A Private Big War

As the Bushites continue their Iraqnam war, they are waging another war at home, on the American people and on America itself. Contempt for the Constitution and civil liberties is just part of it. The whole of it is a private big war, on behalf of corporate profits, feeding off the people who don't profit.

The Iraqmire that's killing thousands and turning a country into a weaponized hell, is a privatized war. Taxpayer billions (to be paid for generations) are going to Halliburton and various private armies, just as the current Medicare prescription drug debacle is designed not to help seniors or safeguard their health, but to enrich corporations and their obscenely overpaid executives.

Meanwhile, cuts in programs affecting people in the U.S., especially the poor, the sick, the old and others outside the Bushledged few, became law in late 2005. Now at the same time as they are demanding a trillion more in war spending for their corporate pals, the Bushites are asking Congress for more war on America in its proposed 2006 budget.

The Christian Science Monitor reports that among the programs targeted for elimination are:

• The Commodity Supplemental Food Program, which provides food packages for some 400,000 low-income seniors.

• A preventive care block grant, which helps states provide preventive healthcare for "underserved populations."

• The TRIO Talent Search program, which helps colleges and universities assist disadvantaged teenagers so they can finish high school and go to college.

Among programs facing major cuts, according to CBPP:

• Section 202 housing for low-income elderly, which would be cut 26 percent below the 2006 level.

• Section 811 housing for low-income people with disabilities, which would face a 50 percent cut.

• A 79 percent cut for Community Oriented Policing Services, which aims to put more police on the streets.

• Child Care and Development Block Grant, which would face more than $1 billion in cuts over five years. CBPP reports that by 2011 the number of children receiving child-care assistance would drop by more than 400,000, compared with the 2005 figure.

There are proposed cuts in Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security. Cuts in enforcement for missed child support, and cuts to environmental programs, including the restoration of the Pacific salmon, and cuts to National Parks. All of these have already been cut, and cut again. Some are barely functioning. And as they function less and less well, people blame government more.

On the day this budget was announced, the Big Smirk himself had an unusual experience when he attended the funeral of Coretta Scott King: he was forced to be present while people were criticizing him. As the Los Angeles Times reports, there were pointed references in particular from President Jimmy Carter, who referred to the illegal wiretaps and other survelliance endured by Martin Luther King and Coretta King.

"This commemorative ceremony this morning and this afternoon is not only to acknowledge the great contributions of Coretta and Martin, but to remind us that the struggle for equal rights is not over," he also remarked, "We only have to recall the color of the faces of those in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi, those who were most devastated by Katrina, to know that there are not yet equal opportunities for all Americans."

Rev. Joseph Lowery noted Coretta King's opposition to the war in Iraq, and could have been commenting directly on Bush' s budget. "She deplored the terror inflicted by our smart bombs on missions way afar. We know now there were no weapons of mass destruction over there. But Coretta knew, and we knew, that there are weapons of misdirection right down here. Millions without health insurance. Poverty abounds. For war, billions more, but no more for the poor."

Call the Talese, They're Trying to Steal My Sales

Our Story So Far: Nan Talese is James Frey's editor, and she went on the Oprah Purgatario to explain the publishing business. I don't know if she was booed, but someone wrote that Oprah gave her a dirty look when her cell phone chimed. To keep you up to date on the zeitgeist, Oprah was criticized for backing Frey in a call to Larry King. Then she was applauded for apologizing and going after Frey on her own show. Now the predictable backlash has begun, and Oprah is getting criticized for holding a public stoning, humiliating Frey and his editor, and not listening to Their Side.

So here's how a Wall Street Journal article (Yes! This is today's free one! Oh thank you thankyou WSJ!) begins:

Last Thursday, publishing-industry veteran Nan Talese was excoriated on television by Oprah Winfrey for publishing James Frey's 2003 "A Million Little Pieces," a bestselling memoir about the author's struggle to overcome drug dependency that he has since admitted is partly fictitious.

But on Friday morning, Ms. Talese walked into 22nd-floor offices in Midtown Manhattan to a standing ovation from her colleagues. Soon afterward, she received a call of support from Peter Olson, chief executive of Bertelsmann AG's Random House Inc. publishing arm."I've gotten more than 500 emails over the last few days, and the overwhelming majority have been supportive," says Ms. Talese whose imprint, Nan A. Talese, is part of Random House's Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group. Indeed, many members of the publishing industry have rallied around Ms. Talese and Random House, saying that they would have published "A Million Little Pieces" as well and could have been duped just as easily.

The WSJ story is ostensibly about how it's too expensive for poor poor pitiful publishers to fact check their books. Not everyone in publishing agrees that nothing can or should be done, however. Some publishers say the "Million Little Pieces" incident may well result in some changes in how books are vetted. "The entire process will have to be rethought," says James Atlas, president of Atlas Books LLC [followed by a plug for Atlas' last book.]

Full disclosure: Many years ago I had a very short meeting with Nan Talese, when she was an editor at a different publishing house. It was a courtesy to one of her (fiction, acknowleded that is) writers who I knew. I waited around, got to sit down long enough to hear her dis everything I'd done and everything I proposed to do, thanked her very much and left.

I also used to know James Atlas, and I believe the last time I saw him I was pitching story ideas when he was an editor at the NY Times Magazine. He was more positive about the ideas but when it came time to assign, Atlas shrugged.

Also, I must warn you that reading this blog or anything else on your computer can cause headaches, heartaches and acid indigestion. A small number of readers have suffered seizures and required medical attention. Others have dipped into prolonged depression, puncutated by anxiety and anger, leading to reading a lot of psychology books and babbling on blogs. If symptoms persist, tough shit, you're not covered.

Now where was I? Right---the story quotes others pointing out various relevant factors: the much larger marketing budgets for some books which cut into editing resources for all books, and even the Power of Oprah as a key factor in what kinds of books get published. Implying that Frey wouldn't have gotten on the show if he'd called his book fiction, as he apparently did until other publishers passed on it.

But none of this bothers Nan Talese. She goes right from harvesting applause, phone calls and e-mails to a working lunch with--who else?--James Frey, as they go over wording to be added to new copies of his book, pointing out in the best possible way that it's apparently a pack of lies (although on Oprah, Frey reportedly had problems remembering what was and what wasn't true, if any. ) And here's her bottom line:

Last week, the publisher issued a statement saying, "We bear a responsibility for what we publish, and apologize to the reading public for any unintentional confusion surrounding the publication of 'A Million Little Pieces.'" In an interview, Ms. Talese said, "We will continue to print the book as long as there is public demand for it."

We bear "a" responsibility? Apologize for any "unintentional confusion surrounding the publication"?? What is that supposed to mean? There was no confusion surrounding the publication. It was published satisfactorily, well enough to get in stores and sell three million copies. The problem is with the words in the book, and its author, who shows signs of being a pathological liar.

But the last part is very clear. "We will continue to print the book as long as there is public demand for it." Makes it sound like a public service. Here's the book, judge for yourself, we won't be a party to censorship. Right. And because we're so sincere, we're giving the book away free.

Not exactly. They didn't say that, of course. Frey may have been disgraced and suffered an hour of humiliation, but he's rich. And absolutely no one is asking him to give back the money. Which might lead to Nan Talese and Random House being asked to give back the money. This is America. Ain't nobody going to give back no money, pardner. And I ain't lyin. Really.

Another Random House editor is quoted in the story saying he"expects that the future reception for first-time memoirists could be different, especially 'those with highly melodramatic, uncorroborated life narratives.'" What an ironist. Frey has killed the memoir market for awhile, except for his own books. But the implication is clearly that when faced with "highly melodramatic" life narratives, those with integrity and an actual sense of responsibility exercise editorial skepticism. But then there are those who read with greed, and the ease of exploiting paying readers is the chief if not the only deciding factor.

I mean, what would happen if you expressed doubts and he took the book elsewhere? Or if you checked into it a little and found out it wasn't true---that the truth was not nearly so gripping and un-putdownable as the lies? You certainly don't want to put yourself in that position.

And clearly this is something that Nan Talese understands, along with apparently everyone she knows.

It's Mourning in America

The mourning has begun, quietly. NBC has announced that The West Wing will not return for another season. It wasn't much of a shock when NBC cancelled American Dream before this season, another show we watched every week. But it seemed unlikely this series would go to the trouble of a creating a season-long cliffhanger--who would be the television President next year?--when there wasn't going to be a next year.

But of course, it was a business, not a creative decision, taken by a network that has lost its touch in both areas. The real world had already intruded with the death of John Spencer, one of the original West Wing stars. Now we're truly bereft, with no president but the so-called "real one," and Geena Davis, who will have to do.

I got a retroactive sense of this cancellation's inevitability in the reaction of a bunch of young whiners at Salon. One didn't like it because it was unrealistically intelligent, and besides, her actor boyfriend does like it. The one contributor who wasn't busily displaying his hip cynicism had to apologize because it made him feel good (i.e. corny.) These are apparently the viewers that advertisers pay attention to. Good luck.

The Internet attracts nitpickers, so I shouldn't expect anyone to simply acknowledge that it was at worst an interesting hour of television not about criminals or crimestoppers, and at best it was great. But the real reason I remained loyal was the simple fact that since 2000, President Barlett was my President, the chief executive of our alternative reality. I wasn't sure Jimmy Smits was going to do it for me, but I was willing to give him a try---and he's been looking and sounding like an acceptable substitute lately. (Not Alan Alda, sorry. One Republican president at a time is way more than enough.)

The idea that all we are to be left with is Bush may be too much to bear. Somebody has to set the standards, remind us of ideals, of intelligence and acting morally even in difficult or complex situations. The uber-hip Salon writers sure don't.

Maybe The West Wing's real sin was frequently articulating issues better than either politicians or the news media. We can't let a mere TV show even slightly slow down the collapse of civilization.

So we're left with the White House of Commander in Chief, now the property of the Bochco family, and its chief of staff, Tom Szentgyorgi (who I wrote about long ago when he was a young up and coming playwright.) Not a terrible alternative. However, for the best writing on contemporary issues as well as some of the best and funniest acting and general bizarre entertainment, we watch Boston Legal.

We're trying out that new series, Injustice, and still enjoy Numbers. Other that these, it's DVDs of Northern Exposure---its third season has some of the best television ever. No wonder old TV shows are the hottest trend in DVDs.

Molly to Dems: What Are You Afraid Of?

Karl Rove made a speech promising that Republicans will make national security their key issue in the 2006 congressional elections, drawing a contrast between their "post-9-11" agenda and the Democrats' alleged "pre-9-11" worldview. Some Washington Democrats were apparently already quaking in their slippers at the prospect of being perceived as soft on terrorism by squeaking too loudly about the Bushites ongoing attempt to make the presidency a dictatorship while shredding the Constitution.

If that's not enough, Osama bin Laden shows up for the first time since just before the presidential election in 2004 to remind people why they should be scared. If Osama isn't on Bush's payroll, he should be. Who has been more important to the Big Smirk-- Rove or Osama-- seems pretty much a tossup.

So what's a Democrat to do? While some thought must be given to political realities, it's time to step up. If Al Gore's speech wasn't clear enough, listen to columnist Molly Ivins:

"The recent death of Gene McCarthy reminded me of a lesson I spent a long, long time unlearning, so now I have to re-learn it. It's about political courage and heroes, and when a country is desperate for leadership. There are times when regular politics will not do, and this is one of those times. There are times a country is so tired of bull that only the truth can provide relief. "

While the Repubs have managed perceptions well enough to keep people scared of Democrats almost as much as of terrorists, maybe it's not so dangerous out there as Dems may imagine. As Molly points out:

"What kind of courage does it take, for mercy's sake? The majority of the American people (55 percent) think the war in Iraq is a mistake and that we should get out. The majority (65 percent) of the American people want single-payer health care and are willing to pay more taxes to get it. The majority (86 percent) of the American people favor raising the minimum wage. The majority of the American people (60 percent) favor repealing Bush's tax cuts, or at least those that go only to the rich. The majority (66 percent) wants to reduce the deficit not by cutting domestic spending, but by reducing Pentagon spending or raising taxes.The majority (77 percent) thinks we should do "whatever it takes" to protect the environment. The majority (87 percent) thinks big oil companies are gouging consumers and would support a windfall profits tax. That is the center, you fools. WHO ARE YOU AFRAID OF?"

We do know who they are afraid of: the America people who have been so easily made afraid. So what Al Gore said bears repeating:

"Is our Congress today in more danger than were their predecessors when the British army was marching on the Capitol? Is the world more dangerous than when we faced an ideological enemy with tens of thousands of missiles poised to be launched against us and annihilate our country at a moment's notice? Is America in more danger now than when we faced worldwide fascism on the march-when our fathers fought and won two World Wars simultaneously? [Here I think he meant to say "consecutively."]

It is simply an insult to those who came before us and sacrificed so much on our behalf to imply that we have more to be fearful of than they. Yet they faithfully protected our freedoms and now it is up to us to do the same."

These are times that try men's souls. That doesn't mean these are just difficult times. That means they are times when souls are on trial.

John F. Kennedy's book, Profiles in Courage, is about politicians who became statesmen and patriots in moments of crisis and importance. We need the material for new chapters, and soon.

Political Football

Lynn Swann couldn't had written a better script for himself, at least so far. The former Pittsburgh Steeler wide receiver, a star on the mythic Super Bowl teams of the 1970s, announced two weeks ago that he's running for Governor of Pennsylvania as a Republican.

Two weeks ago, the Pittsburgh Steelers were the underdog in the wild card playoff game with Cincinatti. They won. Last week, the Steelers did what had never been done before--they became the first wild card team ranked last among playoff teams to knock off the team ranked first. They defeated the Indianapolis Colts, who'd gone undefeated for most of the season and were heavy favorites to win this year's Super Bowl.

Pennsylvania's current Governor, Democrat Ed Rendell is running for reelection. He's been popular for most of his term. But in a recent poll , Swann was slightly ahead of him.

Months ago, when Swann's possible candidacy was first floated, I saw a blog discussion that generally ridiculed his chances. I entered it to differ. Some of the participants were in Pennsylvania, though mostly in the east, in the Philadelphia end of the state. Though I left western Pennsylvania almost a decade ago, I didn't dismiss the chances of a Steeler legend--especially not this one. I'd met Lynn Swann, and seen his mouth in action. He's smooth, charming and never at a loss for words.

Years after our interview on the Steelers practice field (which had to be ended by the intervention of another player or Swann might still be talking, and I'd still be enjoying it) I was driving through a fashionable Pittsburgh neighborhood, stopping at an intersection when a car came up behind me fast and stopped practically on my bumper. I looked in the rear-view mirror. An attractive woman was driving, and in the seat beside her, with a big smile and talking a mile a minute, was Lynn Swann.

The poll showed that Swann was attracting more Democrats than Rendell was attracting Republicans. Not surprising, and I'll bet they're largely football fans, if not Steeler fans from the western side of the Commonwealth.

I doubt that many people know where Swann stands on the issues, and these numbers probably won't hold up. On the other hand, celebrity politicians---particularly when they seem centrist, and even a little liberal for Republicans---sometimes make their own rules. Of course Swann isn't a movie star, though he had the looks. But he's a living legend in a state where football counts, maybe even more than pretend Terminators.

And where the primary celebrities are athletes. Part of the celebrity mystique is the association with winning. Swann certainly has that.

So, suddenly, do the 2005-06 Steelers.There are only four teams left playing NFL football. The Steelers are the only team in Pennsylvania among them, and if they're getting front sports page treatment in San Francisco, you can bet they're all over the state's media. Western Pennsylvania is typically in a condition between euphoria and hysteria about now.

The Steelers are an underdog again today when they travel to Denver. If they win that game, they will go to the Super Bowl, probably as the favorite. Lynn Swann will really be smiling then.

The Hypocritical Praise for Dr. King: Remembering the Reality

I just read a column on an otherwise right wing editorial page, full of piety for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. While my prediction on the first MLK holiday hasn't to my knowledge yet come true---that soon, like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, King's likeness would be animated to cheerfully shill for used cars and (as I so intemperately suggested to an audience rather south of the Mason-Dixon Line) perhaps even for MLK Day White Sales. However, his memory is being demeaned in other ways, mostly by this false piety.

People who are the ideological descendants of those who opposed MLK's every move and even vilified him now find him a remote enough figure to pretend to revere him, or at least the few soundbites anybody knows. Though the wisdom of those words has become clearer through the years, their radical nature at the time is conveniently forgotten.

In the early 60s, King was criticized for insisting on moving the cause of African-Americans too fast. In the mid and late 60s, he was criticized by some younger activists for moving too slow.He was a prominent moving target of racism for his public life. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover considered him a dangerous subversive, especially when he called upon America to live up to its own Constitution. King was followed, bugged and wiretapped, in the interests of national security.

When he began by trying to integrate in the deep South, he was called dangerous. When he moved his efforts to the North, he offended some of his former supporters as well as making his Democratic party allies nervous. When he came out strongly against the Vietnam War, some supporters within the Civil Rights movement derided him for straying from the path, while right wingers accused him of being a traitor. When he moved from attempts to strike down bad local laws and get just federal laws passed to addressing economic injustice, he was once again called a Communist.

In short, if he were alive today, his past actions strongly suggest he would be an activist against the war in Iraq. He would be railing against the rapidly increasing economic inequality, and against the fat cats who buy congressional votes for a relative pittance, and write laws for their benefit that mean to other Americans, including future generations.

He would note as he did in the 60s that the burdens of war are borne overwhelmingly by those low on the economic scale, both Americans and the victims of war in Iraqnam.And he would probably be bugged, wiretapped and followed by the FBI, the Pentagon and the National Security Agency. His 21st century March on Washington would not include an invitation to the White House, as his 1963 march did, by a President who would be assassinated in a matter of months.

Those of us who revere Dr. King do so for a variety of reasons. But it seems clear to me that certain people now praising him revere him chiefly for the fact that he isn't here dogging them, and telling the truth about how they are destroying the promise of this country, the Constitution and the American Dream.

Is This The Way The Republic Ends?

It was supposed to be where the issue, not to mention the outrage, of the cheerful assertion of dictatorship was going to be focused. The Alito hearings, whatever they would mean for the eventual acceptance of the nominee to the Supreme Court, would serve notice that Democrats and even some Republicans weren't going to stand for Constitutional democracy being dismantled before their eyes by a government headed by an embarrassing self-parody in the Oval Office.

Well, it was an awfully good idea. Too bad the Senators on the committee were so lame, and so easily flummoxed by a nominee who failed to dramatically screw up, mostly by sitting utterly still and saying as little as possible with as many words as possible.

And of course the media utterly fell for the only not entirely boring photo op, which was the nominee's wife in tears, after a question by Republican Senator Lindsay Graham. Graham, sitting in judgment on the judge, was also the guy who helped prepare him for testimony, and was he ever prepared. Most Little Leagues don't let coaches umpire, but Congress is apparently different.

Maybe that should be their motto: Congress: always a lower standard.

Could it be that the tears were also coached? The woman could have been an actor playing Alito's wife and our ace investigative newshounds would never know it. They're too busy, getting the money shot, doing inserts for teasers and interviews for other shows on their network, and bantering with pundits and drive-time djs, then rushing back to the office to read the blogs so they can find out what's going on.

The anti-dictatorship crowd hasn't run out of opportunities yet--it's said that Al Gore will shout about constitutional crisis in a speech on Monday, though the drama is a bit diluted by this being known several days in advance, so the speech itself may be old news before it happens.

And some anti-dictatorship folks are trying their own pr campaign, like the series of town meetings which are laudable in themselves, but to puff them up as "impeachment talk is growing" and "350 people are packed into the hall" is pushing it. Yes, maybe they were packed, but they were still just 350 people.

I've been thinking about a short email I got at Christmastime by an old friend from the 70s, which referred to these as "the worst of times." She and I lived through Civil Rights and Vietnam, assassinations, Nixon and Watergate, Reagan and Iran-Contra, and Bush War I.

She may even remember aspects of the Blacklist---after all, her father was I.F. Stone, one of the few wholly admirable men of our time, whose courage is partially measured in his lack of company as a voice of informed dissent. Yet she called these the worst of times, and she may well be right.

But they may not be the worst of times to come, if this pale slide into dictatorship isn't halted.
It's not the wiretaps themselves, not even Alito, that make it so terrible. But the confidence that Bushcorpse has in asserting their evil ways, in destroying this nation's economy, its natural environment and the world's, sending poor young men and women to their deaths, justifying torture and continuing cruel and unusual punishment without even charges, leading a system in which medical care is denied to the non-wealthy, and public health is falling apart, and in Bush's obscenely and absurdly cheerful blather about the ruins of New Orleans...what word is there for this but decay?

Is this how the Republic will end, not with a bang but a simper?

Something Only A Friend Can Tell You

Even if the friend is not immediately grateful

From the Toronto Globe & Mail:

A senior British military officer has lashed out at the U.S. Army's performance in Iraq, accusing it of cultural insensitivity that "amounted to institutional racism" and a predisposition to offensive operations that proved counterproductive when it was faced with a growing insurgency.

Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster, who served alongside the Americans in Iraq in 2004, made the scathing assessment in an article in the latest issue of Military Review, published by the U.S. Army itself.

The article has prompted an angry reaction from some U.S. military officials, including the colonel in charge of the army's School of Advanced Military Studies, who lashed out at Brig. Aylwin-Foster as "an insufferable British snob."

Dear MSNBC

I used to watch msnbc. I also used to watch CNN. I watch neither now, so I had to read about your coverage of the Alito hearings today, and it gives me no reason to consider changing my mind. You couldn't find even a token non-Republican non- Bushite or non-right wing fanatic to put on the air? I mean apart from your so-called news reporters and pundits. I mean just to interview. You interviewed only administration apologists for, how many hours was it?

Pathetic.

Why are all the so-called cable news (with little news, just right wing babble) trying so hard to be Faux? What's really funny is that this might have been a successful strategy, like five years ago. Now the country is clearing looking for alternatives, since they've discovered they've been royally lied to. But you aren't giving them anything but the same tired old Bushite blather.

Too bad. I'd say I was outraged but I can't even say I'm surprised. I've written you off, and it will take some major change to get me back---and I really doubt I'm alone in this.

Opening Today: The Winter of Our Discontent

Now is the winter of our discontent, not to be made glorious summer by the daughter of New York, its Senator. At least not yet.

Even with the first out-loud Impeachment talk in December, it's still very likely that the American people and the entire world are stuck with G.W. Bush as President for the next three years. A Republican Congress arranged a bogus impeachment of a Democratic President but since they've more than proven that their partisanship trumps their patriotism, this Congress will take the ship of state down before they'll permit a Bush Impeachment.Democrats have a chance to win a slim Senate majority in November, and with the likelihood of a major scandal affecting a score of GOPer House members, some possibility of taking both houses.

But even then we run into the major barrier: impeach Bush, get Cheney. Of course, Cheney might be forced to pull an Agnew and get out first to avoid jail...but that's a lot of ifs.

Still, the discontent starts ringing big time today, Monday, with the beginning of hearings on Samuel Alito for Supreme Court. Until recently this shaped up to be a fight over Roe v. Wade, but revelations of White House spying on Americans in defiance of law has changed the dynamic, though Roe is still a mighty factor.

Now, as the Nation summed it up, " The Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Samuel Alito represent the first major battle in an emerging constitutional war over the authority of the President."Alito has left an alarming paper trail. For instance, he picked the perfect year--1984--to write a memo supporting the federal right to wiretap American peace activists without a warrant.

This also indicates a consistency with Bush's last attempted appointment, of Harriet Miers. Right wing fanatics were puzzled (and yes, admit it, a little hurt) that Bush appointed somebody without proven right wing fanaticism on key issues. Why on earth did he choose her? As he tried to rally support among fundie fanatics, GOP party chair Ken Mehlman was quoted as telling them of the need to confirm a justice who will not interfere with the administration’s management of the war on terrorism.

That what Miers was all about: the loyalty to do the right thing if the court tried to restrict the President's power to do whatever he wants, as long as he says it's necessary to defend the U.S. (which may actually mean to him, his rich buddies, his church and a few of his favorite corporations.) Having failed at that, Bush chose somebody who'd shown evidence on the record of supporting such power, even if he didn't happen to be a proven personal toadie.

This of course is only the opening act of what is likely to be The Winter of Our Discontent--the Series. There are the unfolding scandals involving ace lobbyist Abramoff, the delayed justice to De Lay, as well as two other dubious snooping campaigns, by the Pentagon and FBI respectively. The White House National Security Agency buggings (if such an arcane term can be used for a whole new era of electronic spying) are the most clearly contrary to law, though the White House is aggressively asserting its Constitutional right to ignore the Constitution. This is going to be a matter for the courts first, and I suspect it's the reason for Bush taking this stance and doing what John Dean said was unprecedented: a President admitting an impeachable offense. Aggressive assertion of his presidential power would tend to make this a matter for the Supreme Court to decide (insulating Bush from congressional action), which would make sense if Alito wins confirmation, as so far is expected.

But that's not all. The Plame Game isn't over, and Rove is still a favorite to be indicted.In the meantime, Bush is taking the same damn the torpedoes full speed ahead rhetorical stance on Iraqnam, where the news is not changing American public opinion in Bushcorpse favor. Like more death and destruction, news of poor oil revenue, a Pentagon study that up to 80% of Marine casualities could have been prevented by the use of body armor which is available but the Pentagon won't use, and now, a study by a Nobel Prize winning economist and a Harvard budget expert that the real cost of the Iraqmire could eventually be over two TRILLION DOLLARS. This is more than ten times the official estimate.

As this news gets into the national bloodstream, discontent is likely to increase. Bushcorpse stopped its free fall to the bottom in opinion polls at least temporarily, but its much publicized "rebound" still has 60% against him. A month from now the free fall could be back.Especially as it sinks in: three more years...

Ranting Back at the Engineers of Interconnected Ignorance

Charlie Rose just had one of those fascinating and infuriating group interview shows on what’s next in technology and society, global economics and the U.S. These people---like the head cheese of Cisco systems, president of Stanford U., John Doerr and Ether Dyson who have so many titles for so many entities (virtual or not) that they should have extra names---are undoubtedly smart, and they make a lot of sense on a number of issues. Doerr has a list for immediate needs, like a commitment to 100,000 new engineers from U.S. schools (and the end of idiotic Homeland Security laws that chase away foreign students) in four years, U.S. energy independence in five years, commitment to dealing with pandemics, plus real broadband, real health care, actual education in schools, etc. These priorities (many being widely shared among technology celebrities and ceos) are inarguable.

How far the U.S. has fallen behind in Internet related technology, in producing scientists and engineers, as well as in supporting a decent society with good public health, health insurance, education and respect for learning---it's all an immense and depressing scandal.But some of the rah rah for innovations that technology will and should create, especially via the Internet, are a lot more troublesome. Some are the product of the limitations of scientific and engineering thinking. Some are just dumb.

For example, the idea that all information will be and should be digital, because it makes it accessible to more people. This is part of the Internet=Everything approach, so typical of a new technology yet in this case particularly dangerous because it’s possible. In ten years, says Ether Dyson, the Internet will be like electricity---you won’t even think about it, you’ll just think about what you can do with it. It’s got a McLuhanesque prophetic non sequiter ring to it, and it’s also functionally insane. Because a great many of our real problems today are due to the fact that we don’t think about electricity, the infrastructure that delivers it, the costs to individuals and the planet of how we deliver it and especially the energy used.

On a practical level, it’s very easy for me to focus on this because I’ve just gone for 36 hours without electricity---and people I know who live within a couple of miles went 3 or 4 days, and within15 or 20 miles went 6 days without it. But 36 hours was enough to teach the lessons that we are more and more dependent on electricity---even for (as I mentioned in previous posts) things that didn’t used to be, like gas heating and cooking. So there are a lot of people around here talking about getting blowers for woodstoves that are powered by the heat of the stove itself, or kicking themselves for throwing out their manual typewriters.

The lesson may be forgotten, but fried systems and downed lines due to storms (which are likely to increase in many places in the next decade) or supply and demand problems and other infrastructure difficulties are both real and indicative. The same fossil fuel energy that is fueling those storms through global heating, is the energy that is running out. Local disruptions are likely to increase as the problems of supply and infrastructure grow. And though technologists don’t like to point it out, the tremendous growth of the Internet has accounted for a large percentage of the growth in energy use.

And don’t bother me about wireless—microwave technologies are quite vulnerable, and also depend on the physical world of structures with transmitters, as well as energy sources.

I ask you, who in their right mind would discard multiple ways of storing and presenting “information” in favor of a single highly vulnerable system? Scientists and engineers and people who would make a lot of money creating such a system, apparently.

Unless and until highly portable, decentralized, highly efficient, sustainable and renewable energy systems are widely and cheaply available as part of every electronic device, linked to a digital distribution infrastructure that is impervious to physical or software sabotage or disruption, this Internet as Everything within ten years is a moronic fantasy.

And if you haven’t accomplished this and a lot more in ten or maybe twenty years, it’s unlikely that anyone is going to have this fantasy ever again, at least in this millennium.

The urge to digitize entire libraries is supposed to supplant the need for those libraries, which the president of Stanford characterized as imprisoning information within walls. That’s very attractive to schools like Humboldt State, strapped for cash, which has already gone two years without buying a single new book for its library, apparently with little complaint.

I don’t see libraries as imprisoning information; I see libraries as protecting information. Make it accessible, of course. But don’t destroy it. (I can hear them objecting now—of course, we didn’t mean burn the books. Well, wake up, dreamers. They’ve already burned the card catalogues. Now in a brownout nobody can find anything. Of course, you burn the books. The San Francisco Library did when it went digital. I suspect the practice is widespread, even before digitizing those destroyed books was affordable. Who can afford to store them? And pretty soon, who can afford to print more? Sure, this is a broad question with many individual solutions, but the prediction was also broad.)

Then there’s the knotty problem of who is going to pay “content providers” in this new digital world. There are real problems involved, but the solutions I heard proposed show the fundamental idiocy embedded in the very vocabulary used to discuss these matters.We have to find a way to “pay content providers” so they will have “incentive to create content.” The Cisco Kid said that the wave of the future would be to pay not for information or access but for interaction. His two examples were: you don’t pay the doctor to take your blood pressure. You take it online yourself. You pay the doctor to interpret it, along with other medical information; you can instantly get three or four opinions on the same information. Second, you don’t pay somebody to write something, you pay them to answer questions about it.

The practicality of getting four competent doctors to comment on the same trivial case aside, the writer example gave me chills, perhaps because it revived every fear sweated into me by some of my English lit professors who took the Leavis side over C.P. Snow in the perennial Two Cultures debate, particularly on the cultural cluelessness of engineers.

I presume some of these “content providers” are artists, musicians and literary writers. First of all, they don’t need to be paid as “incentive.” They need to be paid so they can a) live and b) write, not necessarily in that order. Incentive is not the problem.

Secondly, this seems to propose that you don’t pay Doris Lessing or Gabriel Garcia Marquez for writing their books. You pay them for answering questions about them.

In some ways, this is only an extension of what’s been happening for the past two decades, which is writers like Doris Lessing are forced to go on book tours and promote their books in order to get paid. Now writers must do Internet chats, etc. or their publishers may very well refuse to publish them. Agents are more interested in your marketing plan than your words. (Whereas nobody seems to care about the expertise at writing of a marketing expert.) This is due to the marriage of technology and business. And this might be a real rather than prophetic example of the Cisco Kid’s belief that “technology will dictate business strategy.”

But promotion makes celebrities, not writers. And only someone who doesn’t have the foggiest notion of what a literary work is, who possibly has never read a literary novel or even a short poem of Rumi, could possibly suggest that the proper job of literary writers is explaining what they write.

By all means give us 100,000 new engineers, and teach them Chinese while you’re at it. But you’d better pay some attention to developing 100,000 new literature majors if you want a society in which humans can be human. And make a few new portable typewriters while you’re at it.

Tirhas Habtegiris: Death and Its Strange Bedfellows

There's a little flurry of interest on the web, notably on skeptical community.com, concerning the death by hospital decision of Tirhas Habtegiris, who I wrote about here. It seems to have been prompted by a commentary in Slate by Steven E. Landsburg.

This column is obtuse in the extreme. There is no paragraph after the opening one in which Landsburg gets the point.

The opening graph however is interesting in how he decides to summarize the case:

Tirhas Habtegiris, a 27-year-old terminal cancer patient at Baylor Regional Medical Center in Plano, Texas, was removed from her ventilator last month because she couldn't pay her medical bills. The hospital gave Ms. Habtegiris' family 10 days' notice, and then, with the bills still unpaid, withdrew her life support on the 11th day. It took Ms. Habtegiris about 15 minutes to die.

The facts reproduce those in the two TV station reports, the only reporting I've seen. But he goes farther than those reports in stating categorically that Habtegiris was taken off life support because her bills weren't paid.But then Landsburg goes off on a bizarre riff about the relative value of ventilator insurance and a quart of milk to a poor person. In countering a blogger's claim that pulling the plug on a conscious person wasn't "compassionate", he lectures thusly:

Now let me remind you what "compassion" means. According to Merriam-Webster Online (which, by virtue of being online, really ought to be easily accessible to bloggers), compassion is the "sympathetic consciousness of others' distress together with a desire to alleviate it." By that definition, there is nothing particularly compassionate about giving ventilator insurance to a person who really feels a more urgent need for milk or eggs. One might even say that choosing to ignore the major sources of others' distress is precisely the opposite of sympathetic consciousness.

It takes a very active if deformed imagination to interpret the act of compassion the blogger--or any other non-deluded person--meant as providing this woman with ventilator insurance (whatever that may be I personally have never seen it offered.)Landsburg doesn't even bother to spell out his premise, as if we all share it with him: that if someone doesn't have ventilator insurance, or some other means to pay, then naturally they deserve to die.

Let's stipulate that there are some moral ambiguities in this situation, particularly in the fact that this woman would not live without the intervention of a ventilator machine. But it can be argued---and it seems to me---that this is a distinction in degree and not in kind, from any sort of life-saving care. If someone is denied medication to avoid an oncoming heart attack--if you refuse to go get the pills--how different is that?

To most reasonable people, the compassion referred to here is in continuing to provide care to a conscious living person, to abide by her wishes to continue living, and work out who is going to pay for it later (as if there aren't a thousand ways to manage that.) At minimum, to keep her on the ventilator until her final wish is granted: to die in the arms of her mother, then in Africa and unable to get to the hospital in Texas within the 10 day to death sentence.

That's the "compassion" argument.But there is an even more fundamental issue, which is: justice. How is this different from murder? This is reportedly a conscious person. Can you define keeping a machine on for the time it takes for her to die as extraordinary means? Yes, the woman was defined as terminally ill. But death is certain for everyone, though the time it will occur is generally uncertain. Everyone who is murdered is therefore dead "before their time," if that time might be 60 years or 60 seconds.

There are laws and rules about allowing certain terminally ill patients to die by withdrawing life support, but as far as I know, these require the patient to be persistently unconscious, or "brain-dead." In other words, the person as a person is already dead. There is an argument for "mercy killing" if the patient wishes to die rather than suffer prolonged pain leading directly to death.

But neither of these seems to have been the situation. She was conscious, and not asking to be relieved of her life. The fact is that this woman's death at that time required an act: turning off the machine. Under the circumstances as we know them so far, how is that different in kind from hitting her in the head with a pipe?

And if a conscious person is denied life because she can't pay her bills, how is this different from murder for money?

My first concern here is that there has been no serious reporting on this situation. Until we know the facts in more detail--what the true situation in the hospital was, what the law was and what it says that was applied to her case, along with some idea of the laws and rules and ethics that bear on this situation, we're all just speculating.

However, if Landsburg's commentary is all we get, we're all in big trouble. Behind all our concerns is the spectre of you or me in that hospital bed. Maybe Landsburg is well fixed enough to not worry. Few of us are.

Blow It Up, Blow the Money, Go Home

If you need any further evidence of the complete bankruptcy of the Bushwar in Iraq, there is this from the Washington Post: [my interpolations in blue]

The Bush administration does not intend to seek any new funds for Iraq reconstruction in the budget request going before Congress in February, officials say. The decision signals the winding down of an $18.4 billion U.S. rebuilding effort in which roughly half of the money was eaten away by the insurgency, a buildup of Iraq's criminal justice system and the investigation and trial of Saddam Hussein.

Of course, this doesn't count the billions in bribes, kickbacks, fraud and excessive profits by Halliburton and other Bushcorpse pals. Iraq still doesn't have reliable electricity, water or sewage; except for the right to get purple on your finger every few months, Iraqi daily life is worse off than it was under Saddam, apart from thousands of violent deaths.

As for Saddam's trial, the evidence of his torturing people is at this point a highly embarrassing reminder of Bushcorpse torturing people, and not just in Iraq as Saddam did, but in secret prisons throughout Europe and Asia, and at Guantanamo.

AND Iraqis are still be tortured by their government, or rogue elements of it. A month or so ago we had the extraordinary complaint of the country's president that the police or militias or the army (who knows which is which?) were torturing lots of people. Just like the good old days.

Just under 20 percent of the reconstruction package remains unallocated. When the last of the $18.4 billion is spent, U.S. officials in Baghdad have made clear, other foreign donors and the fledgling Iraqi government will have to take up what authorities say is tens of billions of dollars of work yet to be done merely to bring reliable electricity, water and other services to Iraq's 26 million people.

"The U.S. never intended to completely rebuild Iraq," Brig. Gen. William McCoy, the Army Corps of Engineers commander overseeing the work, told reporters at a recent news conference. In an interview this past week, McCoy said: "This was just supposed to be a jump-start."

When the U.S. began the "reconstruction," they employed big U.S. firms, all Bushcorpse pals, instead of contracting with Iraqis who had built the infrastructure in the first place. These companies brought in cheap foreign labor to increase their profits, and Iraqi men had something like a 50% unemployment rate. That act of stupidity, corruption and paternalism led to complete failure, and now that the place is in utter chaos, Bushcorpse decides to leave it to the people they should have financed in the beginning.

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.