science curriculum in the Dover PA schools. The recent ruling by Judge Jones reproduces statements of the fanatical fundamentalists on the school board, as summarized by georgia10 at Daily Kos (with page numbers from the Judge's decision):

1. The board members wanted a 50-50 ratio between the teaching of creationism and evolution in biology classes (p. 95)

2. The President also wanted to inject religion into social studies classes, and supplied the school with a book about the myth of the separation of church and state. (p. 96)

3. Another board member said "This country wasn't founded on Muslim beliefs or evolution. This country was founded on Christianity and our students should be taught as such." (p. 102)

4. At a meeting, a board member's wife gave a speech, saying that "evolution teaches nothing but lies," quoted from Genesis, asked "how can we allow anything else to be taught in our schools," recited gospel verses telling people to become born again Christians, and stated that evolution violated the teachings of the Bible. (p. 103)

5. Other statements by board members included "Nowhere in the Constitution does it call for a separation of church and state," and "liberals in black robes" are "taking away the rights of Christians, " and "2,000 years ago someone died on a cross. Can't someone take a stand for him?"

Notice how similar even the language is to the Agape essay.

The fanatical anger over Christmas being stolen from Christians is in a factual sense nutty as a holiday fruitcake. First of all, nobody is trying to take away a single Christian religious celebration, anywhere in America. Nobody is going into anybody’s churches and saying they can’t celebrate the birth of Christ.

Plus the idea of the “Christmas holiday season” being stolen from Christianity is historically ludicrous. Of all the elements of the traditional American Christmas, about 95% of them have nothing whatever to do with Christianity. Many predate Christianity by centuries, going back to indigenous celebrations of the winter solstice, the celebrations of fire and light in the winter darkness, the post-harvest feast, the mysteries of death (winter, darkness) and resurrection (spring, light) that is as least as old as the very ancient recognition of the bear as a sacred animal that "died" in the winter and was "reborn" in the spring.

Many indigenous cultures see the winter as a time of the earth’s pregnancy, and so birth and children are part of it. Though gift-giving probably has its roots in Greek festivals at the New Year, the Roman Saturnalia, the Feast of Fools and Misrule, the Christian emphasis on the Christ child probably had something to do with gifts to children becoming the focus. The whole “naughty and nice” aspect also predates Christianity, as does the Yuletide, the so-called Christmas tree, holly, etc.

Other “traditions,” developed independent of Christianity and well after it began. The modern “Santa Claus” is mostly a combination of various mythic and folk figures (both gift-giving and punishing ones), given his contemporary form by Coca Cola and other businesses.

So nearly all “Christmas” traditions are “heathen”, Pagan and secular in origin. The early Church readily admitted that it used the Roman mid-winter festivals to celebrate a birth that more likely took place in the spring or summer.

But what’s truly serious about this is the attempt to assert exclusive power over the American Christmas, as it has evolved (there’s that word again!) along with the country.

Christmas became powerful in America, partly because it was so commercialized, and like a lot of popular culture, it became a nexus for the exchange of cultural traditions. I grew up in a working class area of mostly Catholics from Italy, eastern Europe and Ireland, but with a strong presence in our bigger towns and cities of German and Scottish Protestants and European Jews. In my family, we had specifically Italian traditions and Christmas foods from my mother’s side, and eastern European from my father’s.

But there was tolerance and more—there was sharing. That was the spirit of—the meaning of—Christmas, as America practiced it. The songs we sang give it away---they came from many countries, many times, both religious and secular.

Out of this amalgamation came regional traditions. In western Pennsylvania to this day, for instance, homes are more intensely decorated with more elaborate lights and displays than where I live now in rural far northern California.

These of course were mostly Christians in a mostly (and very openly) Christian area. That kind of Christmas influenced many Jewish celebrations of Hanukkah, with more emphasis on gift-giving than before.

Now we have Kwanzaa, a new celebration for the African American community, with roots in Africa but also in this “spirit of Christmas” at its best.

And of course, there are holidays and holy days for virtually all religions that occur in mid-winter, rooted in one of the oldest human celebrations and religious occasions, the Solstice.

So the American Christmas has expanded to include all of these, in sharing and community. The earth-based religions are particularly appropriate because there are no more powerful earth-based religions than those of the original Americans, the Native peoples.

These are appropriate in another way. Most Native people will tell you that they don’t always get along. But there is one element that I’ve found essentially universal among Native traditionals—and that’s respect for religion, anyone’s religion (as long as it isnt harmful or imposed.)

The American Christmas follows the example of Native peoples who accepted Christianity along with their own religions. They may have left some parts out that they learned from white Christians (like intolerance and hypocrisy) but they included what spoke to them. They accept reverence and joy, and ways of understanding their relationship to life and the earth.

Without a direct or conscious intent perhaps, this attitude informs religious freedom in the Constitution, and has since become the most characteristic feature of the American Christmas.

It’s also true that this is no longer the America of the first half of the twentieth century. There are many more cultures represented from many more parts of the world---from all of vast Asia, from Latin America and more.

And there are Muslims in America now, and thanks to a certain ignorance and intolerance fed by reaction and over-reaction to a terrorist attack, there is fear and a defensiveness, a feeling that to fight so-called Islamic fundamentalism, we need to circle the wagons of Christian fundamentalism. Yet Christ is a respected figure in Muslim belief, and some Muslims in America celebrate Christmas.

Perhaps it was more comfortable for Christians to bring their religious beliefs into places where in a more diverse society it’s simply not appropriate. And it never was all that Constitutional. But diversity gives us the compensation of much more to be shared.

“Happy Holidays” is just an inclusive alternative, a greeting that is simply being polite, though usually unnecessarily so, since the American Christmas includes everyone.

So the real war is the attempted war on the American Christmas by those who want to have it all to themselves, or to lord it over others, or simply to exploit believers for their own power and wealth. Using political and economic power to try to reestablish a hegemony from the past is just plain un-American.

All religions are entitled to their holy days and their sacred places. But it seems to me, admittedly only partially qualified to observe that hoarding the Christmas holidays, the public Christmas, for Christians only, is fundamentally un-Christian, as well as un-American.

Let’s name the danger: the legitimizing of intolerance, the destruction of the American Christmas: part celebration of Christ’s birth, part celebration of the silent growing within the earth of the new life of spring, part Hannukah, part Kwanzza, leading up to the various New Year’s—European, Russian Orthodox, Chinese, Hindu, etc.

Most of these, you notice, are religious celebrations. But even if Mr. Scrooge’s newly discovered spirit of Christmas is secular, or even if celebration of family and friends, memory and hope at year’s end is defined as agnostic, it’s all the American Christmas, the best intent of the holiday season. (The worst is of course that it can never fulfill the inflated expectations, and all the projections, tensions, loneliness and pain come rushing out.)

Some of us will stick with one tradition and the expressions of one faith. But some of us will not only mix “secular” celebrations with religious, but we will attend high Mass and Hanukkah, sing a Native ceremonial song or a Buddhist chant at solstice. I don’t know if whites are invited to Kwanzaa events, but I was invited to a black fundamentalist church one Christmas, and had a great time.

In fact this is the one time of the year that America can feel like the America we’d like it to be: not just tolerant but open, compassionate, interested in learning about each other, and in sharing for our mutual joy, and our strength as a nation.

Some Christians want to assert that Christmas is only about Christ, and is only for Christians. In their churches it can be true. But it simply isn’t the case otherwise. In America the season called Christmas belongs to everyone.

This is the way the Republic ends?

Let's review some of the events of this extraordinary week, in which serious threats to American democracy were revealed. They bear a striking resemblance to the growing evidence of the climate crisis. Both conclusions come from data accruing over time, suddenly exploding in terms of quantity and threat, so quickly that it is difficult keeping up with each revelation.

What's going on politically now can be summarized in this way: if this is not an ongoing campaign to establish a dictatorship, we are headed there anyway.There were two sets of revelations. The first pertains to controlling dissent through intimidation, harrassment, disinformation and spying, though the major issue of civil liberties and the important issue of wasted resources applied to the wrong problem are also involved.

Mid-week it was revealed that the Pentagon has been spying on the activities of various antiwar groups, including Quakers, and designating their lawful and constitutionally protected activities---especially protests against deceptive military recruiting-- as terrorist threats.Late in the week there were reports of repeated instances of spying on hundreds and probably thousands of individuals within the U.S. authorized by the White House---but not by any law.

These revelations created a furor in Congress, and added to other civil liberties concerns, and concerns about government gone wild and going after the wrong targets while neglecting quite obviously necessary matters to protect the public (like ensuring that first responders can communicate), led to the U.S. Senate refusing to renew and extend the Patriot Act. The Act extends provisions that allow for unwarranted intrusions, and mask them in secrecy.

The political firestorm resulting from these revelations forced the White House to gamble on becoming highly aggressive. Yes, said the President in a radio address Saturday, I authorized the spying, to protect the American people, and if you are against it, or against the Patriot Act, then you are making it easy for terrorists to strike again.It's a ploy that worked before. However, when put in context of related news this week and earlier, it may be the most important moment so far in Bushcorps attempt to overrride democracy and accelerate its own reign of terror against political dissent and opposition. If American public opinion doesn't continue to bang away at Bush's credibility, this will be a Republic we can't keep, after barely a wimper.

These were only the most publicized of such revelations. Proposals to reorganize Homeland Security to perform domestic spying and to use Transportation Department operatives to spy on Americans in the transit system were exposed by E Pluribus Media.

In addition to the abuses to peace groups revealed this week, there was the story of a college student who was visited by federal agents because he requested Mao's Little Red Book through an interlibrary loan system for a political science paper.

Such acts of government terrorism are familiar to anyone who was part of various movements in the 1960s---for peace, Civil Rights or Native American rights, for example--as well as to anyone familiar with the Red-Baiting 50s. Computers and the Internet add a new patina, as well as new ease for tracking and intrusion.

Whether by evil intent or simply misguided priorities, once the bureaucracies involved get these marching orders, abuses are automatic and fully predictable. Spying is done, reports are generated because the more threats, the more funding, and the more power.

All of this, plus earlier proposals for giving the military more power domestically, is only possible if Americans are both cowardly and stupid enough to fall for the fear mongering again.

There is however a new and even more insidious element to this undermining of democracy, if not blatant attempt to establish a one-party dictatorship. This is the activity that could shake this nation to its foundations: the growing evidence that the sanctity of voting has been violated, that voting results have been falsified, and that the result has been the election of George Bush as president, in 2000 if not also in 2004. And the continuing operations and plans to make this secret theft of democracy permanent.

The GAO report last month was sobering---so sobering, that the mainstream media is in major denial. The collection of evidence of vote-tampering, etc. continues, last week centering on the issue of electronic voting machines, specifically those of Diebold.After years of accusations, fragmentary and anecdotal evidence, including the views of insiders, a test was conducted last week in Florida which conclusively proved that a hacker could manipulate Diebold machines from a remote location to change the votes, and it would be undetected.

Not only the results of the test but its pattern convinced a Florida election official to conclude that votes in his county were changed in the 2000 election, enough to change the outcome in the state and then in the nation. Diebold protested the test itself, but not the facts of the test's outcome.In 2004 Diebold's president guaranteed that Bush would win the election.

Last week it was widely publicized that Diebold is being sued by some of its own stockholders for withholding information from them, including the vulnerabilties of its voting machines. Not as widely reported, while Diebold was competing in several states to install their machines for future elections, their officials continued making contributions to Republican politicians, even after these contributions were supposedly halted.

That Republicans continue to plan staying in office by manipulating elections was made clear by the Bush nomination to the Federal Elections Commission of a man notorious for concocting and carrying out voter suppression schemes, including the haphazard listing of Florida felons in 2000 that robbed thousands of legitimate voters of their voting rights.

These machines are still scheduled to be used in the 2006 elections in a number of states, some of which succumbed to Diebold and Republican pressure last week to approve them. Except for Democrats on the Congressional Black Caucus, and Senator Kerry's quiet observation that he lost every single precinct in New Mexico that used touch-screen voting machines, regardless of whether it was a Republican or Democratic area, the political consequences of a loss of public confidence in the vote has perhaps made Democrats very hesitant to strongly raise this issue.
They have reason to be afraid, for a crisis of confidence could be exploited by Bushcorps, to install the dictatorship it seems to be preparing on all fronts.

Pope Ahnold?

I don't pretend to know for certain what the exact criteria should be for a governor contemplating clemency to save the life of a man facing the death penalty, but in refusing to grant this reprieve to Stanley Tookie Williams, Governor Schwarzenegger used language I would have thought more appropriate for the man's confessor.

The sticking point was Williams' insistence that he was not guilty of the murders he had been convicted of committing. "Without an apology and atonement for these senseless and brutal killings, " Ahnold wrote, " there can be no redemption. In this case the one thing that would be the clearest indication of complete remorse and full redemption is the one thing Williams will not do."

Atonement? It could be argued that Williams did that with his life in prison. He obviously had remorse for the life he'd led. But he kept insisting he was innocent, infuriating the police and prosecutors. But what baits my hook is all the repeated use of the word redemption.

I thought the governor was being asked to commute a death sentence to life in prison. What does that have to do with redemption? Don't Christians believe that's God's role? Even the Catholics delegate the forgiveness of sin to ordained priests, not politicians. And even they aren't normally presumptuous enough to state who does and doesn't get redeemed.

Ahnold is taking his Terminator role a little too seriously. Hey, Caesar. Stick to the state. Or are you looking for higher office where they don't require American citizenship?

The intense lobbying to kill convicted murderers, whatever the evidence, on the part of police, FBI (when they're involved) and prosecutors, can perhaps be better understood by the headline of a story that appeared the same day as Ahnold's statement in the San Francisco Chronicle: No arrests made in 80% of homicides. That's just San Francisco, but the figures are probably nearly as shocking elsewhere. When they actually arrest someone and successfully make a case, they sure need it to stick. And somebody has to die.

It's Still A Drag

The Lennon formula for song writing: say what you want to say and give it a good beat.

I've resisted joining the chorus reevaluating Lennon today. I guess 25 years since the day he died is a reasonable day to do that, but I don't want to remember him for his sudden and sickening murder.

Still, it's been with me all day.

Paul McCartney's first quoted reaction, widely criticized at the time, was "It's a drag." Now I know all the inarticulate grief locked in those words. It's still a drag.

I was in New York City the last day of John Lennon's life. We breathed the same cold air. I was flying west when he was shot. I learned about it in Los Angeles. That made it even more surreal---in that sudden soft air and sunshine, after the dirty wind and gray chill of New York.

The radio played his songs, Beatles songs, constantly the next day when I was driving around in a rental car, and there was a period of silence that Yoko Ono asked for as a memorial, which I spent on Santa Monica Beach. When it was over and I was walking back to the car, I saw his name written in the sand. Imagine. Lennon Lives.

Another reason this memory is so painful is that the friend I spent the most time with that evening and the next day, sharing all those half-spoken feelings of awe and dread and the tentativeness of being alive, is also dead now. She also died young and suddenly, not many years later. And more beauty was lost from the world.

The Beatles are certainly still part of my life, even of a lot of days. I've felt closest to George the past few years, and I admire how Paul and even Ringo have conducted their lives as they age beyond what we could even imagine then. But John was the one I admired the most then, who opened the most doors to perception.

Oddly, the John song I like doing the most these days is a minor one, "Crippled Inside." But it's so John.

"You can shine your shoes and wear a suit
You can comb your hair and look quite cute
You can hide your face behind a smile
One thing you can't hide/ is when you're crippled inside."

These days the song I feel closest to is one of Paul's, which I didn't take note of much when it came out about two years after John's death, called "Tug of War." It's only been in the last year or two that I've come to feel these lines:

"In another world, in another world
We could stand on top of the mountain with our flag unfurled;
In a time to come, we will be dancing to the beat
played on a different drum..."

And these:

"In years to come, they may discover
what the air we breathe and the life we lead
are all about.

But it won't be soon enough,
soon enough for me.

No, it won't be soon enough,
soon enough for me. "

Without Robert Kennedy: We Are Lonelier in America

A version of this essay was frontpaged today on Daily Kos.

This would have been Robert F. Kennedy's 80th birthday. It comes at a moment of intense political polarization, in a nation roiled by an unpopular war characterized by official deceit. Many of Robert Kennedy's words on Vietnam could be dropped into the newspaper today and they would be just as relevant.

If he were a politican today, there would be many in the blososphere ripping into him daily, this one, charging him with opportunism, cynical and self-centered politics, and trading on his name and wealthy family.

Kennedy was himself a polarizing figure, although his words were of reconcilation. That in part was what made him polarizing. His positions on various issues did not satisfy the templates of the left or right. Yet he was the only white politician who had the passionate support and love of many blacks. He was the only political leader who spent time on Indian reservations and tiny Inuit villages as well as southern rural and white West Virgina mountain shanty towns.

He inspired passions for and passions against. People wanted to touch him, and he needed to touch others--he seemed to learn through touch. He learned through children, extending the feelings of a father to compassion for all children.

He grew up in privilege, and his early meetings with black leaders were not warm. Yet by 1968, when Martin Luther King was shot and killed, his widow asked Robert Kennedy to arrange to have his body moved from Memphis to Atlanta. His impromptu speech, passing on the news of King's assassination in a black neighborhood where he happened to be, is one of his most famous.

If we took Robert Kennedy out of time, and dropped him into our own, he would find a different country in many ways. There are about twice as many people in the United States. The racial and ethnic composition has changed. In 1968, one parent usually did the earning for the family, the man in most white families, and increasingly the woman in single parent poor black families. Two paycheck families, let alone two parents with five or six jobs between them, were rare.

But the social needs and injustices are largely the same. Kennedy spoke in favor of national health care coverage in 1968, a cause his brother Ted would champion and keep on the agenda for many years.

Politically, the parties were stronger. Democrats had deep organizations in the cities, and industrial unions were strong. But the Democratic party was also coming apart. JFK knew that by leading on civil rights, the Democrats would lose their hold on the solid South. 1968 would see Richard Nixon exploit this. Vietnam was itself tearing younger people like me away from the party. Eugene McCarthy ran within the party, but he was not really of it. Robert Kennedy was, and his candidacy may have kept many young people in the party.

I happened to catch some of the C-Span coverage of a commemoration of his birthday, and saw John Lewis say that this would be a very different country today if he had been President, and I've known in my heart for a long time that this is true. But the emotion I felt I later understood as this: loneliness. Robert Kennedy's death made this a very lonely country for me.

Robert Kennedy took on that last political fight, knowing the odds were against him, knowing that violence was in the air. He was a warrior for peace. It is important to remember even as we stand up against the cynical and cowardly violence of the rabid right, that Robert Kennedy's last crusade was this: as he said to a largely black audience in that unwritten speech on the night of Martin Luther King's assassination, "Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world."

I could quote his Vietnam speeches, emphasizing the horror for the victims of war. But Robert Kennedy's life, and a great deal of the promise of America, was ended by an act of violence in June 1968. So I quoted instead Kennedy's first major speech was just after King's death, and after the violent riots that torched and destroyed significant parts of many cities. In some cities, like Washington, it would be more than a decade before those areas recovered.

"For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly, destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, this poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is the slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter.

This is the breaking of a man's spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among other men.

And this too afflicts us all. I have not come here to propose a set of specific remedies nor is there a single set. For a broad and adequate outline we know what must be done. When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family , then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies---to be met not with cooperation but with conquest, to be subjugated and mastered.

We learn, at the last, to look on our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community, men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear--only a common desire to retreat from each other--only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force. For all this there are no final answers. Yet we know what we must do. It is to achieve true justice among our fellow citizens. The question is not what program to enact.

The question is whether we can find in our midst and in our own hearts that leadership of human purpose that will recognize the terrible truths of our existence.We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of all. We must admit in ourselves that our own children's future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can niether be enobled or enriched by hatred or revenge. Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land."

Robert F. Kennedy
in Ohio April 4, 1968

Respect

Representative John Murtha is from my neck of the woods. His district is close to where I grew up. He was the first Vietnam veteran to be elected to Congress. He saw combat, and he has the medals, including two purple hearts. He is the highest ranking Democrat on the House appropriations defense subcommittee. He is considered a hawk. He voted for the Iraq war.

Thursday he said it's time to bring U.S. soldiers home.

This is the Washington equivalent of an earthquake. As the AP report put it "The comments by the Pennsylvania lawmaker, who has spent three decades in the House, hold particular weight because he is close to many military commanders and has enormous credibility with his colleagues on defense issues."

This was the first huge blow of the day suffered by the Bush administration; the other, which came late Thursday night, is from a former CIA Director in the first Bush administration, and a Navy Admiral, who accuses the Bush administration of a policy of torture, and of lying about it.

It is to be expected that such devastating statements would make Bushcorps and their apologists defensive. But that spineless bunch of hate-filled moral bankrupts knows only how to attack the messenger. While the president repeatedly accuses Democrats of being irresponsible, repeating it like the Rovian mantra it likely is, his White House spokesperson did his best to villify and marginalize John Murtha for daring to speak his mind. Some other Republicans and the Rabid Right blogs were even more defamatory.

I haven't agreed with many positions taken by Rep. John Murtha on military and foreign policy matters. But I never disrespected him.

I saw some of his press conference. I saw the emotion with which he spoke about the wounded soldiers he's visited. And I say to those who vilify him now, have you visited with the soldiers you so easily send into hell, every week? Do you talk with men who have lost both legs and an arm, or to the family seated around the bed of a young son in a coma? How dare you disrespect a man who has.

I fully expect to disagree with John Murtha again, to oppose some bill that he supports, to support some candidate he opposes. But I hope I never degrade myself or degrade the political process by the kind of cowardly vilification that characterizes the supposed guardians of our morals, the holier than thou zealots that blithely send others to bleed and burn and die so they can enrich themselves, in this orgy of cynical corruption known as the Bush administration and the repulsive right.

Fox in the Henhouse, Wolf at the Door

Sure, we're all sick to death reciting the tragic actions, bold and destructive deceptions and mind-boggling mistakes of Bush Corps, and sick to death of hearing them. But we aren't being inundated only by Bush-bashing as politics or as Internet sport. There is real damage being done. One by one, our public institutions are being dismantled, corrupted and destroyed.

Our ability to respond to the challenges of the future, which could become crucial at any moment, are being greviously wounded if not utterly demolished.

Think Katrina. Think FEMA. And if anyone believes that private corporations are up to the challenge, they've earned an all expenses paid vacation in Iraq, where the privatization of war and intelligence gathering has resulted in one disaster after another, even given that it was a fool's errand to begin with.

A lethal combination of ideological dogmatism, cronyism and corruption has led to psychotic priorities and actions. The evidence is hitting hard every single day.The worst is that it affects institutions and offices that even ideological, politically and economically corrupt and crony-prone leaders of the past have been sane enough to leave alone. Like public health. Transportation. The Army.

Iraq is the playground for psychotic priorities based on ideological dogmatism and a truly frightening ignoring of facts that contradict those priorities and assumptions when they conflict with the ideology. The tragic harm has been done to the people of Iraq, to American soldiers (and those of other countries) and families, to American prestige, and by creating new reasons for terrorism and a huge training ground for terrorists---all of this damages our present and our future.

We also saw what the Iraq war has done to our National Guard and its ability to do its historic job that Americans depend on the Guard to do, when its personnel and equipment were in Iraq instead of Louisiana and Arkansas in the aftermath of Katrina. Now there are fears for what it is doing to the armed forces.Bob Herbert wrote this in the NY Times: The Army, for example, has been stretched so taut since the Sept. 11 attacks, especially by the fiasco in Iraq, that it's become like a rubber band that may snap at any moment. ..Last December, the top general in the Army Reserve warned that his organization was "rapidly degenerating into a 'broken' force" because of the Pentagon's "dysfunctional" policies and demands placed on the Reserve by the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. As one of my colleagues at The Times, David Unger of the editorial board, wrote, "The Army's commitments have dangerously and rapidly expanded, while recruitment has plunged."

What happens when psychotic priorities are wedded to this administration's penchant for cronyism? Again we saw that in Katrina, and now we're seeing it in the potentially greater challenge of avian flu.

As Jeremy Scahill reports in The Nation and on Democracy Now!, Bushcorps has "systematically de-funded" public health programs, specifically those that would prepare the nation for an avian flu threat, and provided massive funding for research into technologies to "fight a possible anthrax or smallpox attack, which almost no one in the public health or national security community was saying was an imminent threat, except people close to Dick Cheney." Specifically, Scooter Libby.

According to Dr. Irwin Redlener, Director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, also interviewed on the same DN program by Amy Goodman, we are completely unprepared for any sort of health emergency. Why not?

"... the influence of politics and ideology and strategies to promote a particular point of view, undermining something that should have been above and beyond any kind of political consideration...The problem there, of course, is that the whole health care system is so fragile and so eroded over this last couple of decades that we don't even have that capacity in place right now to make anybody feel very confident that we can handle the number of people who might be affected by a pandemic flu."

One reason for this now is that these efforts are being run by a Bushcorp crony, Stewart Simonson, who has no credentials other than being an ideological Republican. 'I mean, every single administration in American political history has put cronies and pals and donors into political positions," Dr. Redlener said. " But normally, typically, those people get – you know, they become the ambassador to Liechtenstein or the deputy undersecretary of commerce, where, in effect, it really doesn't matter who's in those positions. What's striking about this administration, since they got into power, is the placement of people into critical positions, where the national security or the public health is at stake."

Here as in all actions by Bushcorps the cronyism and neocon foreign policy is all in the service of the ideology that began reshaping America in the Reagan administration: the destruction of public institutions, to be replaced by "private" corporations, with the purpose of profit, not public service or the public good.

This is clear in Bush's new flu initiatives, and Republican backed legislation called Bioshield 2. It would, said Scahill, "remove all corporate accountability and liability for pharmaceutical companies that manufacturer vaccinations -- vaccines that hurt people or kill people, and secondly it creates a federal agency that would be the only agency exempt from the Freedom of Information Act."

"This whole thing has gotten so bizarre and Byzantine, "added Dr. Redlener," and permeated with this sort of electrifying high intensity politics and economics that the real goal of all of this, which is to literally make us safer in the event of a pandemic or any kind of major disaster, that gets lost in the shuffle. You can't even sort it out now. So even issues like the Bioshield bills, which are terrible bills, basically, for a variety of reasons..."

One of which is that this proposal does nothing to ensure there are mechanisms to produce vaccines and anti-viral medications when they are needed. In other words, the entire public purpose.

Bushcorps relentless push for privatization made news this week as well when the administration fired the president of Amtrak because he wasn't going along with their plans to break up and privatize pieces of the national railroad transportation system.

According to the New York Times, the man they fired, David Gunn, " is known as a rail-turnaround artist. He was brought in to fix the New York City subway system in the 1980's, and provided leadership in the construction of the subway system in Washington. "Just two months ago he was praised by the chairman of the same governing board that fired him: "Mr. Gunn has done, as far as I am concerned, a splendid job." He said Mr. Gunn had "righted a ship that was listing and about to spill over."

But Gunn wouldn't agree to their plans. "They want at least one transportation mode that is totally free market," Mr. Gunn said. But highways, airports and ports are all federally subsidized, he said, decrying "all this angst over an operating deficit of 500 million bucks for the whole country, and the bulk of money going into capital or infrastructure."

What's this relentless privatization about? "...the largest transfer of public wealth to private pockets in the history of this country," says Si Kahn, co-author of The Fox in the Henhouse: How Privatization Threatens Democracy, interviewed this week on Democracy Now!

He continued:"We're seeing this in Iraq, where the goal of this administration is to see how much of the money that should be going to all sorts of other issues and other causes can be put into private pockets. Think Halliburton. Think Lockheed Martin. This is what is going on, and it is the undermining of public space, of the public good, of public welfare, is a deliberate strategy to undermine the ground that belongs to all of us: the common wealth, the commons, those things that create public good, that create a humane society."

Added his co-author, Elizabeth Minnich: "The most important thing to emphasize over and over again is precisely that shift from the public, that which belongs to us, services, goods, values that we have held dear, that we have government established to protect and to provide for us, being opened up to for-profit exploitation, in which case two things key happen. One is, goods that are supposed to be for the people, that we set aside, that we established as rights for the people, which is democratic to the core, being taken over by for-profit corporations for private pockets, dispersed away from the people most directly affected. This is anti-democratic in the extreme. "

But it's been consistently sold as simply a more efficient way to provide services the public wants and needs, using the invisible hand of competition, the magic of the marketplace, instead of bureaucratic waste and abuse.

And it's all a lie. "The whole notion that gets repeated time and again is that the privatizing corporations can do a better job," Minnich said. "People ask us this every time: 'But aren't they more efficient?' No, they do not do a better job. "

"And efficiency," Kahn added, "in corporate terms, means efficiency in generating a profit. It means efficiency in returning the maximum amount of money to the corporate directors and executives and to the majority shareholders."

And the result is, as everyone who say The West Wing debate knows, that wasteful government delivers health care through Medicare with administration costs of under 2% of revenue, while private health care insurance corporations typically devote a third or more to administration, not to mention lobbying and advertising.

We have done worse than letting the fox guard the henhouse, these author say, we've invited them inside. Is there any wonder that our health care system is shambles, our privatized prisons and schools are a scandal, our privatized war is beset with expensive failure and lack of accountability for hired killers and torturers? Or that public institutions bled dry by ideologues of privatization can't meet their challenges?

Critics may claim that alarmists have been crying wolf over failures caused by ideologues, corporate greed and privatization, but we made it through the 80s and we're still here.They should be reminded that even in the cautionary tale about the boy who cried wolf prematurely, the story ends when his cries are ignored, but unfortunately for everyone, the wolf finally comes.

You Say You Want An Evolution

On the same day that the Kansas state school board passed a requirement that Intelligent Design must be considered as an alternative to Darwinian evolution in science classes, voters in Dover, Pennsylvania unseated the local school board members who mandated mention of Intelligent Design in its ninth grade science classes. Score one for each side?

Maybe. Except that the fight goes on in Kansas, while in Dover it’s over. There’s a good reason why.

I happen to know a teacher at the Dover high school, the wife of a close friend. They both live in a nearby town, also in the rural middle of Pennsylvania (my home state.) Like rural Kansas, Dover is very conservative. There were no polls to depend on for this school board election, so my friends were worried. They saw lots of campaign signs for the pro-ID candidates, and heard that several local churches were supporting them. The area had just been through a widely publicized trial on the issue that took place almost precisely 80 years after the famous Scopes trial on the teaching of evolution in Dayton, Tennessee.

Coincidentally, as the Dover trial was underway, L.A. Theatre Works was beginning its extensive national tour of “The Great Tennessee Monkey Trial,” a staged version of the radio play adapted from the Tennessee court transcripts by Peter Goodchild. I caught the first performance here in Arcata, which starred Edward Asner as William Jennings Bryan and John de Lancie as Clarence Darrow. (It will eventually make its way to York, PA, down the road from Dover.) This play was chosen to tour because the audio version was the Theatre Works production most requested by public school teachers.

Goodchild’s text and historical background makes clear that there was a great deal more at issue in the Tennessee trial than Darwin versus the Biblical creation story. In 1925, Darwinism was seen as justifying an amoral and violent struggle for dominance that demeaned human and Christian values of compassion and community. More specifically, it was seen as a prime influence on Germany (through Nietzsche) and its belief in conquest and might makes right that resulted in the carnage and societal upheaval of the Great War. It was an attack on the human spirit by godless, animalistic and mechanistic science.

These ideas had evolved from those held by Darwin’s opponents in his own time, when self-proclaimed Darwinists themselves proposed several dubious inferences with social and political implications. As George Bernard Shaw said, “Darwin had the luck to please anybody with an ax to grind.” Depending on whose ax it was, Darwinian evolution proved that human progress is inevitable, that human failure is inevitable, that the rich have a duty to be selfish because they naturally deserve to inherit the earth, and all that distinguishes humans from other animals is ethical and unselfish behavior.

We have as rich a stew of projections, derivations and inspirations in our time, though we tend to simplify the storyline to an either/or. It’s an easier story to fit into soundbites and fundraising appeals. It’s also irresponsible. Any subject as complex as Darwinian evolution, as science or as insight into the human condition or the nature of life, that winds up being the center of conflict between two opposing and dogmatic sides, is being distorted and misused, eventually by all sides.

Which brings us back to Dover. Sometimes the complicated is oversimplified, and other times the cacophony quiets to a few simple considerations. According to what I’ve read and what my friends tell me, a lot of people there didn’t like being subjected to all the attention, particularly by school board members who had never been elected, but were appointed to fill vacancies. They especially didn’t like what the controversy was doing within the high school. Most teachers were furious with the rule and civil disobedience was a real possibility.

The successful candidates, who ran as a group, talked about the church/state, science/religion issues, but also about returning attention to the school and above all, the students. And this may be where the ID battle was lost: parental concerns for the education of their children trumped everything else. After all the posturing and theorizing, all the grand principles at issue, it likely came down to parents who want their children to get the best education they can, which means from good teachers in a well-ordered school. Regardless of what they believe about the origin of species, they likely know that the same science everyone in the world studies is something their children will need to know in the twenty-first century.

Nobody knew for sure that this is how it would turn out in Dover. But it did turn out that way, and in most places, it probably will.

Repudiation Day

It's been something like nine years since a Democrat could go to bed happy on election night. We like the feeling.

Tuesday was an "off-year" election day across the U.S., with mostly state and local offices involved. But there was a pretty clear pattern of repudiation for Republicans, and specifically of G.W. Bush.

Beginning at the end, it's about 1:30a. on the West Coast, and about 90% of California's precincts have reported their votes on the Special Election initatives sponsored by Governor Schwarzenegger. They all are on their way to resounding defeat. None even has 48% of the vote, and they are all trending even lower.

As an additional indication of voter mood, it's not just the Terminator's propositions---they are all being defeated: a clear sign of disgust with a special election that cost this strapped state something like $60 million, and may have resulted in some $300 million spent by everyone involved.

On the East Coast, two highly contested races for governor were both won by Democrats:New Jersey Sen. John Corzine and Virginia Lt. Gov. Tim Kaine. The defeat for Republicans in Virginia was particularly bitter, since the state voted Bush in 2004, and Bush campaigned with the Republican candidate for two days recently.

Another election repudiating Bush: In St. Paul, Minnesota, the Democratic Mayor Randy Kelly had endorsed G.W. Bush for president last year. This year his own party ran another candidate against him, former City Council member Chris Coleman.

On Tuesday, Coleman defeated the incumbent Kelly by more than a 2 to 1 margin. It was the first time in more than 30 years that an incumbent mayor lost reelection in St. Paul, and polls indicated the overwhelming reason was his support for Bush.

There was even a school board election of special significance. The Dover, PA school board made international news by voting to require that Intelligent Design be mentioned in connection with Darwinian evolution in high school biology classes, which led to a court case that concluded last week. The judge hasn't ruled yet, but the people of Dover have. Every contested seat on the school board was won by an opponent of the Intelligent Design decision.

There were some bright spots for Republicans---especially the New York mayoral race, where an unbelievable amount of money was spent to return Mayor Bloomberg to office. And election reform measures failed in Ohio, of all the places that need them.

But there was one more repudiation--a CBS poll which asked registered voters which of the 2004 presidential candidates they would vote for today. Although there were slightly more 04 Bush voters than Kerry voters in the survey, Kerry would win by a margin of 5%.

The West Wing: The Fake Debate

The President of Projection is what I used to call Bill Clinton, when I heard people getting mad at him for not pushing more of the liberal agenda, and this was at the beginning of his first term when he was trying, and getting smacked down in Washington for the effort.

In fact, the presidency is a job that an actual person has to perform, and the executive branch is a collection of lots of people who all have the same 24 hour day as the rest of us.But it can't be ignored that the presidency is symbolically much more than that. People will always project their hopes and dreams, their standards and expectations, however unrealistic, on the single figure who all Americans are eligible to vote for.

We need that symbol of our sense of ourselves.So to many people, including me, the real President for the last six years has been Jeb Bartlett, played by Martin Sheen on The West Wing. If for no other reason that he has better writers. He was able, through word and deed, to articulate what many of us would hope our President would be.

Now The West Wing is changing administrations. This season so far has been largely devoted to the campaign between Democrat Rep. Matt Santos (played by Jimmy Smits) and Republican Senator Arnold Vinick (Alan Alda.) To add the breathing room of fantasy to its "ripped from the headlines" topicality, it's Santos who is from Texas (a Latino liberal) and Vinick who is from California (conservative but not far right.)Sunday night was the Sweeps gimmick: a show almost entirely given over to a scripted candidate debate, done live twice (for eastern and western time zones) and shot much like a network presidential debate (although the director had an uncanny habit of knowing exactly which one was going to say something important, and having the camera on him as he said it.)

Monday the reviews started coming in. Tom Shales of the Washington Post and Doug Elfman of the Chicago Sun Times were underwhelmed. The Associated Press reported that the faux debate was seen by an estimated 9.6 million viewers, up from the 8.2 million that followed the show to its early Sunday night slot from its accustomed 9p Wednesday this season.

Several stories criticized the use of the NBC News logo, which was kept on the screen while TV newsman Forrest Sawyer acted the part of a TV newsman running the debate---and could get a supporting actor nomination, while demonstrating just how much the oncamera news role is acting rather than reporting.

As a piece of theatre, script author Lawrence O'Donnell (a Clinton White House vet who does political consulting when he's not producing TV) immediately opened the possibilities for real drama by having Senator Vinick suggest that the stifling rules of non-engagement be loosened and the candidates really debate. When Santos agreed, the participants were free to ramble, ask each other sharp questions, interupt and argue.

O'Donnell mixed in some reminicent moments---Santos explaining his "I voted for it before I voted against it" statement, Vinick pulling a fountain pen from his pocket to emphasize his intent to veto something, just as Bill Clinton during a State of the Union message, when he thought opponent might spoil his supposedly popular health care plan by making it less than universal. They did that, all right.

There were the West Wing moments we've come to know and love when we finally hear someone articulately and cogently express a position the way we've been waiting for, as when Santos defends the title of "liberal." People who watched the whole debate learned things from "both candidates," like the hyper-efficiency of Medicare compared to corporate health care, or the burden of heavy taxation in Africa.

But my overwhelming impression of the debate content was that it's Lawrence O'Donnell, a pragmatic middle of the road liberal, talking to himself. There was some edge to Santos and Vinick, but not much. I'll bet a social evening with O'Donnell would result in the same basic mix of sensible and provocative opinions.

In terms of performance (West Coast version), Alda seemed much more at ease with the live format, and he owned the stage. Smits had his moments, but he didn't seem at home in this form.

To further confuse realities, Zogby, the real polling firm, has been polling on voter/viewer preferences as if this is a real race, although the electorate is restricted to West Wing viewers. They even did a snap poll after the debate. As reported by MSNBC, Santos/Smits won it, 54 percent to 38 percent, but Vinick/Alda gained in overall preference: in the pre-debate poll, 59 percent favored Santos to 29% for Vinick.

It shouldn't be too surprising that West Wing fans favor the Democrat. While the producers are tempted by the dramatic possibilities of switching to a Republican administration, they would risk losing a chunk of the show's core viewers (including me. One Republican President at a time is more than enough.) Clues to a Santos victory are found less in the substance of debate issues than in the fact that supporting characters in the Vinick campaign are less well developed than among the Dems. Plus a Vinick victory would likely mean an instant and near total change in the cast, several of whom are involved enough in the Santos campaign to make the transition. TV dramas seldom replace a cast wholesale except as a last ditch effort to cut costs and win a new audience.

So President Bartlett will be gone, and that alone will be a tough change for this series to weather. Of course, there's the possibility that this is the show's last season, though that's not yet part of the buzz. I shudder to think what the next three years would be like with George Bush as the only President of the U.S.

Although if her show can weather its own creative storms and survive the season, there could be Geena Davis.

Catching Up on the DC Soap (Can This Administration Be Saved?)

So what happens next in the tragic soap opera of the Bush administration? Will Rove go aroving, will Scooter scoot to the prosecutor with the goods on Cheney? What's Fitzgerald up to anyway?

Not knowing, can't say, but if reading the pack journalism pressgeist, and between the lines of unsourced or unnamed sourced stories of recent vintage is the equivalent of reading tea leaves, here's some idea of what people who think they know are thinking.

You'll recall that the conventional wisdom way back when Scooter was indicted 10 days or so ago was that Karl Rove had dodged a bullet and would escape indictment. By the end of this past week, the feeling was building that Rove was likely to be indicted after all. Maybe this week, maybe next week.

After warning that Fitzgerald might not indict anyone, John Dean changed his tune. "Having read the indictment against Libby, I am inclined to believe more will be issued," he wrote. " In fact, I will be stunned if no one else is indicted."

The fickle finger of fate started pointing Rove's way with shadowy reports of vague prosecutorial activity in Rove's neighborhood. Then an inside story was leaked (apparently with press secretary Scott McClellan's fingerprints all over it) about growing opposition among White House staff to Rove sticking around.

Finally, Time wrote the obituary, in a story that looked to me to have Rove's pudgy digit tracks all over it, suggesting that Rove had accomplished what he set out to do, now he was tired and wanted to spend more time with his family. Time also predicted other personnel changes that last week everyone said Bush would never make. But they make sense covering for Rove's departure, like Lyndon Johnson eliminating his entire cabinet from consideration for vice president in 1964 so he wouldn't have to explain why he didn't pick Bobby Kennedy.

Scooter hobbled to court last week, his attorney loudly proclaiming his innocence. Some observers swear he will never go to trial, others think he'll just try to string it out long enough to get a pardon. But a name that kept appearing on every story of dastardly deeds last week was Dick Cheney.

John Dean wrote that "when one studies the indictment, and carefully reads the transcript of the press conference, it appears Libby's saga may be only Act Two in a three-act play. And in my view, the person who should be tossing and turning at night, in anticipation of the last act, is the Vice President of the United States, Richard B. Cheney."

Cheney was also the chief target of some Republican attacks on the fake case for the Iraq war. He was the patsy in chief for spreading the lies of a known terrorist liar linking al Qeda and Iraq, even after the guy recanted, according to a New York Times story.

The Washington Post went after Cheney for creating and supporting US policies and practices using torture, and the lead story in today's Washington Post is: "Over the past year, Vice President Cheney has waged an intense and largely unpublicized campaign to stop Congress, the Pentagon and the State Department from imposing more restrictive rules on the handling of terrorist suspects, according to defense, state, intelligence and congressional officials."

So does this mean Cheney is going to be indicted? Could be. But John Dean doesn't believe it will be because Libby falls for the alleged Fitzgerald strategy of big fish, bigger fish.

Dean wrote:Will Libby flip? Unlikely. Neither Cheney nor Libby (I believe) will be so foolish as to crack a deal. And Libby probably (and no doubt correctly) assumes that Cheney - a former boss with whom he has a close relationship - will (at the right time and place) help Libby out, either with a pardon or financially, if necessary.

Libby's goal, meanwhile, will be to stall going to trial as long as possible, so as not to hurt Republicans' showing in the 2006 elections. So if Libby can take the heat for a time, he and his former boss (and friend) may get through this. But should Republicans lose control of the Senate (where they are blocking all oversight of this administration), I predict Cheney will resign "for health reasons."

Perhaps the more interesting question at this point is why is Cheney suddenly so popular? Is he really the Satanic Machiavelli, or is there a campaign to give him up as the fall guy? (It wouldn't be a set up, exactly, since there's no doubt he's done all the awful things attributed to him, and more.)

By this past week only a few lonely voices were asking, where was Bush in all this? Did Rove really deceive him, or did he know all about the Plame outing? And what is his responsibility for lying us into war, and approving and defending torture?

Three polls came out last week, all with similiar and similiarly devastating numbers for Bushcorps. But two of them asked a couple of interesting questions, especially when you put them together. When asked if Congress should consider impeaching President Bush if he lied about the reasons for invading Iraq, about 53% said yes. And in another poll, when asked if they thought Bush did lie us into the Iraq war, about 53% said yes. You do the math.

More Scorched Than Mirth

I saw the road show of Capitol Steps Friday night, and had a peculiar reaction. Based in DC, they do mostly political parody with wicked lyrics set to familiar songs. Most of what they did Friday I'd heard on their latest CD, though they did have a Sam Alito song (set to "Mona Lisa.") But even when I knew the material, it was pretty funny in performance. Some of it was downright hilarious.

But as it turned out, the release of laughter also released other emotions. I felt like crying. I don't mean laughing until I was in tears. I mean just plain tears.

I got little sense of the righteousness I may have felt when I was younger when political idiots were skewered with effective satire, the kind that just tells the truth. I felt the sadness, the grief, or what San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll called anguish in his Friday piece. The kind you have to hold back with the assault of such appalling news day after day.

And the tragedy keeps unfolding, or maybe the accurate metaphor is metastasizing. Now we learn from Lawrence Wilkerson that when he was in Colin Powell's State Department he followed the paper trail on prisoner abuse back to the vice president's office. Having such suspicions confirmed doesn't inspire feelings of vindication, it just layers on more dismay and shame, and anguish, and grief.

Meanwhile, the Republicant Congress ignores the astounding polls and keeps on the path of their relentless destruction, ramming through legislation that not only despoils the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, but enacts deep cuts in Medicaid, Medicare, other programs for the poor, and cuts student loans, all in the Republicant class war on Americans.

Laughing at dumb old G.W. is a necessary release, but let's face it, when you need a doctor, or a house payment, or a future, or a burial plot for your son or daughter, it's not funny anymore.


While we're on the subject of political comment, why is there more intelligence, eloquence and wisdom in James Spader's lines as a fictional lawyer in Boston Legal trying a fictional case about a National Guardsman forced to remain past his enlistment and is killed in Iraq---or Jimmy Smits as the fictional presidential candidate talking about abortion on The West Wing---than out of anyone's mouth in Washington, or any of the pundits, talking heads, and wise scribes I hear or read?

Gotcha Day in the Senate

On Tuesday, Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid organized and carried out a successful sneak attack on the Republican leadership. He used a parliamentary maneuver to force a closed session of the Senate to discuss why the Republicans won't investigate the breach in national security at high levels of the executive branch, namely the outing of a CIA operative.They came away with a commitment on the next steps in holding just such an investigation.

While it's silly to hold out much hope that Senate Republicans---particularly this integrity-challenged bunch--are going to really investigate their fellow GOPers, this manuever was a big win for Reid, Democrats and the nation that must know how and why it's ability to defend itself against terrorists with WMDs was compromised by the President's men.

I can't say I was a big Reid supporter when he was announced as the new leader, but he's shown some impressive moves. He's been out front and outspoken on important issues, more so than recent Senate leaders. He's a congressional pro, something the Dems have lacked perhaps since Tip O'Neill was running things in the House. That became clear with this manuever, in a couple of ways.

The context is important: it's the day after Rovebush announced a Supreme pick that the rabid right loved, a transparent attempt to change the subject from the White House inner circle indictment, and the whole subject of political corruption there. In the process, as Reid mentioned yesterday with a seemingly casual attitude, the usual consultation with Reid and other leaders didn't happen. Bushrove talked only to rabid rightists before naming Alito.

With his secret session manuever today, Reid served notice that he knows what he's doing in the Senate, and he'll find a way to make things very difficult there for Alito's confirmation. And that he understand payback. This might have been a little inside the Senate nudge, except that Repub leader Bill Frist announced it to the world, whining that he wasn't consulted about this, contrary to the usual procedure. What a dope.

It took Reid about 24 hours to get his. Not only that, but he has placed the Plame Game back on the big agenda, no matter what else Fitzgerald does or doesn't do. There are other benefits, too, enumerated in this dkos post by hunter.

The Big One

It's a Rove move, likely the first consequence of Official A's escape from indictment Friday. President Bush appointed Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, a move that is at once bold and weak, outrageous and predictable, skillful and desperate, confrontational and a flanking maneuver.

Because Alito redefines the extreme right, he energizes the rabid right base that harried the Harriet back to the White House, where she is already busy instructing the press secretary not to talk to the press about anything having remotely to do with She Who Must Not Be Plamed. Because Alito is such an extreme and divisive choice, the resulting cacaphony is supposed to drown out any residual echoes from the indictments of White House honcho Scooted Libby, along with drowning out Democrats' calls for Rove's resignation heard Monday (but barely).

That this is an essential part of the strategy is clear from vp Cheney's actions in response to Libby being indicted for lying and obstructing justice in the Plame Game. As Think Progress among others point out, he replaced Libby with another staffer who is named in Libby's indictment as essentially a co-conspirator. He elevated a second staffer who is also named, and even more directly involved in the orchestrated campaign to publicize the name of a covert CIA agent. This is not exactly evidence of contrition and reform.

Diverting attention may or may not work, but clearly this appointment is not just a little misdirection. Alito can be seen as the payoff of the Bush administration, from the moment that Justices Scalia and Thomas ignored their conflicts of interest and their own judicial records to appoint George Bush, the loser of the 2000 election, as President.

Scalia gets paid off, as do all the rabid right faithful, who outed themselves in the Miers mire as insisting on an unconstitutional religious test for one of the twelve judges charged with the ultimate interpretation and defense of the Constitution.

The stage is now set, and this is The Big One. If the Bushies prevail and Alito takes the oath, this long national nightmare will echo through the law for generations. If the Democrats can rouse themselves and fight a solid and judicious fight, they will not only defeat the antiConstitution but give voters the beginning of a rationale to return them to congressional majority in 06.

Last Best Guesses

In eight hours or so (or not) we will know (1) what special prosecutor Fitzgerald is going to do and/or (2) who won the third game of the World Series or (3) one of these or (4) neither.Here's my prediction (not about the game, except that it probably will end, someday, possibly before the 4th game starts.)

Fitzgerald will issue four sealed indictments, and will continue his investigation with a new grand jury. Rove and Libby will be told they are among the four, but this will not be announced to the public. In fairly short order, Rove and Libby will announce they are resigning and leaving the White House to spend more time with their lawyers.

In justifying further investigation, Fitzgerald will mention leads that point to vice president Cheney. While Fitzgerald quietly investigates, Cheney will resign and leave the White House to spend more time with his money.In a couple of years Fitzgerald will indict Cheney, but there will be no trial because on his last day of office, Bush will pardon him.

Bush will then leave the White House to become the new CEO of Halliburton, but will mostly be at his ranch where he will spend more time with his brush.

Whigging Out: What the New York Times Must Do Now

There were three important pieces on the Plame affair in Sunday's New York Times, though only two got a lot of attention: the staff story about Times reporter Judy Miller and her jailing, and Miller's own piece about her testimony.

But the third piece was Frank Rich's column, when he took a step back and zeroed in on the underlying crime, the campaign to sell the Iraq war to the American people, Congress and the world.It was a little-known group of insiders, Rich wrote, who engineered this campaign: known as the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG. Their cooked intelligence, spin and disinformation efforts were the real crime, Rich suggests.

The Bush-Cheney product rolled out by Card, Rove, Libby & Company had been bought by Congress, the press and the public. The intelligence and facts had been successfully fixed to sell the war, and any memory of Mr. Bush's errant 16 words melted away in Shock and Awe. When, months later, a national security official, Stephen Hadley, took "responsibility" for allowing the president to address the nation about mythical uranium, no one knew that Mr. Hadley, too, had been a member of WHIG.

It was not until the war was supposedly over - with "Mission Accomplished," in May 2003 - that Mr. Wilson started to add his voice to those who were disputing the administration's uranium hype. Members of WHIG had a compelling motive to shut him down. In contrast to other skeptics, like Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency (this year's Nobel Peace Prize winner), Mr. Wilson was an American diplomat; he had reported his findings in Niger to our own government. He was a dagger aimed at the heart of WHIG and its disinformation campaign. Exactly who tried to silence him and how is what Mr. Fitzgerald presumably will tell us.

All the President's men lied in public about what they knew about the Plame affair, Rich says, because they thought Ashcroft's Justice Department would always be in charge of the non-investigation. But political pressure forced the appointment of an independent prosecutor, and their skillful manipulation in 2003 and 2004 became waiting for the consequences in 2005.

THIS modus operandi was foolproof, shielding the president as well as Mr. Rove from culpability, as long as it was about winning an election. The attack on Mr. Wilson, by contrast, has left them and the Cheney-Libby tag team vulnerable because it's about something far bigger: protecting the lies that took the country into what the Reagan administration National Security Agency director, Lt. Gen. William Odom, recently called "the greatest strategic disaster in United States history."

Rich concludes: Whether or not Mr. Fitzgerald uncovers an indictable crime, there is once again a victim, but that victim is not Mr. or Mrs. Wilson; it's the nation. It is surely a joke of history that even as the White House sells this weekend's constitutional referendum as yet another "victory" for democracy in Iraq, we still don't know the whole story of how our own democracy was hijacked on the way to war.

That was Sunday. Wednesday the other shoe dropped, courtesy of the unlikely local rival, the New York Daily News. They ran a short article on WHIG--but it has a bomb attached. The last paragraphs are:

Besides Rove and Libby, the group included senior White House aides Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin, James Wilkinson, Nicholas Calio, Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley.

WHIG also was doing more than just public relations, said a second former intel officer. "They were funneling information to [New York Times reporter] Judy Miller. Judy was a charter member," the source said. [emphasis mine.]

Among other things, this is a direct challenge to the Times. Rich often defended Judy Miller as a colleague who went to jail for a principle. Though his Sunday piece mentions her as a co-author of a piece that neatly expressed the WHIG point of view, he didn't actually name her as a member.

The Daily News story essentially challenges the Times to investigate just what Miller's involvement with WHIG really was. My guess is that they are already on it, and if they aren't, they really need to be.

They need to devote a team of their best investigative reporters to looking hard at every Miller story, correlating its content and timing with every WHIG meeting. They need to follow Miller's trial wherever it leads, with or without her cooperation (I'd guess without.)

It is a way for the Times to reclaim some integrity from this sorrow mess. Not doing it would be more damaging than anything so far.Eventually, people are going to be leaving their jobs and perhaps the Times because of how this was all mishandled. But right now, this is the story they must do.

As for the bigger picture, the Fitzgerald investigation needs to unravel the whole WHIG conspiracy, not only as it touched the Plame affair, but as Rich rightly emphasizes, the selling of the tragic war in Iraq. Rich sets a high but appropriate bar for Fitzgerald. But by implication he sets it as well for his own newspaper.

WATERGATE II?

Rumors are flying in Washington and across the Internet. Apparently begun from within the Bush administration and reported by such outlets as the Washington Post and US News, the speculation that Vice President Cheney is about to resign, because he is facing indictment in the Plame affair. As of close of business in Washington on Tuesday, other rumors (with sources claiming knowledge of the investigation) put the number of Bush administration figures who might be indicted as soon as tomorrow at 22. It could decimate the Bush administration more thoroughly and faster than the attrition of the Nixon administration in Watergate.

This time a single investigator working in secret could unleash this scandal on a relatively unsuspecting public. Though new media outlets have been involved, they have mostly been responding to subpoenas rather than leading with investigative reporting. The Washington Post gained credibility from its Watergate reporting. This time, the New York Times has suffered massive blows to its credibility because of the continuing involvement in the scandal itself of one of their reporters.

Like Watergate, it breaks while the administration is already reeling from an unpopular war and its imperious attitude. Nothing is certain yet, but when rumors like this are flying and given credence, something is up.

Eternal Vigilance

Two news stories I noticed—each of them also flagged by a prominent southpaw blogger—contribute to a disquieting trend in recent proposals from the Bushcorps White House.The first was Bush’s own suggestion, made at his press conference Tuesday. It was significant enough for an AP report to lead with it. He was speaking to the concerns of a possible global pandemic if something like the Asian bird flu mutates, which the UN estimated could kill as many as 150 million people worldwide. Bush chose to talk about a new role for the military in such an outbreak.

Jennifer Loven reported it this way: “President Bush stirring debate on the worrisome possibility of a bird flu pandemic, suggested dispatching American troops to enforce quarantines in any areas with outbreaks of the killer virus.

Bush asserted aggressive action could be needed to prevent a potentially crippling U.S. outbreak of a bird flu strain that is sweeping through Asian poultry and causing experts to fear it could become the next deadly pandemic. Citing concern that state and local authorities might be unable to contain and deal with such an outbreak, Bush asked Congress to give him the authority to call in the military. The idea raised the startling-to-some image of soldiers cordoning off communities hit by disease.

"The president ought to have all ... assets on the table to be able to deal with something this significant," Bush said during a 55 minute question-and-answer session with reporters in the sun-splashed Rose Garden.As Lovin noted: The president has already indicated he wants to give the armed forces the lead responsibility for conducting search-and-rescue operations and sending in supplies after massive natural disasters and terrorist attacks — a notion that could require a change in law and that even some in the Pentagon have reacted to skeptically.

She quotes Dr. Irwin Redlener, director of the Columbia University National Center for Disaster Preparedness, as calling the president's suggestion an "extraordinarily draconian measure" that would be unnecessary if the nation had built the capability for rapid vaccine production, ensured a large supply of anti-virals like Tamiflu, and not allowed the degradation of the public health system."The translation of this is martial law in the United States," Redlener said.

Bush is not alone in believing that the military should have a larger role in disasters, as apparently they already will have in something like a terrorist biological weapon attack. There are some reasonable arguments for this, as there are for an armed forces role in public health emergencies, because they have the manpower and some applicable resources, the ability to transport quickly, and other capabilities. But that’s really not the issue.

First of all, Bush proposes the troops for “security,” not general response. That’s what supporters miss (and I found myself in the unusual position, watching the PBS News Hour last week, of disagreeing with the representative from the Center for American Progress, and agreeing with the man from the Cato Institute, on this issue of the military’s role in disasters.)And even stranger, I think Bush is right about one thing---the military would be most useful in security, because that’s what they do. They carry guns, and shoot them. They are trained in various methods of mayhem. They use force, and that’s what they know best. They simply aren’t trained well or at all for the tasks they would be most useful in performing in a domestic emergency.

This is not the World War II army. They don’t provide support even for themselves. Halliburton feeds them in Iraq. They pay corporations to do just about everything except fight, and they pay some corporations to do that as well. When the armed forces were given peacekeeping duty in Kosovo, their commander got himself a few weeks training, and the rest of them had none. The National Guard gets some training in disaster relief, and they are more experienced in it.The lack of training shows up in the pattern of alienating and often brutalizing civilians in Iraq, and it certainly showed up in the prisons there. Until the military is trained for these new missions, they are going to be nothing but a blunt force, and if deployed in America, a potential threat to the lives and liberties of American citizens. (On that threat, I was interested to see that Plutonium Page of Daily Kos agrees.)

Now ask yourself, why is it that the first thing Bushcorps thought of was the military---the security issue---rather than the public health tasks? Is it a fixation on the wrong thing, like thinking the solution to terrorism was to invade Iraq? In the Katrina postmortems, there seemed to be the sense that a major reason that the Red Cross wasn’t allowed into New Orleans sooner was security concerns---which have turned out to be much less of a factor than first thought. When the federal government did show up, they showed up in force, literally: with thousands of troops and mercenaries armed and read to secure a nearly empty city.But there might be more to it that this.

Which brings us to the other story, as dug out by BooMan of the Booman Tribune blog . He focused on this paragraph from a report in the congressional newsletter, the Hill, concerning Bushcorps efforts to convince conservatives to support Bush's new nominee to the Supreme Court, his lawyer:

Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee, yesterday held a conference call with conservative leaders to address their concerns about Miers. He stressed Bush’s close relationship with Miers and the need to confirm a justice who will not interfere with the administration’s management of the war on terrorism, according to a person who attended the teleconference.

BooMan interpreted this phrase “who will not interfere with the administration’s management of the war on terrorism” as code for support for the Patriot Act and everything else Bushcorps wants, including abrogating civil and human rights at Guantanamo Bay, and a freer hand to use torture there and elsewhere, and to keep evidence of it out of the public eye.

It’s certainly something the Senate needs to ask Miers. What about the Bushcorps policy of not allowing Americans to be sanctioned by the world court or other courts of international law? Does the U.S. have a responsibility to obey the Geneva Conventions? And so on.To be appropriately blunt about it, put these two stories together and you have the outlines of a military dictatorship in the making. Now maybe Bushcorps would be sincerely scandalized by such a thought, but it wouldn’t be entirely inconsistent. In some ways, it’s not even inconsistent with our history.

In the early 1890s, the Pullman Company was one of the largest and most powerful corporations in America. They made and maintained the train cars for America’s long-distance travel, especially by the wealthy. They also forced their workers to live in a company town, where they fleeced them for much of their wages. Then they used an economic downturn that didn’t affect them directly as an excuse for cutting wages by a third. The union went out on strike, and other railroad unions joined. Then before the strike could disrupt the Columbian Exhibition in Chicago---where American corporations showed off their vision of the future to the world---President Grover Cleveland sent federal marshals and half the standing army for “security,” to break the strike.

It wasn’t the first time that the military was used to benefit the ruling oligarchy, and it wasn’t the last. This one happened in George W. Bush’s great-grandfather’s time. It’s well within memory of the perpetual ruling class the Bushes belong to. None of this has to be conscious to be a factor.It makes a scary kind of sense from their point of view. They've enriched the rich and impoverished the middle class, and eventually that could lead to trouble. The rich might need additional "security" for their gated universe.

When Thomas Jefferson said “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” he wasn’t talking about vigilance directed outward, to foreign powers. Nor did he mean the 18th century equivalent of environmental activists, or even pinko subversives. He was talking about bad laws and big time tyranny. He would not be surprised either if the party that promises to get government off your back is the one who winds up giving you government’s bayonet in your face.