One Man Truth Squad

What the World Needs Now: 2009

2009-01-03T11:09:00.000-08:00

"What the world needs now is another folk singer
Like I need a hole in my head" David Lowery, Cracker

As those lines suggest, the time for passivity and "words, words words"(as Hamlet would say) is over. In two weeks the U.S. will finally have the regime change at home that we have so desperately needed as our war criminals(Bush, Cheney...) have squandered our financial stability, sense of hope and optimism, and perception around the world in the name of enriching their war machine allies by overthrowing sovereign states. Indeed, the masters of war have once again brought this country to its knees, tearing apart the delicate social fabric that has allowed America to be a beacon of hope for generations of immigrants who have built this nation and made it better, stronger, more just. My love for this country is deep, despite the horrific legacy of racial intolerance that has dominated our short history. Unlike the "advanced" European societies and pretty much every other country in the world, we have made incredible progress addressing the disease we call racism, despite our poor record of recognizing the class disparities that threaten to ruin this nation if we do not confront the disgusting level of greed personified by Wall Street and CEOs that laughably continue to think they are worth hundreds of times the wages they pay their workers.

Just how does one develop the misconception that it is acceptable to ask for a $10 million bonus when your company is being bailed out by taxpayers? This shocking level of arrogance can only be addressed by putting these criminals in jail. How does a country justify putting a kid in jail for stealing a bicycle while Madoff steals $50 billion and is given house arrest(at a $7 million penthouse)? This is no Golden Age; it's the new Gilded Age, with the toxic and dangerous combination of privatization of profits and socialization of losses(e.g. Wall Street does well and they keep their billions; they fail and WE bail them out) This is the groundwork for social upheaval on a scale this country has never witnessed, and there's a legitimate chance(at least 25%) that we sink into Depression(10% drop in GDP) in 2009. If you think this is overstated consider the legacy of 2008(NY Times 1-1-09): Stock Market down 34-40%($6.7 TRILLION of wealth, pensions, savings etc. lost), 2.6 million jobs lost, median home prices drop from $230,000 to $180,000, government takeover of 206 banks, treasury bills dropping below 0%( people are so scared of losing their money, they will pay to keep it safe instead of earning interest) Good luck trying to find numbers that match those in the history of this country. Of course your search will lead you one place: The Great Depression.

Rarely has a country entered a new year with this profound juxtaposition of hope and fear--hope that Obama's rhetoric and vision can enable the country--and indeed the world--to confront the most dire economic circumstances a president has faced since FDR's election in 1932, as the Great Depression was just kicking into high gear in the aftermath of a market meltdown that was both significantly different and disconcertingly similar to the challenges that this nation must overcome if we are to avoid a downward spiral of economic devastation that would be a tremendous shock to pretty much all Americans, except those very few, such as my 90 year-old Italian grandmother who literally walked through the snow in Buffalo, New York searching for work to help feed her family during the early 1930s. Most 12 year-olds in this society are not really up to that task in my humble opinion. We like to tell ourselves that we are the most creative, hard working people on earth, when in reality we have become soft, very soft, content to live beyond our means by charging our lifestyles on credit cards, fed by the pimp bankers who gave $750,000 mortgage loans to lettuce pickers who make $14,000 a year.(NY Times). Go back and look for all the safety net programs this country had in 1930. There was no safety net--you either worked, starved, or stood in soup lines. Indeed, one of the more bitterly ironic indicators during the stock market crash was that on several days one of the only stocks to see gains was...Campbell's Soup!

So, will Obama be the next FDR or Jimmy Carter? Time will tell, of course, and I, as a big supporter, both in this blog and financially, wish him well. We need him to be a great president, but I am not going to back him on every issue simply because I voted for him. That is not the way I think nor is it the objective of this blog. It's pathetic to see the talking heads on TV either supporting or attacking Obama on every issue. Here's my take: He has shown himself to be prudent and a centrist as far as his cabinet. It's not the "change" he promised, and I think the country needs, but neither is it irresponsible. Hillary and the crew should do a good job if they are willing to buy into Obama's plan. What concerns me most about Obama is his tendency to try to appease everyone. That's not what this election was about: He won on a message of change, so it is a mistake to reach out to homophobic asses like Rick Warren who ambushed him in the staged discussion with McCain and feels that homosexuality between two consenting adults is somehow the same as bestiality and pedophilia. I can understand someone being opposed to gay marriage, even though it's idiotic to suggest that it threatens my marriage. My wife and I are quite happy and are not threatened at all by gay couples. Live and let live--more people should follow that, especially when the issues do not affect the public at large. Warren is about as enlightened on these matters as Bull Connor was on race issues in 1960s Alabama, so if Obama wants to engage the man in a dialog to help him overcome his hatred of a significant group of Americans that supported Obama's campaign, fine. But invite him to be a part of the Inauguration? So, what's next, a KKK grand wizard, an anti-Semite, a Minuteman? I don't think so. Obama is condoning the one generally accepted form of illogical hatred in our society--the persecution of gays, usually by Bible(or some other religious text)-toting folks that use the good book to attack gays even though the Bible is full of polygamy, execution for children who disobey their parents etc. etc. If anyone actually read the Old Testament they would be ashamed of quoting their passages and pasting them to their foreheads. I was surprised that Obama would be so tone-deaf on this issue, especially when there is significant tension in California because 70% of blacks voted for Prop 8, the measure that passed in November and not only bars gay marriage but seeks to revoke the gay marriages that have already taken place. Indeed, 8 is hate in my view. I also understand that for many blacks it is offensive to claim that prejudice against gays is the same as racism because gay people can keep their sexual orientation private while blacks cannot hide their skin color; furthermore, I also acknowledge the profound influence of the church in black communities, and while I am puzzled why any black person would embrace a religion that was used to subjugate them in slavery for centuries I understand that the church has also had an important positive influence in many black communities, but facts are stubborn things, and Obama of all people should be more enlightened than the average American, myself included, and avoid the little wink and nod he gave to Americans who stubbornly retain their bigoted views. That's not change we can believe in.

Other than these real and potential missteps Obama has done an excellent job of both preparing to take office and not appearing to nudge the war criminals out before Jan. 20. So, what should he do in 2009 to save this nation from a potentially cataclysmic financial meltdown?

1. Send a message to the world that he will be a strong commander-in-chief. Obama cannot allow countries to test his mettle, as is the current case in the Israel-Hamas situation. Put an end to this affair by sending in UN peacekeepers; this will anger both sides, a major reason why it is a good idea. Hamas needs to be overthrown and Israel needs to have restraint: some primitive rockets capable of doing very little tangible damage do not call for massive retaliation and civilian deaths. Both sides have plenty of blood on their hands, and while I sympathize much more with Israel simply because I think they, unlike the Arab states, are sincerely interested in living in peace, the fact remains that Israel is not going to bomb their way to peace. I do not buy into the "Islam is a violent religion" rhetoric because there are obviously Muslims who want to live in peace and keep their religion to themselves rather than searching out infidels to murder, but I also refuse to blindly claim that the Koran is only full of peace, love, and understanding. As with the Bible, it's full of hatred, intolerance and some love, but ignorant extremists find more than enough "evidence" in the book to justify in their simple little minds the complete destruction of Israel. If America were under the type of assault Israel has endured for decades, we would act in the same manner(How many bombs from Tijuana would hit San Diego before we wiped out the entire city? Think about it...), but their current offensive and the murder of innocent civilians is simply sowing the seeds of hatred for many generations to come. They have the best military intelligence in the world, so they know exactly where the terrorists are(as they have bombed precise houses) so get in there with ground troops and get after the real problems. Yes, it will be bloody but that's what war is. There has never been a war won with bombing raids only; they should know that from Lebanon. Get your hands dirty or get out.
Obama needs to show leadership to the rest of the world and there is no better place to start than this confrontation.

2. Obama needs to institute an immediate and significant payroll tax cut for people making $150K or less to quickly stimulate the economy. Rebate checks take too long and have shown to be ineffective because people put them in the bank. The massive jobs program he has proposed is of limited usefulness because while it will help in the long-term it is also a relic of the past. This crisis is not the same as 1932; the dynamics are very different and require different strategies. He's rightly concerned about unemployment, which will get much worse in early 2009, but this economy cannot wait for action. The only way to act quickly is through payroll tax deductions, as they can change those percentages in a matter of weeks, while job programs will take months and years to have a significant impact. Obama--and the nation--does not have months or years. We are on the precipice of a financial meltdown; if he doesn't act quickly there will be many more bank failures and the type of run on the banks that led to the Great Depression. The TARP program has been a horrible failure because they gave money to banks, who in turn have sat on the money, afraid that the bad mortgage securities were going to wipe out their entire operations--that's the essence of the problem: Banks are hoarding money they were given to get credit rolling, and their greed and incompetence may bring down the entire world financial market system. There is very little consumer confidence in this society; people are scared and they rightly feel much poorer than they were a year ago. This type of fear leads people to stop spending and that's exactly what is going on. Americans' insatiable appetite for consumer goods has weaned and it's bringing our economy--as well as China's--to a dramatic reversal that will continue to have dire consequences in 2009.

3. Finally, the most important action Obama must take to save the country is to deal with the housing crisis, which is only going to intensify in 2009. Housing got us into this crisis and there is no way out except to deal with the mortgage meltdown that has led to a catastrophic decline and home values, which in turn has destroyed consumer confidence. One of the best recent books is Financial Shock by Moody's Mark Zandi, which details the crisis through mid-2008 and offers a very sobering picture of what the country faces in 2009, as the mortgage crisis is nowhere near its peak. There are literally $500 billion in bad mortgages that haven't reset yet and when they do the decline in prices will continue to the point that millions and millions more Americans will either lose their homes or simply walk away from a house that is underwater, as it makes no sense to pay a $400,000 mortgage on a house that is worth $200,000 or less. If the government does not act to stabilize housing prices no one is going to buy or sell and more and more jobs will be lost. California and several other states are in worse shape than at any time in history because housing has brought down the entire economy. When house are not bought and sold, taxes are not collected and jobs are lost--finance jobs, construction, furniture, repairs--you name it. In California an astonishing 60% of mortgages are underwater! When some one's house has dropped in value from $600,000 to $400,000 that person who has lost $200,000 in equity in a matter of months is not likely to feel good about rushing out to purchase the new plasma TV or new automobile. Sadly, many Americans have been financing their phony lifestyles with home equity loans, which have increased from $220 billion t0 $820 billion since 2000! Now those people are stuck in houses that are worth less than their first mortgage AND they have an equity loan to deal with. I opposed the pathetic $700 billion Wall St. bailout because I knew it would be used precisely for what it has been used for--to enrich Paulson's corrupt banker friends at Goldman Sachs and other banks. They have kept that money and paid their huge bonuses anyway, calling them "retention fees" so they can pay the geniuses who made all the bad loans 10 million or more each to stick around in 2009 to help further destroy the American economy. That money could have literally bought every underwater mortgage in the country, allowing banks to wipe them off their balance sheets so that they could begin making loans again--prudent loans to qualified borrowers. If Paulson and Bush would have acted on this we would not be where we are, so Obama needs to clean up the mess quickly by establishing a system to buy these bad assets(which was what the money was originally allocated for) and essentially reset the housing market by helping it find a "bottom." Currently, the bottom is nowhere in sight and prices continue to plunge, even with no buyers, for who would buy a house now when it may lose another 50% in value in the next 12 months? The only sales in California are short sales and foreclosures, so much so that even houses that are not in foreclosure are having to be sold at foreclosure prices. If this situation is not addressed the country will not get out of this predicament. It's really that simple.

These are the times of the New Austerity, as Christmas retail sales were dismal and major manufacturing in this country--GM AND Toyota etc.--are on the brink of disaster, with declines of 30-50% from last year. People are not buying cars, Big 3 or other. The Big 3 is in deep trouble, in part, because more advanced societies have socialized health care rather than burdening the companies so their bottom line is much different than those of German and Japanese car makers. These redneck Southern senators who attack GM workers as overpaid($60K a year for working on an assembly line is overpaid but $35 million for a Wall St banker is OK?) are desperate to hold on to their $14 an hour jobs by attacking the "fat cats" who make $30 for GM. $14 an hour is $30K a year. How many Americans can survive on that paycheck, and if they can, how do they do it? Well, we know the answer to that: They charge their consumer purchases on credit cards, putting the country deeper in debt, and now those individuals do not have the money to be consumers because there is no more easy credit. The party's over friends, but these ignorant Senators are too blind to see that cutting workers' wages is not going to stimulate the economy. It's the decline in well-paying middle class jobs that has created the new Gilded Age. The rich, led by greedy Republican tax and employment policies, have succeeded in destroying the middle class through depressing wages and paying executives and shareholders more, as well as sending jobs overseas to increase dividends. Trouble is, the loss of middle class jobs has gutted the U.S. economy. How do you think the Dow surpassed 14,000 last year before sinking as low as 7300 when reality hit? Unchecked and unregulated greed. Capitalism does not work without checks and balances because people are greedy by nature; that's why we have laws--and $50 billion Ponzi schemes. Indeed, the American economy is currently one big Ponzi scheme that is about ready to come crashing down if Obama is unable or unwilling to take bold, decisive action. There's a great new book called Unequal Democracy by Larry Bartels, Princeton professor, on this topic. Check it out.

It's been 76 years since a president took office facing the types of challenges that confront the historic presidency of Barack Obama. He has the goodwill of the vast majority of Americans who not only want him to do well but literally need him to be a transformational president, someone with the strength of character and vision to make significant changes, not a middle-of-the-road status quo leader. His future--and that of the nation--depends on this man's character. Let's all hope he is up to the task.

"A New Day in America..."

2008-11-04T20:18:00.000-08:00

As Congressman John Lewis observed, tonight America decided to "lay down the burden of race and move ahead" in a profoundly nonviolent revolution, and once again America reclaimed its place as the true leader of the world, for in no other country on earth would Obama's story be possible, such is the reality of racial hatred, religious intolerance, and class divisions that define even the best of European nations. Make no mistake about it, tonight we all witnessed the most important day in U.S. history in at least a generation, and in one seminal event America did more to realize Martin Luther King's dream than in the forty years of struggle since his death, as now every child born in this country can honestly aspire to the highest office in the land. It is no longer a line teachers try to sell kids in rundown classrooms but a real, tangible reality: Yes, you can achieve, and no, despite our heartbreaking legacy of injustice, we are not a country that is unwilling to transcend our past. Indeed, we are a country that will judge people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin, and despite the many challenges that we still must confront, we are, in essence, a nation that believes in our ideals of social justice and equality for all. I have never been more proud to be an American than I am tonight, as I looked my 2 month old daughter in the eyes and told her that she will never live in a country that is dominated by racist or sexist values: That is the message this nation sent tonight with the election of Barack Obama.

So how did Obama overcome enormous, unprecedented challenges to win this election. Here are the six most important aspects of Obama's victory:

1. He should call Bush to thank him for being the worst president in U.S. history. Bush's complete and utter incompetence opened the door to radical change in much the same way that an Indian-American--Bobby Jindal--was elected in the Deep South after Hurricane Katrina when Louisiana's residents were so fed up with the corrupt state leaders that they essentially said, "this 36-year-old kid seems young and smart, so let's give him a shot at running this state." That's basically what many conservative Americans said as they voted for Obama: Yes, he's a black man, but he's Harvard-educated, level-headed, and seems to know his stuff, so let's give him a shot, for it can't be any worse than this idiot Bush.

2. Obama had the most impressive campaign organization in U.S. history. Starting in the primaries, they left Clinton behind, utilizing the Internet not just to solicit funds but to put together a 50 state machine that mobilized voters and got people to the polls, especially in the caucus states that gave Obama the delegate lead that enabled him to hold off Clinton. Obama wisely rejected public financing and buried the GOP in advertising dollars, even as they cried about how unfair it was that the Dems finally had their chance to have more money. He knew the public didn't care much about the public financing issue, so he absorbed the flip-flop blow back and overwhelmed McCain in the battleground states and put him on the defensive in red states, which made the difference in the end in states such as Florida and especially Virginia. It is a model that will be studied for generations, and Obama did his part by running a literally flawless campaign. Except for a few stumbles in the primaries he made no mistakes.

3. On August 29th, McCain made blunder number one: The selection of Palin was a disaster, as it solidified his base in an election where needed to appeal to the center. Palin scared the hell out of reasonable independents and Democrats whom McCain had to have. Palin reinforced the perception that the GOP was a party of disgruntled white people, and all she brought to the ticket were a bunch of racists who were either going to sit it out or vote for McCain anyway. Look at the composition of those rallies in the final weeks: Angry rural white people calling for Obama's death, that's the crowd she cultivated, and it became painfully clear to open-minded Americans that she was more of a grand wizard of the KKK than a viable president of the United States. After her pathetic debate performance she was relegated to SNL skits and not taken seriously by most of America. As the results made painfully clear, she did much more harm than good simply because people had no confidence that she could take over if the 72-year-old man with a 1000 page medical history were to die in office. That's the bottom line; she failed the only test a VP has to pass--can this person be trusted as president?

4. On September 15, as the stock market was literally crashing, McCain made blunder number two when he repeated the idiotic observation that "the fundamentals of the economy are strong." Even the most simplistic investors who simply have a 401K knew that their nest egg was disappearing everyday, so to hear the cognitive dissonance of a man who wants to be president make such a ridiculous statement was alarming and caused a dramatic shift in the polls. It was clear at that point that McCain was indeed as out of touch as his seven houses and dozen cars suggested. He was reduced to a typical rich, old, white Republican who has no sense of the challenges average Americans struggle with on a monthly basis. It was a devastating mistake.

5. McCain inexplicably dug himself in deeper on the economic issue when he played his little "suspend the campaign" game--and then failed to get anything done because the GOP rejected him. It was a humiliating defeat that led him to arrive at the debate with his tail between his legs and reduced to having to support the bailout package that Bush demanded and that the GOP helped pass. Obama survived the bad decision to vote for the bailout only because he waited to be certain that McCain would vote yes before he did.

6. In all three debates Obama reassured the nation that he was cool, calm, and competent, as he destroyed "Forrest Grump" McCain on the issues and left him looking flustered and angry. The debates were the first time most Americans saw Obama, and they liked what they saw: He was forceful and astute, as well as refined and respectful, certainly not some Angry Black Man. The debates had a huge impact in terms of convincing Americans that it was OK to vote for this guy, that he cared about the country, knew the issues, had a vision, and seemed much more skilled than Bush. The debates sealed the deal, as McCain never was able to catch up in the polls.

Now, thankfully, Joe the plumber can get back to the very real and very important work of unplugging toilets, and Palin can fade into Alaska oblivion: Their 15 minutes are up. John McCain has served this country well and Obama should seek his counsel, as he is an honorable man at heart. He is not the first person whose ambition cost him his soul, but McCain could have run a much more dishonorable campaign than he did, and he deserves respect for that choice. He made a deal with the devil, those "agents of intolerance" he rejected in 2000, and the GOP needs to have a good, old-fashioned war for the soul of the party. The right wing, bigoted evangelicals need to be cut loose to form their own party so that moderates can regain control in case Obama does not live up to the promise of his potential. Obama has a monumental task ahead of him, but he also has no excuses, with large majorities in both houses. As he seemed to indicate in his acceptance speech, he knows it's time to get to work, to try to save this great but fading nation.
He will indeed be judged by the content of his character, not the color of his skin, in these next four years, and all Americans should wish him the best of luck. He will need it.

October Surprise: Powell Eviscerates GOP. McCain Meltsdown in Final Debate

2008-10-19T15:43:00.000-07:00

In a resounding rejection of Republican policies and campaign tactics, universally respected General Colin Powell delivered the most devastating attack on McCain since Obama silenced him with his three unanswered "you were wrong!" statements in the first debate. On "Meet the Press" Powell not only offered a sincere endorsement for a man he called a "transformational figure," but more importantly provided an unexpectedly ferocious attack on the people McCain himself once called the "agents of intolerance" but are now the ones McCain sold his soul to in this misguided attempt at a presidential campaign, namely the right wing racists who, sadly, have taken over the party and in doing so have reduced it to a party of the very rich and the very ignorant(the choice of the laughable Palin--which Powell cited as disturbing--was to appease this intolerant crowd), with a few lost and misguided good souls thrown in, although they are flocking to Obama everyday, as their goodness prevents them from turning the other cheek to people calling Obama a "terrorist" and shouting "kill him!" Intelligent Republicans cannot--and indeed are not going to--support a potential president who is too insecure to sit down on "Meet the Press" or even conduct a basic press conference. She has brought shame to true GOP intellectuals because of her complete lack or intellectual curiosity or even a cursory interest in the issues that will affect the lives of all Americans, and she is going to negotiate with Putin? Someone who is scared to death of Tom Brokaw...Nor can they endure idiots such as the Congresswoman Bachmann from Minnesota who called Obama "un-American" and called for a new round of McCarthyistic investigations of which members of Congress are un-American. Is this what the GOP has really been reduced to?(Powell singled her out as symbolic of this new, horrible GOP that he is repudiating.) I certainly do not think McCain is un-American in any way. Indeed, I respect him much more than cowards such as Bush who ran from military service during Vietnam and fools such as Romney, who claimed his five sons were serving their country by trying to help him get elected: That's about as un-American a statement I have heard from a politician. Perhaps that is what she was talking about--who the draft dodgers are, who refuses to send their kids to Iraq while they talk tough themselves. However, I doubt that's what she has in mind...Now Obama is a "socialist" according to another delusional old woman in a nursing home who was screaming that one word at him over and over, thanks to one of her heroes McCain or Palin, who evidently taught her that word; Obama should have asked her if she cashed her "SOCIAL" Security check this month, that most beloved of our "socialist" programs, but if Obama is a socialist what does that make the man who supported a $700 billion bailout for Wall Street AND introduced a $300 billion socialist bailout for banks who made bad loans?

Indeed, McCain is as socialist as they come(in his own words he supports "regulation " of "greed and corruption on Wall Street"), and they have the nerve to say shame on Obama for trying to "redistribute wealth" by asking the rich to pay what they were paying during the Clinton years--remember that was when we PAID for our tax breaks with cuts in welfare benefits, closing military bases etc., balanced the budget, AND had a booming economy! It's absurd to suggest that restoring the tax bracket from the 1990s for people who make over $250K is going to somehow destroy the economy, when the economy is pretty much destroyed already. The GOP, starting with the fraud Reagan, is the party of cutting taxes AND increasing spending, thus leaving future generations with the bills to pay. Take a minute to research budget deficits, including those when the GOP controlled both houses of Congress. Try cutting your family's income while increasing your spending. Where will that lead your family? Sleeping on the streets or in your car? That's where our country is headed thanks to the irresponsible combination of tax breaks for the very wealthy and unrestrained spending, especially on the bloated military budget and obscene tax breaks for Bush's oil buddies.

Is this race for president over? Of course not! I know people who are highly educated and think it's over and that Obama will win 40 states etc., yet they are oblivious to the reality that a black man named Barack Hussein Obama is not going to be a landslide victor in this country in these times, not even against John "Sidney" McCain III, champion of the common man, despite never holding a private sector job in his life, except when given one by his wife's daddy, and not even in the worst economic times since the 1930s, a direct result of the complete and utter disaster that is George W Bush, a president who offered no leadership in a time when the country desperately needed it and now is so despised that McCain takes it as an insult to be compared to the man whose GOP jersey he wears. The GOP is setting up a brilliant plan to try to suppress the vote and steal this election as they did in 2000 and 2004 if they can get it close enough to put it in the hands of states with Republican governors and secretaries of state. These are the people who delivered in the last two elections, so if anyone thinks Obama will coast to an easy victory he or she has a very short memory. This will be a brutal fight up to and including election day and perhaps weeks and days afterward, when the GOP lawyers will go after the irrelevant Acorn, who are supposedly trying to steal the election because a few crooks are filling out phony registration forms to get paid more. Anyone who has ever been part of a voter registration drive knows that stuff like that happens and that's why we have someone called a REGISTRAR, who confirms eligibility. This is all much ado about nothing except for GOP plans to intimidate people so that they will not vote. If they can bring out the dogs and cops to the polling places they certainly will.

Anyway, Obama, ironically, has W. to thank for his good fortunes, for the Republicans are humiliated to a degree that many are running for office with ads that do not even state their party, such is the shame they feel to be associated with a man who bears the type of universal ill will that no president has endured since Hoover. No, Nixon, was not despised nearly to the degree that Bush is. As the song goes, "Watergate does not bother me..." but down in sweet home Alabama these days it's hard to find too many people whose conscience does not bother them as we are bogged down in the Iraq fiasco and our moral standing in the world has been destroyed because of Bush's arrogance and ignorance, a truly frightening combination that is older than Greek tragedy and likely to end just as badly, as Bush wallows in hubris in the waning days of his presidency, isolated and alone, no one calling to ask him to campaign. A figure of pure pathos.
It was truly gratifying to hear Powell basically reiterate everything I wrote in my last blog entry, simply in more politically correct terms: While I termed these "people" "toothless inbreds," Powell, being the gentleman he is, called them "narrow" several times. So what do you think he meant? They are certainly not physically "narrow," as our country is the only country on earth where even the poor people are obese, so he certainly meant what we all call "narrow-minded," which is a precise and devastating analysis of the state of the GOP, as seen through the eyes of one of its own most respected statesmen!

McCain's final debate performance was indicative of his entire campaign: moments of clarity obscured by petulance and anger. On a night when Obama was flat and content to play defense and avoid any gaffes, McCain had an opportunity to make his last best case that he isn't Bush's third term. Instead, McCain walked into a brilliant trap Obama laid by claiming "I am not George Bush." While McCain's staff claimed it was some great moment, Obama's staff already had the ad ready to go, the one that featured that line, along with an array of McCain's awkward, antagonistic angry old man faces, finishing up with McCain's own boastful claim that he supported the greatest failure in U.S. history "over 90% of the time." He should not have even mentioned Bush's name, as it backfired by making people think, "actually, this guy IS a lot like Bush," which explains the overwhelming response of viewers who felt Obama won the debate, even with his B game.

McCain did a good job in the first 30 minutes of the debate but he simply couldn't restrain himself from himself, as he continually displayed his odious personality, limited insights on the economic crisis, and pathetic lack of credibility on such important issues as health care, women's health(which he mocked with his arrogant "air quotations") and abortion. Obama basically destroyed McCain when the discussion turned to these topics, as Americans generally feel that health care should be a right and that abortion should be legal but with sensible regulations such as exceptions for the "health" of the mother, incest, rape etc. Many Republicans have this misguided notion that human life begins at conception, when all advanced societies understand that POTENTIAL human life begins at conception but that a tiny clump of cells is nowhere near the same as a fully developed 30 week fetus that is viable outside the womb. To claim that these are the same is to disregard actual human life and display an astounding level of ignorance. This is common sense and that's why we have laws that treat the two as completely different. For instance, if a woman causes a miscarriage because she drank, exercised etc. early in her pregnancy, perhaps before she even knew she was pregnant, she will not be prosecuted and perhaps even jailed, but if she were to cause the unintended death of a 30 week fetus she may very well be subjected to prosecution, just as if someone murdered a woman who is 8 months pregnant the charge would be double murder, but if the woman is 8 days pregnant that would never be the charge. Why you ask? Because at 8 days it is a POTENTIAL human life...Anyway, this argument was the end of McCain's opportunity to impress independent women, who were horrified by his lack of concern for women's health and women's issues in general. This became painfully clear after the debate when independents favored Obama by over 25% in the the CNN and CBS polls. Now, it's all over but the shouting, as the campaign moves into the final stages and McCain clings to the hope that Bush and his criminal friends can deliver him an October surprise or help coordinate the "narrow victory" they now claim they will win. I would never claim that Barack Obama is absolutely the most qualified person in America to be president, as there are many Democrats and even a few Republicans that share his intellectual capacity and ability to inspire and listen to what others have to offer, but Obama is clearly more qualified than McCain, and as Powell made painfully clear, is what America needs here and now, in a time when a continuation of the Bush tragedy is a risk this nation simply cannot afford.
Vote Obama on November 4th

The face of the GOP: A pathetic old lady who calls Obama an "Arab"

2008-10-11T12:05:00.000-07:00

"How did it come to this?" someone asked me yesterday in reference to the Republican party's rallies this week that have featured crowd members shouting out and even telling news crews the following comments about Obama: "He's a terrorist!" "Bomb him!" "Kill him!" "Off with his head!" I think you get the point: These "people" are filled with the type of ignorant hatred that is a threat to American values, even as they wear their flag pins while cheering and calling for the DEATH of the first potential African-American president. Indeed, that is what this country has come to precisely because of the calculated "culture war" the Republicans began in the Reagan years and perfected in the 2000 campaign. The Republican party has sadly been reduced to, ironically, the very rich and the very ignorant. My friends who grew up Republican because they favored limited government and low taxes have nothing in common with this new party that uses billions of taxpayer dollars to bail out Wall St. criminals, nor do they relate to people who are so controlled by evangelical religious superstitions that they endorse the government telling us whom we can sleep with, what women do with their bodies, whom we can marry, what drugs people take, what scientists can do, what basic truths are taught in schools etc.

This new GOP is nothing like the Goldwater party of the 60s and 70s, and the current Republicans have literally destroyed this country because of their overt embrace of ignorance as something to celebrate(Bush is their poster boy). Case in point: I was talking with someone the other day about the overwhelming support Obama has in places like Berkeley and Boston, locations of some of the top universities in the world. My friend said, "What do you expect, it's Berkeley?" My response was, "Exactly." Think about what it says about our country when the most educated scholars and future leaders are overwhelmingly Democratic, while Billy Bob's Bible College is where you find the McCain supporters, and not coincidentally, where many of the Bush crowd came from. Monica Goodling and her mail order law degree from Pat Robertson's college is just one example. What does it say when the educated class is Democratic and Joe Sixpack and his racist buddies are the ones who knock down a few brews and show up to the McCain rally to shout "Kill him!"? Is this the America you want for your kids? Is the uneducated class the role model for your children? One glance at the electoral map will confirm everything I have noted here, as the McCain "safe" states speak for themselves(Mississippi, Alabama, Oklahoma, Utah...), while the West Coast and East Coast and sites of every celebrated university in the country are solidly Obama. What does this say about the ideas these parties represent? Even Karl Rove couldn't spin the reality that the GOP has become the party of rich greedy individuals and poor, uneducated whites who claim Obama is an "Arab" or "scares them" simply because they don't want to come right out and say that they hate black people. That's the bottom line that the media is afraid to confront because they want the money that comes from these ignorant, toothless inbreds who sit around and watch TV all day, ranting about how their plight is somehow the fault of blacks and immigrants.

Let's be brutally honest about what is going on: McCain found himself so down and out last week after getting whipped in another debate that he had his campaign brazenly tell the media that the campaign was going to "go negative," and it was very clear what that meant: Their last, best hope was to turn the country against Obama because of his race, so they began their guilt by association nonsense, calling a Chicago professor a "domestic terrorist, " even though the man has never been convicted any kind of domestic terrorism, with the intention of creating a white lynch mob that would put McCain and Palin on their shoulders and carry them across the finish line and into the White House. However, someone forgot to remind McCain just how successful these tactics would be when it comes to motivating all the racists to crawl out from under their rocks to "get the black man"("Kill him" "Bomb him"). The hapless Palin began firing up the lynch mob last week, claiming that Obama "pals around with domestic terrorists" and she and McCain continued attacking all week, even as the stock market dropped over 20% in seven days. Instead of pushing a plan to save the country's financial system, they wallowed in race baiting until it reached its logical conclusion on Friday with the overt comments about being "scared" of the "Arab." Of course, the GOP talking heads tried to defend their voters, even while McCain himself attempted to save a shred of his dignity by telling the truth for a few minutes. I have nothing but disdain for McCain, Palin, and this new Republican party, but let me be very clear: I certainly don't want any of them to be killed, bombed, or have their heads cut off, nor do I think McCain or Palin are terrorists. No, I simply recognize that they are bad people who deserve to be rejected by the American people on November 4th so that they can fade from our memory and Obama can begin the ominous--and perhaps impossible--task of rebuilding this country's economic system before all of us suffer the consequences of the worst financial collapse in the nation's history. Make no mistake about it, that is what is at stake here; this is no time for ignorant observations about "terrorists" and "Arabs." This country needs a COMPETENT leader to step up with a viable plan or all of us will endure a catastrophic future that will result in the complete and utter disintegration of our society. That's what is at stake when you vote, not whom you would rather have a beer with. We saw how well that guy did...

Debate Analysis: Sept 26 and Oct 2

2008-10-02T17:34:00.000-07:00

Republicans can breathe a sigh of relief--and perhaps send Gwen Ifill a stipend for allowing Palin to dodge questions all night--as Palin certainly avoided the type of meltdown that seemed increasingly plausible as the campaign has unfolded over the past two weeks. She has shown herself to be so monumentally ignorant that the bar was set so low that her literal survival in the debate was a moral victory for the "ignorance is bliss" crowd, otherwise known as the Republican base. Her insouciance and "aw shucks" demeanor consisted of the mindless regurgitation of a phrase--"corruption and greed on Wall Street"--and a relentless determination to avoid any substantive "debate" but rather engage in a faithful repetition of the McCain talking points, which Obama basically destroyed in the first presidential debate, namely the inability to acknowledge the colossal failure that is the Iraq War and the lucid reality of the failure of the Bush economic policies that have led the country to the precipice of another Great Depression.
Palin, while having no grasp of any relevant facts or statistics, nonetheless did a good job of endorsing a candidate(McCain) whose career has been one of supporting the economic policies that have destroyed the middle class and decimated the nation's financial system. So while she floundered talking about "Joe Six-Pack" and tried to make the case that the $100 million dollar man McCain somehow cares about the concerns of the Main Street workers he has trampled for years in his rush to worship his CEO buddies and lavish them with obscene tax breaks, Palin essentially did what they prayed she would do in the sense that there were no "I'll get back to ya" moments. Moderator Gwen Ifill, whom racist Republicans attacked as being essentially in Obama's camp because of a book that has been advertised since the summer, actually was much too deferential to Palin, as she let her off the hook again and again, even when she evidently didn't understand the term "Achilles Heel," as she made no attempt to even acknowledge the question, let alone respond. Ifill was obviously intimidated into discarding follow-up questions and allowed Palin to retreat to her favorite McCain talking point: "Greed and corruption on Wall Street..." Perhaps she could have been asked to provide a single salient example of Wall Street issues and how to address them...
Biden, on the other hand, was professional, polite and serious, presenting a thorough and analytical perspective of both the current state of the economy and the challenges that face the country in the aftermath of the president McCain bragged about "supporting over 90% of the time." That's not a good record when the president is the least popular in U.S. history. While Palin showed a hapless inability to address the mortgage crisis, let alone speak intelligently about solutions, Biden discussed practical ideas and implications of the Bankruptcy Bill while acknowledging the depth of the crisis. On health care, Palin fled to the same old "tax credit" argument that seems to be the Republican answer for everything, despite the reality that the current economic crash that has led banks to the brink of collapse and a panic that would bring down the entire system has taken place in the context of Bush's unprecedented tax breaks for the wealthy. A layman can see how well this failed policy of trickle down economics works in a system--capitalism-- whose life blood is human greed, pure and simple. That is why we have to regulate the economy, just as we regulate human behavior with those pesky things called LAWS.
Unchecked capitalism leads to rampant greed, and the Bush legacy, in addition to unilaterally attacking countries, will be the complete and utter disregard for even a basic level of oversight of our financial system. Bush and McCain are figures of genuine pathos, and their names will be mentioned with disdain for decades to come, as all Americans literally pay the cost of their criminal activities and those of their trusted friends and advisers.

The final analysis of the VP debate was that Palin exceeded expectations that were so low that one would think she were a 5th grader, but in terms of specific issues she was in way over her head and basically didn't get the better of a single question. She did a good job of memorizing a dozen or so policy positions she was fed but offered no solutions other than the trite tax breaks for the wealthy. That accounts for the perception of viewers who overwhelmingly declared Biden the winner and will certainly be more inclined to support Obama and Biden after witnessing the debate, but it was indeed a moral victory that someone with her limited intellectual capacity could endure 90 minute debate, so hats off to her, heckuva job, Palie!

In last Friday's debate, Obama accomplished his main objective--to convince undecided voters that he is a viable president rather than a neophyte. His clear articulation of his vision and profound insights on all substantive issues reassured undecided voters and resulted in a rush of support that has increased his lead in every battleground state and left a staggered McCain looking like the grumpy old man he is. It's not highly effective to say Obama "doesn't understand" when he is standing next to you essentially kicking your ass on foreign policy issues that are supposed to be your area of expertise, yet that is exactly what happened, as the climactic moment of the debate was the three punch left-right-left combination where Obama looked at the terrified McCain and told him three times: "You were wrong!" about all the major Iraq lies Bush sold the American public. McCain offered no response, as he knows he was indeed wrong about Iraq, as well as every other major policy issue("Fundamentals of the economy are strong...?") McCain should be playing a violin on the Titanic, not running for president, such is his stunning lack of vision and insight in a time of unprecedented economic uncertainty. His campaign is laughably incompetent, and he personifies the GOP dilemma of being an old and out of touch party that is of, by and for an increasingly small minority of rich old men and ladies, with the obligatory white racists thrown in. The times are indeed changing, "my friends..."

"We are a better country than this..."

2008-08-29T11:51:00.000-07:00

"We meet at one of those defining moments--a moment when our nation is at war, our economy is in turmoil, and the American promise has been threatened once more." 8-28-08

Watching Barack Obama is becoming more and more like watching the great athletes I have admired over the years, as once again he stepped up to the plate, with the burden of unrealistic expectations on his back, and proceeded to hit a grand slam. Like the Negro League great Josh Gibson, when Obama has two strikes he's not in the hole--the pitcher's in the hole, because he still has another swing. Speaking in front of 85,000 people on the anniversary of perhaps the most sacred political speech in U.S. history, Obama was able to transcend the hypocrisy of the GOP, who ridiculed his celebrity while scrambling to beg people to fill a high school gym for a McCain "rally" and deliver a speech that was not really about poetry but hard-nosed prose that rang with disdain for the Bush tragedy and their half-dead little lapdog who has sold his soul to whore himself to the same big oil interests and right wing evangelicals whose world is slipping away as this society changes in ways that were unimaginable even a generation ago.

We all remember three years ago today, as Katrina ravaged New Orleans, killing far too many brothers and sisters, it was McCain who literally ate birthday cake with his buddy George, oblivious to the suffering of poor men, women and children left to drown while the pathetic "heckuva job Brownie" did absolutely nothing to help rescue thousands of trapped Americans whose government failed them because of incompetent leaders who sent their "National Guard" to assist in an immoral, illegal, and hopelessly misguided occupation of a country that had nothing to do with 9-11 and indeed never attacked America. These idiots are asking the American people to let them finish destroying the country, with McCain pledging to continue the Bush "policies." And now, before the GOP can begin to recover from Hurricane Barack that submerged their ill will, the karma-infused Gustav approaches the Gulf Coast just in time for the GOP convention, a stark reminder of Bush-Brownie-McCain incompetence and evidence that maybe there really is a God, since it appears to be payback from an angry God for the right wing nut jobs who prayed for rain to ruin Obama's speech. God evidently doesn't like evangelical blowhards and GOP conventions anymore than She supposedly doesn't like those sinners in the Big Easy. In the final analysis, Obama's speech was a harbinger of change. It will come, even if Obama cannot overcome the worst instincts of this country in 2008. As Hamlet said, "If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come; it will be now; if it be not now; yet it will come. The readiness is all." (5.2.217-220)

Obama clearly conveyed his readiness to lead the country and, perhaps more importantly, articulated a cogent and detailed vision of what we need to do to begin to reclaim the American Dream that has been battered and bruised by eight years of an administration that is hopelessly ignorant and lacking in any type of vision. Quite frankly, I would take Kanye West's assertion after Katrina much farther: George Bush doesn't care about the average American, regardless of skin color. He has abused his office to enrich his Texas oil industry buddies and in doing so has literally murdered sons and daughters whose bodies litter the desert so that these criminals can continue doing business as usual, just on a much larger scale, with their no-bid contracts to "rebuild" a country we destroyed. In a just world--or even in many countries--Bush and Cheney would be deposed from power and executed for their war crimes, so they should slither back to the Texas and Wyoming rocks they crawled out from under and be ready to take their lumps from historians who will excoriate them for centuries to come for what they have done to this country. That is what led to Obama's frustrated "Enough!" that was a metaphor for the anger and rage of a generation of Americans who have helplessly endured the destruction of the ideals of this nation that we all love so much. As Obama said, "America, we are a better country than these last eight years. We are a better country than this." Obama's speech was the most profound wake-up call in this nation's history; however, it remains to be seen if America is up to answering the call, or will they simply pull the pillow over their heads and hit the symbolic snooze button embodied by a vote for McSame. That question is by no means certain, as Obama's brave, thoughtful, and tenacious speech cannot obscure the fact that he is the underdog in this race simply because of who he is.

In Shakespeare's Henry V the young King Henry was mocked by his opponents because he was young and inexperienced and spent his early days hanging out in the pubs with his drunkard buddy Falstaff, inviting apprehension among the people as his time to take the throne approached. Once the young king assumed the throne, the French mocked him by sending a gift of tennis balls, only be told that "we understand the [Dauphin] well / How he comes over us with our wilder days / Not measuring what use we made of them." Just as the French underestimated and mocked the young king, the hapless old GOP has done the same with Obama, unable to comprehend what the young Obama learned in his younger days as a student of the world and Chicago activist. They thought they were dealing with some weak, celebrity version of Jimmy Carter when all of the sudden Joe Louis showed up on that stage Thursday night and knocked down the entire GOP, leaving them so dazed and confused they were uncharacteristically silent after Obama's speech, symbolically throwing in the towel. It was an overwhelmingly audacious frontal assault that left the McCain camp mired in shock and awe, so out of it that they made an hurried and irresponsible decision to name an unqualified, unknown governor to the ticket, hoping to peel away some of the Hillary supporters who seemed to be coming home in droves on Thursday night. The problem with the Palin VP selection is that it is a stunning insult to almost all Democratic women, as she represents everything the feminists have fought against since the 1970s, besides having absolutely none of the experience that was Hillary's main argument, remember "ready from Day One..."? More on the VP later...

It was Henry V who led his outnumbered "band of brothers" to a stunning victory over the French, noting in his own powerful speech on the eve of the decisive battle and English victory:
" I am not covetous for gold / Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost; / It yearns me not if men my garments wear; such outward things dwell not in my desires. / But if it be a sin to covet honor, / I am the most offending soul alive...For he today that sheds his blood with me / shall be my brother." (Henry V 4.3.20-60)
Make no mistake about it, Obama's speech was as much about honor as it was policy. It was essentially a populist declaration of war on a GOP that has destroyed America's financial and economic structures and left the country reeling in the aftermath of an Olympics that featured the daunting reality of an ascendant China and an America so stretched by the human and financial costs of the Iraq fiasco that perhaps we have been reduced to a "country of whiners" because that's all we were able to do when Russia smacked down Georgia, after a McCain lobbyist most likely encouraged Georgia to attack South Ossetia so that he could create another Bhutto moment to highlight McCain's "experience." The opposite, of course, developed when the Georgian president appealed for "actions not words" while the helpless McCain blustered his usual tough guy talk and then let the story disappear. Of course, the mainstream media won't touch this angle, even while highlighting the connections between McCain's campaign and Georgia: "You don't defeat a terrorist network that operates in 80 countries by occupying Iraq. You don't protect Israel and deter Iran just by talking tough in Washington. You can't truly stand up for Georgia when you've strained our oldest alliances."

Obama laid out his case to address the significant challenges that face this country in the 21st century with realistic and ambitious plans to end our addiction to oil in 10 years, provide more than lip service and prayers for public education, and begin to provide health care for poor and middle class people that transcends the GOP's preferred emergency room>financial ruin>bankruptcy medley the right wingers crow about, most recently proposing that no one is considered "uninsured" in America because all of us have access to emergency rooms. In terms of foreign policy, Obama finally took McCain head-on: "If John McCain wants to have a debate about who has the temperament, and judgment, to serve as the next commander in chief, that's a debate I'm ready to have. For while Se. McCain was turning his sights to Iraq just days after 9/11, I stood up and opposed this war, knowing that it would distract us from the real threats that we face...John McCain likes to say that he'll follow Bin Laden to the gates of hell--but he won't even follow him to the cave where he lives." Indeed, they are probably afraid to find that cave because it was decorated by Bush's oil buddies at Enron, who, if you recall, hosted the Taliban in Texas and showed them a good 'ol time, even as the Taliban freaks said publicly that they felt sorry for American men who could not "control" their women. This is all public knowledge, yet some people still wonder why Bush has dragged his feet in Afghanistan and provided those chartered jets for the wonderful Bin Laden family to flee America on 9-12, while relatives of dead WTC Americans were told to catch a bus to NY to identify their dead mothers, father, sons, daughters...These are the "leaders" who stole the election in 2000 and are now counting on there being enough ignorant and racist Americans to let them pass the baton to McCain, anchor leg in a GOP relay that makes the woeful, baton-dropping Olympic American 400 meter relay teams look prepared and focused: "If John McCain wants to follow George Bush with more tough talk and bad strategy, that is his choice--but it is not the change that America needs."

Much has been written already about McCain's selection of Palin to be his VP, but I have a different take than many Democrats who are focusing too much on her "inexperience." In my mind, that is an issue but not the most disturbing one. Obviously, being the governor of a state with a population that is less than many cities in California and an economy that in no way resembles most of America, does not prepare one to be president of the United States. I am also fine with the fact that she was selected because she is a woman: her gender has nothing to do with the larger issues, and although there were many much more qualified Republican women who deserved the selection more than this anonymous person from Alaska, McCain chose to make a political decision to reclaim his "maverick" image, and to be honest, he did a great job of stepping on the afterglow of Obama's speech simply because the national media was so dumbfounded by his selection that it dominated the news cycle the day after Obama's speech.
The problem I have with Palin is that she is so out of her league that even McCain did not make the case that she is qualified to be president. In his introduction today, he never mentioned anything about her readiness to be the leader of the free world--and that is disturbing. If you recall, Bill Clinton chose Al Gore despite being warned that he brings nothing to the ticket as a fellow Southerner, the same age etc. Clinton famously told his advisors that he was picking Gore "because I might die" and he knew Gore would be a great president. Likewise, Obama made the same type of choice with Biden, someone who has run for president several times and has decades of experience.

John McCain for the first time showed himself to be someone who really does not love his country but only cares about his politcial calculations, as he is willing to roll the dice on an unknown governor from podunk Alaska to stare down the Russians if McCain dies. McCain is 72 and has a 1000 page medical report and this is the type of choice he makes? This is the first example of his judgment? THAT is the problem with this choice, not the fact that Palin is two pounds lighter than a straw hat, a truly laughable choice who doesn't believe in science and wants to outlaw all abortions, even in cases of rape and incest(surely that will win over the Hillary supporters...). McCain once again showed himself to have the judgment and intellectual capacity of a petulant child, not a potential president. The problem with Palin is that she is unknown and hasn't gone through the vetting process by the national press, nor has she endured 20+ debates against fellow presidential contenders. Obama has experienced the pressure of battling Biden, Dodd, Clinton, Edwards etc. in head-to-head, high pressure televised debates. That's how I got to know him. That is tangible experience, having your positions scrutinized and attacked and having to respond. That is precisely what is lacking in Palin. Who is she? What is her temperament? How does she think? What are her policy positions? This is what I expect to know about ANY person--from either party--who may be president. Is this asking too much, to expect my VP to be a national figure? What is happening to this country?

And isn't it amusing to watch the same blowhards who attacked Obama relentlessly for his lack of experience now extolling Palin's virtues and her profound experience leading a town of less than 10,000 and dealing with the pressure of the PTA and Miss Alaska competition. Cindy McCain's best argument for Palin was that "you know, Alaska is the closest state to Russia..." OK... I was afraid McCain was going to cave in and select someone as idiotic as Huckabee, but 'ol Huck now looks downright appealing. Perhaps McCain really is a genius however, because I know that I am seriously going to wish him well if he wins this election because I actually do care about this country's future and the safety of my family, so much so that I would never discard posterity simply because I'm an ambitious old man with one foot in the grave.

The Tragedy of McCain III

2008-08-08T19:45:00.000-07:00

"Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time
Unless to to see my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover...
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days." (R3 I.i.24-30)

Like Richard III, McCain is an odious individual, both in appearance and temperament, who, in the potential absence of war in a post-Iraq America, has no reason to live, nowhere to unleash his villainy. He is truly frightened of a world without war, one that he and his family have never known. McCain is the family failure, admitted to Annapolis solely because of his pedigree, only to sink to the bottom of his class and a well-known career as POW, directly related to his incompetence as a pilot. I respect the fact that he actually fought in Vietnam(even though he didn't seem to have many options as the son and grandson of admirals), unlike his chicken-hawk supporters and the current war criminal president, who ran for their lives when it was time to actually support America in a war instead of calling Drug Limbaugh, god of the draft dodgers. I mean, really, who can take any draft dodging baby boomer seriously? They are quite simply cowards, but they are all very willing to send other kids to Iraq.
These are the "people" who support the tragedy of McCain the third, a man who, according to a kid at Dairy Queen, would have no chance for a job serving ice cream cones (I asked a kid behind the counter if they would hire a 72 year-old man who cannot operate a computer and has never had a real job. He said McCain's application would be tossed in the garbage). Indeed, how many of McCain's supporters would hire someone with his background for any job?

"But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass,
I, that am rudely stamped..
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature...
So lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them." (R3 I.i.14-23)

Indeed, McCain--and not really anyone else-- seems obsessed with the fact that Obama is better looking, more popular, and much more interesting than McCain is. Personally, I don't think any of that will make Obama a better president, but McCain is now locked in the tiny prison that is his mind, pathetically fighting the war we lost in Vietnam, while whining and crying to his media "refs" about how Obama gets all the calls. Shame on Obama for speaking to 200,000 Germans while McCain rode around in a golf cart with another fossil, Bush I, and held court in front of the cheese rack at a supermarket. Does the guy have advisors to protect him from himself? A man or woman who has the self-confidence to be the leader of the free world is not content to simply mock his or her opponent but should be able to offer real ideas, a plan, yet there is McCain sadly content to call Obama a "celebrity," as if that's going to turn America against him. Most voters really do want to have a sense of the candidate's values and are not interested in a grumpy old man yelling at the young kid to get off his lawn, yet that is the picture McCain has produced--the angry old man, who, as Obama said, is "proud of his ignorance."

It is clear to anyone paying attention that this election will turn on America's comfort level with Obama. McCain is basically irrelevant, just as he was in the primaries. He is the default candidate, no more and no less. He was there to fill the void for voters who could not stomach the JV lineup the GOP trotted out there in January and now he is the rebound boy for voters who simply cannot vote for a black man. The debates will be critical, as the juxtaposition of the candidates will make it painfully clear that McCain is more suited to running for his retirement home's activities director than leader of the free world. One look at McCain standing next to Obama will be an epiphany for many Americans, the moment when they will ask themselves, "How can I vote for this guy?" Obama, like Kennedy, needs to convey a sense of maturity and make Americans comfortable with the notion of a 47 year-old man with limited national experience leading the country in a time of war and economic devastation. Americans are rightfully concerned about Obama's lack of experience, but he needs to accentuate the reality that McCain is older but much less wiser than he was even a decade ago, as it is clear the current McCain really has nothing in common with the moderate from a decade ago. McCain sold his soul to the the extremist GOP base and is simply another oil industry whore. It was well reported that shortly after he took $285K from big oil interests he suddenly reversed his opposition to offshore drilling, which he now touts as the cure for America's energy woes. The same oil men who pimped Bush for eight years now want to elect McCain so they can roll over and put their pants on. They don't like McCain, but as the old saying goes, you don't pay a whore to stay, you pay her to leave...

I, too, pity McCain, as he is a man with no salient life experiences that are not related to the military. I had my first private sector job at age 12(delivering the Mail Tribune), yet McCain has never gone out and actually earned a job, relying on his rich wife's daddy to hire him for a few weeks but even that was too much so he ran back to the "do nothing" Congress(as the Republicans say), and for three decades he was a master at doing nothing except extorting funds illegally--google "Keating Five"--and having his rich wife's family buy his way out of jail. As Frank Rich observed, "Given that McCain's sole private-sector job was a fleeting stint in public relations at his father-in-law's beer distributorship, he comes by his economic ignorance honestly. But there's no A team aboard the Straight Talk Express to fill him in." Indeed, he has surrounded himself with fellow bitter old men like Gramm and back benchers like Carly Fiorina, famous for running Hewlett-Packard into the ground before she was fired--and given $21 million in cash to stay gone. These are the people who are going to turn around the economy that Bush has destroyed? The only change and hope they represent is the answer to Democrats' prayers that '08 will be the most devastating Republican defeat in history. The Republicans are so hopelessly incompetent and out of touch that their only viable "message" is that they are not Obama and he is not one of "us." You know, the fat(Obama's too thin), ugly(look at McCain), uneducated(Obama went to Harvard) and bitter(GOP is losing in every state where people can read) "us" that the Republicans cling to.

This type of background--along with dumping one's disfigured wife for a young heiress and banishing her with hush money--is enough to damage one's self esteem and provides some insight into McCain's relentless attack on Obama's "celebrity," as fly boy McCain has been exposed for what he is: an empty flight suit with no moral foundation and certainly no intellectual standing, a "wrinkled old white dude" who doesn't know when he's being mocked by Paris Hilton, so clueless he offers his wife up for a pornographic biker "beauty contest." One can only imagine the response if Obama showed any signs of being the type of idiot McCain has shown himself to be. The New York Times rejected an Op-Ed essay he wrote not because the editor didn't agree with his views (they've published many of his essays) but because he couldn't even define victory in Iraq, let alone explain how to achieve it. This is a man who raves about the "surge" being a success but not enough of one to bring the troops home. It seems like a logical question to ask for a plan to bring American soldiers home and stop sending American tax money to a country Americans do not care about. America is in dire economic straits, yet here we are continually borrowing money to fight a war that was proven to be a fraud from the beginning. I guess that's the Vietnam syndrome, having no sense of when a war is over. Countries--at least ones with the catastrophe that defines America's economy--should not babysit countries for 100 years, especially when they are not wanted and even despised. And the war criminal Bush is so ignorant that he is paying to rebuild Iraq with Americans' tax dollars while allowing Iraq to have an $80 billion surplus while we are trillions in debt.

Moreover, McCain's idiotic comment that Obama somehow wanted to "lose" the Iraq war is laughable. How do we lose the war when Hussein is dead? The war criminal's stated purpose for invading Iraq was to overthrow Hussein and seize his huge supplies of WMDs; therefore, we should have declared victory and left on the day he was hanged, rather than installing an Iranian puppet government. McCain is simply a profound, bumbling embarrassment in a GOP year that has featured one after another, yet he remains viable as a potential president because it will probably never be easy for a black man named Obama to be elected in this country. McCain's in it because this is still a racist country in many ways, a fact that all but the most ignorant acknowledge. America has progressed in ways that most countries never will (where are the Obamas in "progressive" Europe?), but there are millions of uneducated bigots in this country, more than enough to swing this election.

There are obviously no easy solutions to extract our country from the Iraq fiasco, but it is quite clear that a man as shockingly ignorant as McCain is probably not the answer. He thinks Iraq shares a border with Pakistan and has to be tutored by Lieberman--a Democrat--in the difference between Shia and Sunni, something most 8th graders probably know after a war that has dragged on longer than our effort to help defeat Hitler. This man is going to be responsible for hundreds of thousands of American troops, young men and women who have repeatedly answered the war criminal's call, even while he told most draft age adults to go shopping and not to worry about the war? In his great article, "It's the Economic Stupidity, Stupid," (7-20-08)Frank Rich excoriated McCain's commander in chief qualities, noting that "you have to wonder if even General Custer's learning curve was faster than his" in response to McCain's hapless understanding of Afghanistan and the Taliban and the reality that we simply don't have the troops to engage an enemy that may indeed pose an actual threat to our country, unlike Iraq.

I doubt any candidate would do the right thing and reinstate the draft, with no exceptions for any reasons. How many wars would we fight if rich kids were going to die? My guess would be zero, unless we were attacked. What a notion, defending your own country...In the nuclear age, ground wars are a relic of the past, yet the war criminal and McCain are content to send more and more men and women to die for the most dishonest war in this nation's history, and Americans worry more about the cost of gas, too ignorant to connect the dots and make the connections. If Americans elect McCain, we will certainly all get what we deserve. This is a democracy, and democracy isn't pretty when one looks at it too closely. The man whose "brain"(Gramm) called the worst mortgage meltdown in the nation's history a "mental recession" and who has repeatedly stated that he really doesn't understand the economy, or "those issues" as he said, McRambo will be free of that pesky economy situation so that he can get back to his war games:

"But if the cause be not good, the King himself
hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads,
chopped off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all,
'We died at such a place'--some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle; for how can they charitably dispose of anything, when blood is their argument? Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the King that led them to it..." (HenryV.4.1.133-143)

Amen, brother Shakespeare.

Bringing It All Back Home

2008-06-03T16:50:00.000-07:00

"You must leave now, take what you need, you think will last.
But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast"

To quote Michelle Obama, for the first time in my adult life I am truly proud of my country tonight, for this is a historic day that posterity will revisit with a sense of pride--a day when black, Hispanic, Asian , indeed all of America's children, can see the promise of America as one that includes their hopes, dreams and aspirations. On June 4, 2008 all American children can wake up and look in the mirror and say, "Someday I can run for President of the United States," and it won't be some empty platitude but a tangible reality embodied by Barack Obama, the first non-Caucasian to win the nomination of a major political party, as well as Hillary Clinton, who despite some misguided and inexcusable conduct both by her and her surrogates, removed any doubt that American sexists have about the fortitude of female candidates. Despite the reality that Hillary got to this point in large part because of her husband's accomplishments, she nonetheless showed herself to be a strong candidate who, quite frankly, has more character than her husband, and she certainly--and rightfully--will be known as the woman who kicked down the door and shattered the glass ceiling that has confined female politicians in our society.

Clinton lost this primary not because she is a flawed candidate but because she got outplayed, out hustled, and definitely out coached by an Obama team that was built to compete in 50 states, utilizing the Internet and prodigious ground forces to vanquish a Clinton machine that was put in the hands of neophytes like Patti Solis Doyle and greed-obsessed egomaniacs like Mark Penn instead of veteran strategists like James Carville, who was left on the CNN pundit sidelines, valiantly whining about Billary's plight. The younger, hungrier team stood up to the champions and punched them in the mouth. Obama wasn't given anything in this campaign, as he was attacked ruthlessly by the GOP, Billary, and a press that played the race card itself, pouncing on any footage of "angry black men" such as Reverend Wright, whom they knew would stir up viewers and drive up their ratings--thus, the endless reels of Obama pastors while McCain's pastors' much more disturbingly racist rhetoric was barely acknowledged.

"The highway is for gamblers, better use your sense.
Take what you have gathered from coincidence."

Barack Obama now has to get down to the serious business of running a tough general election campaign in which he is starting out 20 states behind because so much of this country are backwards, uneducated racists; that's an unpleasant thing to say, but it's the only reason that explains why in a generic match-up the Democrats beat the Republicans by 20% but when Obama's name is matched with McCain it's an even race. If ever there was a year that the Dems should sweep everything it's 2008: The country is in the worst economic shape since the Depression and people are desperate to turn the page on the failed policies and embarrassing ignorance of Bush. However, even in this climate a black man named Barack Obama is no sure thing. He is the clear underdog in this race, baffling as that may sound.

"Leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you.
Forget the dead you've left, they will not follow you."

Obama needs to hammer McCain relentlessly on the issues, which McCain is out of step with pretty much all Americans, except guys like him--old, white redneck racists(his base):

McCain believes the following:

1. Abortion should be outlawed in all cases under the Republican platform. This alone will prevent any true Hillary feminist from voting for McCain. McCain has no regard for women's rights.

2. We should have a presence in Iraq for 100 years and continue to fight a war in which we cannot even define an exit strategy, let alone "victory"
Obama TV commercials should mock McCain's "visit" to a "safe" market in Iraq, surrounded by troops, tanks, Blackhawks. Obama should go visit the troops, where he will be treated like a rock star by the many black men in women in uniform so that he can show his support as well as the dire condition the country is really in. He should challenge McCain to define progress when he can't visit the country without a small army to protect him. The bottom line will be that the war is a quagmire and Obama is the only one with a viable exit strategy. These idiots who talk about the "surge" working leave out some important little details, such as the reason why violence is down is because we are PAYING these wonderful people not to kill us or each other. What a war: It's such a pathetic disaster that our only solution is put all these murderers on the American payroll, with U.S. taxpayers footing the bill for "insurgents" to stop shooting at us. This is victory? This is turning the tide in Iraq? It's a disgrace, that's what it is, and Obama needs to remind Americans what is really going on and what their hard earned tax dollars are paying for--instead of health care, instead of college educations, instead of a viable retirement program. The Iarq War is the single most disgusting American foreign policy blunder in the history of this country, and McCain is its biggest idiot cheerleader. He needs to be buried with this quagmire around his neck.

3. He is against a new GI bill that was supported by 77 Senators and provides the same college tuition money that WW II GIs received and that help create the middle class in this country.
As the son of admirals he only wants to reward people who choose to stay in the military for 20 years, when he knows that 75% choose to leave after 5 years or less. In McCain's world they are cannon fodder, not men and women who deserve generous benefits.

4. He has been Bush's lapdog, voting with Bush 95% in the U.S. Senate. Every one of those votes needs to be presented to the American people.

5. His message to Americans caught up in the mortgage meltdown has been simple: Drop Dead.
He has no sense of the economic challenges facing this country, as his solution is to provide more tax breaks to companies who use the increased resources to outsource jobs to third world countries, leaving Americans unemployed but enriching McCain's lobbyist friends who have been running and financing his campaign. He is a man who has no moral principles; he's a whore for the lobbyists and big companies who pimped Bush for 8 years before they rolled over and put their pants on and hit the streets to solicit McCain.

6. On health care he is equally ignorant, offering tax credits instead of a real program. Everyone knows tax credits simply help people who have enough money to buy things for which they will receive credits. He has no interest in helping people who cannot afford health care, the ones who are driving up costs by going without care, going to emergency rooms etc.

7. McCain represents a party that is mean-spirited and out of touch. The entire GOP congressional delegation doesn't include a single African-American, and their platform is riddled with hatred for pretty much everyone--Mexicans, poor people, black people, gay people, non-Christians--you name it, they hate it. Obama needs to capitalize on this by expanding his base, to bring in voters who have nowhere else to go. I mean, it would take a desperate "feminist" to vote for the anti-choice, womanizing McCain, but Obama needs to sell himself to those Hillary voters, and make them realize on their own that he embodies their values much more than the hapless and hopelessly out of touch fossil that is McCain, a relic of the past that has no place in contemporary America.

8. He says he wants to run a clean campaign, but McCain's plan is to let his surrogates convey all his racist, xenophobic nonsense; however, McCain's problem is that he is the dirtiest person out there, and Obama needs to let his surrogates go on the offensive against McStain and discuss his treatment of his first wife who waited years for the "hero" to return from Vietnam, only to be critically injured in an accident and have her "hero" husband start an affair with a woman 20 years younger while the faithful wife was seriously injured. Once he dumped his wife and married a multimillionaire who could finance his political ambitions, she had her own problems, as Cindy McCain was a junkie who illegally obtained narcotics and used political connections to avoid the prison term that any other person would have received. Then there was McCain's well-known affair with Charles Keating, a man who robbed the pensions of thousands of Savings and Loan customers, only to go to prison after leaving the poor elderly people destitute. Again, McCain bought his way out of prison, just as his adulterous wife did. This couple makes Billary look pious, and they want to gain the support of the Christian Right? Good luck when all this comes out...McCain has also been trying to hide the fact that he has no religious affiliation, which is fine--with Democrats. Indeed, McCain represents everything the GOP base despises and that's why nearly 30% of the primary voters were showing up to vote against him even after he won the nomination. The bottom line is that he is a weak candidate who only won the nomination because his opponents were a hypocrite Jesus freak with an 8th grade education named Huckabee and someone who wears "magic underwear." Now, McCain is in the big leagues and he looks as out of place as Macbeth as Birnam Woods approached: "Now does he feel his title hang loose about him, like a giant's robe upon a dwarfish thief."

"The vagabond who's rapping at your door
Is standing in the clothes that you once wore
Strike another match, go start anew
And it's all over now, Baby Blue" (Bob Dylan)

More Fun in the New World

2008-04-27T14:07:00.000-07:00

First, let me say what almost no one seems to have to guts to say publicly: Obama has long ago won the Democratic nomination and the charade that is currently playing out in these last few irrelevant states is meant for one simple reason: to make the Billary supporters feel good about themselves and Billary so that they will not keep their bitter selves at home in November instead of voting for Obama, or worse yet voting for McSame. That is what this is all about. The Democratic party is not going to steal the nomination from the rightfully elected candidate, one who just happens to be an African American. Think about it. That would be suicide for the Democratic Party, for African Americans are by far the most loyal group of voters the party can depend on: They supported Kerry--who lost--by a 91-9% margin! The idea that Clinton is somehow more popular than Obama and will procure enough independent votes to win in November is laughable. Her ceiling is well below 50% and while Obama may lose, Clinton surely will lose. That fact hasn't changed in the last few weeks, as Clinton has implemented her scorched earth, party-be-damned strategy to steal the nomination.

All this nonsense about this benchmark and that benchmark is just that--nonsense. The nomination is settled by delegates. Period. There is no changing the rules in the 4th quarter because it suits the rich white woman and her rich white husband. Is that the message the party wants to send to black people, their most loyal constituents? Come on...Obama had nothing to do with setting up the nomination rules, most of which are 25 years old. He has simply played by the rules and not complained to the refs every time he has lost a round. The fact is someone is going to win the nomination in Denver beacuse he or she has the most DELEGATES. Period. They are not suddenly going to go to each state at the convention roll call and call for their popular votes. All this talk is ridiculous and is being kept alive by the media so that they can keep people talking about the race and watching their news shows. That's the bottom line. Think about these vapid arguments about popular vote for instance: Using that to decide would be fine if it was established BEFORE the voting began so that both candidates could simply ignore small states such as Iowa and New Hampshire and spend all their time in the huge states. That would change the entire campaign strategy, obviously, so using that as a benchmark because it suits Clinton after the fact is highly corrupt. Does anyone think Obama would not have gotten even more popular votes if he put all his resources into large states only? In addition, they do not even have caucus popular vote totals so all those popular vote tallies do not even include all the states where Obama won the caucus votes by huge margins! And Clinton talks about fairness and counting votes in Florida and Michigan with a straight face? It's OK not to count ANY of the votes in caucus states she lost. OK...Think how ridiculous this is...

Obama and his supporters know all this but are trying to avoid tearing Billary apart because they know this race is over and they need those voters. Billary, however, seems to be the only one who is seeking any possible way to destroy Obama's campaign, which is puzzling because if Obama loses in November because of her--and that may very well be the case--Clinton, like Kerry, will not be welcomed back into the party nor should she be. She is a flawed candidate, and I stick to my prediction from years ago that the first woman president will be a Republican, as ironic as that may be. There are many excellent female candidates in both parties, but Hillary is the worst choice that either party could make. She is an unqualified serial liar whose judgment alone should disqualify her. She is the worst that politics has to offer, someone who has no real convictions except the ones that she tries to hide(creating a new tax on everyone to create some government healthcare disaster)Democrats, unlike Republicans, do not embrace losers, they cast them aside(Gore, by the way, is not a good example because people know he was screwed, even though he couldn't win his own state).

The Pennsylvania election simply reinforced what we already know about the divide in the Democratic Party: There are many older white people who are not ready to vote for a black man. Evidence: Clinton won 68% of whites over age 60 but lost 52% of whites under 30 and 65% of all 18-24 year-olds. Why is this? The times are changing, generational attitudes are shifting.
Clinton won Pennsylvania because it was a closed primary where 58% of voters were women and 32% were over 60. That's Hillary's base: older uneducated little old white ladies and Pennsylvania was her jackpot. Trouble is, she only won 55% even with those numbers. For those of you who haven't been paying much attention or aren't really good with math, let me give you TWENTY reasons why this race is over. Clinton has won over 60% in ONE state, her home state of Arkansas. Here is a list of some of the states Obama won, along with the percentage he won:

Idaho 79%
Alaska 75%
Hawaii 76%
D.C. 75%
Kansas 74%
Washington 68%
Minnesota 66%
Gerogia 67%
Colorado 67%
Illinois 65%
Nebraska 68%
Virginia 64%
Maryland 60%
Mississippi 61%
North Dakota 61%
Vermont 59%
Wisconsin 58%
Utah 57%
Maine 59%
South Carolina 55%

Those states represent the entire country--coast to coast, north, south, large, small. And they were nearly all blowouts of nearly 20% margins of victory and that's why Obama has put this away in the delegate total. His delegate margins in those states were devastating. Yes, Billary has won large states--by small margins and that's why she is hopelessly behind in the delegate count and that's simply all that matters when all is said and done at the convention. Those are the rules of the game and this game is pretty much over. Florida and Michigan can't even save her in the delegate count. Think about the common sense angle of this: Does she think Obama is going to somehow say, "OK, you're right, Hillary, I won the game fair and square but I'll give it to you."? There is no rational endgame for her to claim this nomination, not with Obama having 1733 delegates to her 1598, with only 400 elected and 300 superdelegates to go, of which he only needs 292 to reach 2025. That's 41% of the remaining delegates. Is Obama really going to lose 60-40 in ANY of the remaining states, let alone ALL of them? She is not going to make up that deficit and needs to be ready to drop out after the last primary on June 3rd, By all means she should play out the rest of the game, but make no mistake: She is simply running out the clock in a football game where she is down by 3 touchdowns on her own 10 yard-line with a minute to play.

This talk of trying to steal Obama's delegates between June 3rd and the convention in August needs to be put to rest so that the Dems can start focusing their attention on McCain, a hapless candidate who needs to be torn apart with the millions Obama has raised. Remember, McCain didn't do so well in Pennsylvania himself. He ran unopposed as the party's choice and still lost 27% of the vote. Yes, 220,000(more than Obama lost by) voted for other candidates in the Republican primary rather than vote for McCain. McCain needs to receive the same treatment Obama has endured, and those of you who are unfamiliar with McCain's past will be enlightened very quickly. He's as dirty as anyone has ever been in a presidential race. Why do you think McCain says he wants to have a civil campaign? He learned in a small way in 2000 what it's like to have his personal life and past torn apart, as Obama is experiencing, so while all the Obama attacks have hurt him and will surely come back and intensify in the general election, McCain's free ride is about to end in a big way, as he will come crashing to earth once those millions are put to work defining him. That's why all these polls showing him doing so well do not mean all that much. He has no opponent at this point, and while there may well be enough racists left to put him over the top, that's not entirely clear simply because the country is in such dire straits. For all you fools who say it's not about race, you really need to wake up: Over 400,000 people(20%) who voted in the Pennsylvania primary said race was a factor in their vote and 75% of them voted for Clinton. And that's on the Democratic side...It's all a numbers game. Also, if race is not a factor then how does one explain that the Dems lead by a large margin on every issue and in a generic match-up, but when Obama's name is mentioned the margin drops. Of course, that has nothing to do with race...Come on. Obvioulsy, there are many blacks voting for Obama because he is black, but with blacks making up around 12% of the U.S. population they don't have the effect of bitter whites who won't vote for a black man even if they agree with him on all the major issues. That is the dilemma Obama faces and the only real reason he could lose an election to a pathetic fossil such as McCain. I mean, I haven't met a single person who has expressed any excitement about McCain. I live in Orange County, CA, hardly a bastion of liberals, yet even people I know who are going to vote for him are simply voting against Obama and Clinton. No one is sporting the McCain t-shirts or stickers, talking about his great proposals to move the country forward; there is absolutely no passion for his candidacy, even here in conservative OC. Sure, he will win the vote here but voters are holding their noses wishing they could vote for someone else, someone who is a more traditional Republican, not a war hawk. McCain was born in the 1930s and wants to keep our country in perpetual war, not really what most people are clamoring for as the U.S. economy is sinking to levels not seen since the 1930s...

It's clear that short of felonious activities by Obama he is clearly going to win the nomination, in spite of these media created "issues" such as Wright and Obama's astute observations about the white working class. Before you waste your time telling me how happy working class whites are, I, unlike most whites, grew up in a working class lumber town in Southern Oregon, the type of place where many people are very bitter because the $12 an hour they make in 2008, which is what they made 20 years ago when I worked a summer at Boise Cascade Lumber while in college, doesn't provide the type of living it did when houses cost $20K and gas was $1. These people do indeed "cling" to their guns, for hunting is something that has not been ruined by government policies; moreover, it is a necessity for many families. My own family hunted deer and elk every fall and winter, as it provided a cheap source of high quality meat as well as a chance for family bonding time. However, Obama's point is well taken, for many families in these areas don't have much else to "cling" to because of the irresponsible economic policies that have sent their jobs to countries that are happy to have a permanent working class that is so poor that they have to accept ten cents an hour: That is where incessant American greed is leading this country: It's a place whose soul has been sold to shareholders and large companies, where people "cling" to what little they have because that's all they can do. The economic despair in places like Pennsylvania is incredible. Median household income in the $47K range? That's poverty level in the real world. See what that will pay for where I live. There is a real war about to emerge in this country if we continue down this road and most people are oblivious, but we'll see what happens when people literally cannot afford to feed their kids(or even buy rice or bread at the store) or drive their cars. I don't think any politicians are prepared or have the will to confront the deep flaws in our current system that are leading to impending disaster, but I am fairly confident that Obama is at least up to the task of trying to respond rather than being locked in some 1950s childhood vision of America. All I know for sure is that "it was better before we voted for what's-his-name...This must be the New World..."(John Doe)

1968-2008: Race in America

2008-03-31T18:34:00.000-07:00

"Horrors of Ethiopia Get Little Notice"
So read a recent headline in the LA Times, highlighting the selective morality of Americans' views of the horrific reality of racial violence and genocide that dominate the world stage "The teenager awoke under a pile of corpses to a prickling sensation on her face. Ants were biting her eyelids and the inside of her mouth." One can almost visualize Dick Cheney reading this and saying, "So?" If this were happening in our country would we care? Certainly. In Europe or Japan, Israel? Most likely. In the Middle East? If they have oil, perhaps. And therein lies the problem. Poor black people simply are not viewed as worthy of our government's concern and resources and they never have been, whether they are fleeing drought, violence and despair in Darfur, Ethiopia, Somalia, Rwanda or devastating winds and floodwaters in New Orleans. As the only people legally enslaved in our "free" country, black people have been the recipients of a unique from of hostility since the corrupt backroom deal that ended Reconstruction and led to a century of post-slavery Jim Crow segregation that was characterized by hate crimes--lynchings--counted not in the dozens but the thousands per year and the rise of the KKK, both in the informal organization of Southern rednecks and the much more frightening branch that wore badges, black robes instead of white, and bore titles such as Senator Helms of North Carolina. Indeed, the legacy of separate and unequal segregation has had a much more direct and lasting impact on post-WW II generations than the distant memory of slavery, despite the dismissive attitude of uneducated whites who say, "slavery was over in 1865 so get over it y'all," oblivious to the reality that social, economic, legal, and educational discrimination was legally institutionalized in this country and affected the lives of many grandmothers and grandfathers who are navigating the turbulent racial waters of the 2008 presidential campaign.
Sure, we'll drop some bags of rice in the African desert, hold a few rock concerts, and send some good-natured, well meaning Peace Corps kids, but actually send troops for a prolonged occupation to help confront the logical conclusion of the corruption of European imperialism? Help rebuild one of the great American cities by developing real schools and safe, affordable housing that doesn't sit in a flood plain, well below sea level? That's wishful thinking, my friends. Americans get a TV commercial of starving children with bloated bellies, telling us 26 cents a day can make the kid's village so much better...

"One man came in the name of love..."
Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated 40 years ago this Friday--April 4th, 1968, the night after he delivered a powerful speech that included the lines "Well I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead...And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we as a people will get to the Promised Land." The courage of a man with a family, young children, who went to bed every night under the fear of death threats surpasses that of any American in the history of this nation. Period. King escaped bomb threats, shotgun blasts into his house, had an American Nazi come up on the stage while he was speaking and repeatedly punch him in the face, yet King never backed down from his steadfast belief in America's potential for justice and righteousness. I have had an interest in King since I was in high school and chose to write my term research paper on King, part of which consisted of sitting in the library watching old videos the librarian dug up for me: they had a profound impact, watching King and others attacked by Bull Connor and his fire hoses and dogs. Living in an all-white, racially ignorant town in Southern Oregon, I nonetheless idolized black blues musicians, many of whom I was lucky to see as they passed through Ashland, the little college town--Albert King, BB King, John Lee Hooker, Robert Cray--my friends and I met them all, loved their music, and immersed ourselves in the power of the blues. It changed my life and the effects continue to reverberate to this day in the way I see myself and the world and the pure joy that music brings to my life. Even as a kid in an all-white school I knew that the musicians I admired were certainly worthy of the same respect as any human being, so I began my quest to explore the history of race relations in America, to understand the context of the music that provided so much meaning for my life. My journey began with King.

Forty years after that infamous day in Memphis, after an ominous spring that led to a summer of blood in the streets after Bobby, Chicago, and the failures of Vietnam, a black man stands poised to win the Democratic nomination for President of the United States. And the old vortex of racial wounds and pure bigotry endures, as the politcial dialog is obsessively focused on Obama's race, despite the fact that he is of mixed race. As in the slave days if one has 1/16 black blood that's enough to be discriminated against, despite Geraldine Ferraro's absurd declaration that is Obama is "lucky" to be a black man. Oh, where would he be if he were white? This much is clear: In the general election Obama would be ahead in every state in the country if he were white, that's where he would be. Political history has nothing to compare to the unpopularity of "the Idiot."

"The Ghost of Tom Joad"
The economy is in 1930s shape, the war is dragging on and now regressing to pre-Surge violence levels, and the Idiot is so hated that he cannot even throw out the first pitch at a baseball game without being booed, as he was last night at the opening of the new Washington Nationals ball park. So while Obama has surely gained some support because he is black, he has--and will continue to--paid a much higher cost than any benefit. Let's face it, the only reason Obama is not a sure thing in November is because much of the country is profoundly(and proudly) racist. That's why Obama will start out behind by 20 states, for no one can make a serious case that it is because of the "issues." That lie is out the window in a year where the Democrats have the Republicans running so scared that dozens of GOP incumbents are quitting rather than face the humiliating defeats that so many endured in the 2006 elections. They know that this fall is going to make '06 look gentle. So, if the Dems are on the country's side on all of the major issues, from the economy to the war, then how could they possibly lose to a fossil such as McCain? McCain, a hapless and pathetic relic of the past, who's beginning to demonstrate just how much he really is George McCain(too ignorant to know the difference between Shia and Sunni?) really offers nothing in the way of pulling W's car out of the ditch. He's the same old, rich white guy who has convinced a bunch of other old, not-so-rich white guys that he cares about them, when in fact, he really does care about them, for they are the ones he needs to pay for the tax cuts for his country club buddies.

"War, What is it good for?"
Obama has the will of the American people on his side, so the effort by Billary and McStain is to radicalize him, to turn him from Martin to Malcolm by playing on the worst instincts of the American people in order to prey upon the same ignorance to lead them to vote for the man they would rather have a beer with instead of the one who may help them keep their pensions and secure an economy that will enable their kids to attend college. Americans want out of this immoral and idiotic war: "This is the first major war in American history where all the additional cost was paid for by borrowing. If the war backers believe that the Iraq war is so essential, then they should be willing to pay for it partly with taxes rather than charging it. One way or another we'll have to pay the bill...The eventual cost of the war will be about $3 trillion. For a family of five, that amounts to a bill of almost $50,000."(NY Times 3-23-08) The war is the biggest con job in the history of the country. I cannot take anyone seriously who supports this fiasco, especially if they or their children are not over there fighting. It's always the chickenhawks who support this nonsense, the ones who ran from Vietnam but are now armchair generals, commanding the troops from their couches, watching Fox news, the ones who talk neocon toughness from the trenches of their computer chairs and their dorm room bunkers: "You hide in your mansion as young people's blood flows out of their bodies and is buried in the mud." They are the worst kind of "Americans." Masters of war, who "fasten the triggers for the others to fire then sit back and watch as the death count gets higher,"(Bob Dylan)they need to be thrown out of the country to make room for the people who want to come here from other countries and do honest work, pay taxes, and become productive Americans, not waste tax dollars killing people who believe a different superstition than a majority of Americans endorse.

"A More Perfect Union"
Obama's speech about race on March 18th was a key moment in the campaign, despite the absurdity of his having to defend himself because of the comments of his pastor. I am more concerned that he has a pastor in the first place than I am that the pastor's views are offensive, for we all know the wonderful legacy of religion in the world. Faith certainly plays a role in many good deeds, but the history of faith is the history of intolerance, violence, genocide etc. I can only hope that Obama's religion, as with most Americans, is more a symbol of propriety than a way of life. Let's face it, people come to this country to get paid and do their own thing, not live in a theocracy. Thank God(pun intended). Anyone who is looking for a truly religious life can probably do better than a country that symbolizes unchecked capitalism. As JD Salinger said way back in the 1950s: " It's very hard to live a spiritual life in America. People think you're a freak if you try to."("Teddy") Thus, the derisive term for a true believer: "Jesus freak." That is the American dilemma: Capitalism is about kicking someone's ass, putting them out of business so you can make more money because you make a product cheaper, pay your workers less, drive up the price of your stock. An economic foundation based on those principles obviously doesn't leave much room for the devout. Just what would Jesus do?
Obama has a huge mountain to climb, battling the Republican "Southern Strategy," GOP code for using white racism to deliver states to dullards like McCain. The GOP is once again testing their belief that the same old racial politics will defeat another Democrat, and that may very well be the case. Time will tell, as we are truly looking into the soul of America this year. Obama seems to be transcending the race card games Clinton is playing, but McCain is already implying that he is un-American, when in fact Obama is uniquely American. Will the same old Willie Horton tactics work? That is the question that will be answered in the coming months. Is this all a mirage or has the country really changed since 1988, let alone 1968?

"The Wright Stuff"
Jeremiah Wright's soundbites are "news" because they provided cover for racist whites to say " See, I knew Obama was just another Black Panther! He's a Farrakhan!" Heaven forbid he speak out for the equal rights of black people...The irony of all this, of course, is that Wright's views are not nearly as disturbing as other equally irrelevant pastors who happen to be white. The real anger, characterized by the relentless loops and "breaking news" on Fox news everytime this pastor has a bowel movement, is because simmering white racism explodes when black people have the audacity to speak the truth about the legacy of racism in this country, the fact that well over 300 years of this country's history, until the mid-1960s was characterized by overt, legal discrimination against black people, so when Wright says the "US of KKK A" he is obviously wrong about the country in 2008 but he is surely right about the country that he grew up in, the one that segregated him at every turn, the one that legally told him, "Know your place."
When Wright speaks of "God damn America," surely the Bible suggests many times that the sin of unprovoked violence and agression(e.g. foreign wars etc.) will be met with the wrath of God. That is not news, and many white pastors have said equally inflammatory things about 9-11, Katrina, AIDS, the SF Earthquake--you name a catastrophe and I will find you a sermon where it is "America's chickens coming home to roost" as Mr. Wright said. My point is not to defend Wright or any of the other equally ignorant white pastors but simply to state the obvious: They are all irrelevant and misguided. Who cares what they have to say? They are essentially paid entertainers, not presidential candidates.
The comments Wright made about drugs and the US drug policy are also not that far off base, for if you remember the US Supreme Court is dealing with the inequity in drug sentencing laws and the fact that people convicted of crack cocaine(mainly blacks, which has a MINIMUM 5 year prison sentence) are serving much longer sentences than those convicted of powder cocaine(mainly whites, which has a MAXIMUM 1 year sentence for an equal amount). These drug laws are clearly racist; indeed, drug laws in general, since the first marijuana law was enacted in Texas to discriminate against Mexicans, have been used to put minorities in jail, for obviously whites use drugs as much as anyone else, but alcohol, by far the most dangerous of all drugs, is especially popular among members of Congress. With around 50% of our prison space being taken up by non-violent drug offenders, many of whom are people of color, is it any wonder that people such as Wright are exasperated with a government who can offer no solutions except to build more prisons and incarcerate more young black males? We are a society in which 26% of all juvenile arrests are black kids, yet 52% of transfers to adult courts are black kids. The message? Let's lock up these black kids and throw away the key. What has been done to address the 9.5% unemployment rate for black males and the fact that black males had higher incomes in 1974 than in 2004? What about the astonishing fact that 11% of black males between the ages of 25-34 are in prison, nearly 10 times the number of white men?(Dyson 109-115) With more black males in prison than in college in the United States in 2008, one would think that the country would take a look at what is going on and try to turn it around, yet we have a government that prefers the more expensive route of prison than the more humane and socially responsible course of treatment. How can someone look at the plight of black communities and not share Wright's outrage if not his rhetoric? So, the only really offensive, Robertson and Falwell level nonsense that Wright expressed was the AIDS as a government plot to wipe out black people stuff. I can only hope that this nonsense was some kind of effort to stir people up so that they'll buy those DVDs and call those 1-800 numbers, for as we all know, these large congregations are all show business.

"Coda"
In the end, Obama was correct in his decision not to "disown" Pastor Wright, for if he would have gone in that direction it would have suggested that he also had no principles or values, that he would disown a friend whose views do not entirely support his own. Throwing Wright under the bus is the type of easy choice that most politicians would make; indeed, it's what we would expect from the Clintons, but Obama is a different kind of politician, despite what the GOP freaks and Drug Limbaugh would have us believe. Real supporters of Obama had their faith renewed, not destroyed, by the Wright controversy, for it showed once again that Obama is clearly superior in the areas that really matter: integrity and judgment. He is clearly a man who does not always seek the most expedient solution, nor is he afraid to speak to Americans as adults rather than boneheads who cannot grasp anything more complex than a bumper sticker. Obama may very well lose this election, especially as he is fighting McCain and the equally slimy Billary machine, but it will be clear that he, if only briefly, raised the level of political discourse in a culture that desperately needed to revisit its values and redefine its objectives in this young century that began in the ominous ashes of the old social and religious grievances that left previous centuries soaked in blood:

"For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism...We can do that. But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we'll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change. That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, "Not this time." Barack Obama 3-18-2008

Hillary's Heart of Darkness

2008-03-11T18:36:00.000-07:00

"The mind of man is capable of anything...He must meet that truth with his own true stuff--with his own inborn strength. Principles? Principles won't do."

On the eve of the Ohio-Texas primaries, Obama had a lead of around 150 pledged delegates, and after tonight's 20 point landslide(nearly 100,000 margin in popular vote) victory in Mississippi(after his 61-38% drubbing in that bastion of African-Americans--Wyoming,), Obama will actually have a larger lead than before Ohio, despite the fact that Billary raved about what a big night they had on March 4. Such is the reality of this campaign: Clinton is finished, yet she desperately spins anything that can harm Obama, knowing that her ceiling of support is basically 51%. People don't like her so she has to tear him down; it's a pathetic spectacle that gets older as each day passes and Billary inches closer to the inevitable precipice that they will ultimately--and thankfully--plunge off in a few long weeks. Americans deserve to be rewarded for enduring the Clintons for all these years, and what better way to repay us than to crawl back under their rock and exit the political stage

"The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion...is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much."

Let's look at a few facts: First, Clinton is 150 delegates(and over 700,000 votes) behind because she not only lost 12 states in a row after Super Tuesday(and 28 out of 42 overall) but lost by profoundly devastating margins, especially in overwhelmingly white states such as Maine, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Virginia, and Washington state, where she lost by 15% or more. That is the reason she is so far behind, not simply because he won a few small states: She has won some larger states, for sure, but look at the margins, which were all very close. Take Texas, for example, where Clinton won the popular vote with 51%. Today, the results were released from the TOTAL Texas vote and guess what--Obama won the state. But where is the media, who celebrated Clinton's "huge" win in Texas? Here is the reality: Clinton won 65 delegates from the popular vote and 30 delegates from the caucus, while Obama won 61 delegates from the popular vote and 38 delegates from the caucus, which means the total in Texas is 99 delegates for Obama and 95 for Clinton, so the math is simple, with Clinton picking up 10 delegates in Ohio, and Rhode Island and Vermont a wash, she emerged from last Tuesday with a 6 delegate pick-up. However, after losing Wyoming and Mississippi, Clinton is actually behind by more delegates than she was when Democrats were beginning to urge her to withdraw from the race because the delegate math simply does not add up, and now with only eight states left to vote, Obama's lead is huge(at least 160 delegates now), regardless of whether or not they re-vote in Florida and Michigan.

Here is what the party should do with those two idiotic states: Let the remaining primary process play itself out if Billary refuses to do the right thing and drop out, and if there is a chance Clinton can catch Obama after the other states vote then you spend the money to hold those elections in late June, giving both candidates time to campaign there(and Obama gets to have his name on the ballot this time) Remember, Clinton only won 55% in Michigan when she was the only name on the ballot! The tough candidate "Uncommitted" got 40% of the vote--and 50% of the white male vote--which is actually much better than Clinton did in at least half a dozen states, so what does that say about her campaign? I think Obama will do just fine in Michigan and will hold his own in Florida, especially once it is clear--as it will be when they actually vote--that he is the rightful Democratic nominee, the one who won the most votes, states, and delegates. Don't forget that when those states voted Obama was still relatively unknown to many voters. Now he is the putative frontrunner. Let's see what happens when those states vote knowing that after the other 48 states weighed in Obama was the overwhelming choice. Clinton will try to say that they are winner-take-all and other desperate nonsense but the states should count for what they are in terms of their delegates--no more and no less.

If she is still 100+ delegates behind she is not going to close that gap in those two states, so they won't even matter in the big scheme of things. As Andrew Sullivan--a Republican--wrote in The Atlantic, "if at the end of it all, one candidate has more delegates and more votes, why is there a question about who won?" Good question, for this is becoming more and more absurd. Just how can Obama win in a way that Clinton would accept? If it is not about the delegates, or states, or popular votes, just what is it about? It's like the Bush problem in Iraq: Define victory and an exit strategy. Clinton's conduct is a disturbing and completely unacceptable assault on the democratic process itself. Obama did not create the rules. All he has done is play fair; Clinton is the one who continually changes the rules, defines which states matter etc. Imagine if Obama were conducting himself in this manner, saying how much Pennsylvania matters, when actually North Carolina and Indiana will have more delegates than Pennsylvania.
For those of you who do not understand the electoral process, the one with the most delegates wins--period, just as the president is elected in the Electoral College, so Al Gore won the popular vote but lost the election. Many of us do not necessarily like that process but it's the system we have, and Americans respect people who play by the rules, not continually cry to the refs as Clinton has mastered. The candidate who has the most delegates at the end of the primary process needs to receive the support and confirmation of the superdelegates and a coronation at a unified convention in Denver. That is the only way the party will avoid an utter bloodbath in Denver and the demise of the party's increasingly slim chances in November.

While the Clinton camp engaged in a new round of race card poker, cynically--and laughably--expressing how "lucky" Obama is to be a black male in America(where would he be if he were white?), Obama has finally begun contesting Clinton's absurd claims that she was anything more than a basic tea-sipping first lady. Even Nobel Peace Prize winner Lord Trimble weighed in this week, flatly stating that Hillary's role in the Northern Ireland peace process was completely exaggerated, as he claimed it was "a wee bit silly" for her to suggest that she had any meaningful role in the negotiations(she flat-out lied on Wed., saying, "I helped bring peace to Northern Ireland"), while she was also slapped down by--of all people--Sinbad, the comedian, who accompanied Hillary on her trip to Eastern Europe that was supposedly too dangerous to send president Bill. Sinbad called her bluff, explaining that the trip was really a USO entertainment gig where, as Sinbad noted, "the only red phone call was to ask where we were going to eat."
The fact remains that she never had national security clearance, as was reported by the New York Times last week, nor has she listed a single substantive foreign policy accomplishment that would enable her to lay claim to all this "experience" nonsense that she has foisted upon the uneducated little old white ladies that are her only reliable base.

Moreover, it was a tough week for her pathetic chief surrogates, as the worst of them, Wolfson, looked like the dishonest fool he is while trying to explain just how Obama will be ready to be VP but is not ready to be president. The look on his face was priceless, as he tried to squirm away from that question, saying that Obama is not ready to be president now but he will be by the convention in August, when he can be Hillary's running mate, but if he is ready to be VP then surely he will also be ready to be president, which is the first duty of a VP. That whole argument was forcefully rejected by Obama, who rightfully explained the absurdity of someone who is essentially out of contention trying to offer the VP to the frontrunner. What's next, is Huckabee going to offer McCain the VP slot? Furthermore, the ominous racial undertone of her and Bill's remarks were clear: Obama is not a serious presidential candidate(despite his commanding lead) No one would really vote for the black man at the top of the ticket(despite the results from 28 states who did just that), so he should know his place and be thankful that the woman who has won half as many states would offer him the VP. How else does one explain the audacity of someone getting her ass kicked and talking about a running mate? The arrogance is palpable. The irony, of course, is that it's all just another Billary lie, for everyone knows that Billary lacks the type of self-esteem that would allow them to even consider Obama on the ticket, for he would completely overshadow her--as he has the entire primary. No, this is another cynical attempt to lure voters away from Obama, thinking that they can vote for Hillary and Obama. As Billary learned in Wyoming and Mississippi, the voters(at least 60% of them) are not much interested in having her on the ticket in either slot. The same old question remains: When, if ever, will the Clintons wake up and realize that it's over, that unless they rig the superdelegates and steal the election they can't possibly claim this victory? Imagine Clinton, loser in states, delegates, and popular votes, standing on the stage in Denver, after ripping the nomination from the first democratically elected African-American nominee, the one who will have over 30 state delegations in the hall that night supporting him. Can anyone really picture that scene?
I can: "I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror--of an intense and hopeless despair. The horror! The horror!" (Conrad, Heart of Darkness)

An Open Letter to Barack Obama: There Will Be Blood

2008-03-05T17:25:00.000-08:00

Once again, my friend, you have taken your foot off the pedal and let your guard down and failed to close the show. While the losses in Ohio and Texas were not that surprising considering the demographics: Just enough racist Hispanics in Texas(she won 2/3 and nearly 90% in some counties despite the fact that she is not Hispanic, which is hard to fathom) and poor, uneducated white racist women(Billary's solid base) in Ohio, bolstered by Drug Limbaugh's listeners, who provided Clinton 8% of her vote in Texas alone, the fact remains that you had a chance to end this thing and you failed miserably. Why? Because you played your smug, overconfident nice guy role that has no place in a presidential election. Many of us watched in disbelief as you played defense for the last seven days, laying on the ropes being pummeled by the most flawed candidate in recent U.S. history.

The Republicans are desperate to run against Billary because, unlike you, they will tear her and Bill apart, pulling every skeleton out of their very full closet, as they should. The big winner last night was John McCain. He can sit back now and watch you waste your $50 million you raised in February to fend off the ridiculous attacks that you left unanswered last week. The Republicans are now openly encouraging voters to vote for Billary, so now you have to defeat them also. The reality is that McCain, really a joke of a candidate, is now the clear frontrunner and prohibitive favorite to be the next president. It's becoming less likely that whoever survives your bloodbath with Billary will have enough energy, support, and money left to defeat McCain.

Once again, the Democrats are looking like the dysfunctional national party that they are, and it's up to you to either change that now and win big and end this nomination or become the poster boy for wimpy Democrats if you can't beat down a woman who has done absolutely nothing in her life to justify her campaign's message that she is somehow the "experienced" candidate. 35 years of experience? She is 60, so she is counting every year since she graduated from college at age 25! The first woman I have ever heard of who took 60 years to "find her voice" as she said in New Hampshire when she made that claim. How do feminists spin that one? The woman had no real experience until she was elected to public office, which was in this decade, years after you had been elected in Illinois. What a joke, but what have you done to contest that? Nothing. This experience argument is a loser, for I would rather have McCain answer the 3AM phone call in the White House than Hillary. Let's face it, the only call she is likely to be answering at 3AM is from one of Bill's "girls" looking for him. Cheney is the experienced candidate, not someone whose husband was receiving oral sex in the White House from a woman his daughter's age. This woman who couldn't keep tabs on her president husband has convinced people that she 's more experienced to run the country? That's laughable, but it's what you let happen. Many of your supporters, myself included, would not vote for Hillary under any circumstances. We would rather see you lose than share a ticket with her and would rather see McCain as president than Hillary if it means being rid of Billary once and for all.

You seem to be losing sight of the real challenges you face as a black man running for president in a racist country. Hillary is rightly one of the most despised women in the country. Except a bunch of little old ladies and feminist hypocrites no one likes her much, and for good reasons. Have feminists sunk so low that they embrace a woman who couldn't win a school board election if her name was not Clinton? Everything she has done has been based on her man's accomplishments. Period. How sad. Many people speak of the fact that you get 80-90% of the black vote. Some of that, obviously, is race-based. There are certainly black people who are voting for you because you are black. However, black people are not delivering your victories in Utah, Washington, Kansas, Iowa, Maine, Vermont etc. I understand the fact that black voters share your values. Remember, blacks voted for Kerry by nearly 90%, so one cannot claim that it's all racism that blacks vote for a black Democratic candidate who reflects their values by the same margins that they voted for Kerry and Gore. Here is the problem you face: Exit polls in Ohio showed that 20% of voters said race was a factor in their vote and 80% of them voted for Clinton, not you! You lost Ohio because of a large group--20%--of poor, uneducated, racist whites, and that is a bad sign for your chances in Pennsylvania, which has famously been described as Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, with Alabama in the middle.

Listen closely, for those of us who have supported your campaign with our time, energy, and most importantly, our money, expect you to wake up and realize the fight you're in and respond accordingly. I am starting to wonder if you really do have the stomach to meet with these world leaders you want to sit down with, for the Clintons are very bad people, just like the "petty dictators" you have spoken of, yet you have allowed these "people," as Daniel Plainview would say, define you. Obviously, you still have plenty of time to win the nomination, and your position is much stronger than Billary because of your commanding delegate and state lead. You have a delegate lead of around 140, as you have won 26 of 40 states, many by huge margins of over 20%(thus your large delegate lead). There are 611 pledged delegates left. Clinton needs to win 60% of the remaining delegates to catch you: She has only won ONE state with 60% of the vote(her home state of Arkansas), so that is nearly impossible. Moreover, you have won many states with over 60%, and have many easy wins if you campaign hard and get tough: Wyoming, Mississippi, North Carolina, Montana, South Dakota, and Oregon are all states that you should win easily, which leaves Pennsylvania, West Virgina, Indiana and Kentucky--all are states you can compete in if not win outright, so if you work hard and follow my advice this race is essentially over, for there is no way Clinton wins 380 out of those 611 delegates in those states. Despite her relentless spin and desire to overthrow the will of the voters, the fact remains that your lead is substantial, and whoever ends in June with the most delegates is in fact the rightful nominee; that's how the process works, and you did not create the process. You played by the rules and have won fair and square, but you are playing against someone who will cheat to win, someone who will rig elections, suppress votes, bribe officials--that's what you are up against, so play the game accordingly.

Here is your new plan:
1. Wake up and start running negative ads everyday. Change your attitude and start fighting.
You need to fight back and show some toughness. It's about perception, which is everything in politics. People want a president who is a fighter. It makes them feel safer. If you understood this, you would have won Texas instead of ignoring the 3AM phone ad.
2. Call out Billary on his library foundation and their tax returns. You have income of 1.3 million and they have 35 million. Let's see where that money came from. There's a reason why she keeps delaying the release of their tax returns. Talk about that everyday and demand that the media follow up. Scrutinize every financial detail. Follow the money; it always leads to corruption.
3. Examine her experience by asking for the release of the White House tapes. What role did she really have? What role did she have in all the BAD things Clinton did? Run ads showing Somalia and Kosovo and the other flawed policies to question her judgment since she said she was a part of everything in the White House. Where was she during the impeachment of her husband?
4. Health Care: The only overt issue she dealt with in her First Lady years was the failed health care reform. Remind people in ads that her only real experience was a complete failure beacuse of her secretive, arrogant approach.
5. Norman Hsu raised nearly a million dollars for her campaign and he is currently in prison on fraud charges, yet you have allowed yourself to be on the defensive over this Rezko nonsense. Turn it around.
6. Trust: The Clintons are the most distrusted politicians in recent political history.Expose them for the liars they are. Look at what they are trying to do in this election, stealing delegates, cheating by changing the rules in Michigan and Florida etc. Don't let her play the victim and the bully. There' s a reason why nearly 50% of Americans do not trust her. She's a bad person with no principles. You obviously know that, as she was willing to throw you under the bus before the vote yesterday by saying you're not qualified to be president. Now you need to state the obvious: A Clinton nomination will be a sure failure because her vote total ceiling will not enable her to win in the Electoral College.
7. Make her answer to those White House years she proudly claims as "experience": Destroying evidence in the death of Vince Foster, Whitewater, Travelgate, the great Monica blue dress details. This is the reality of the Clinton administration. Do you really think the Republicans will not bring this stuff up? That's why they want her to win. She's a huge target with a 35 year record of corruption, not political accomplishments. She has thrown every possible accusation at you, without any regard for the consequences in the general election. She has, in effect, destroyed the Democratic chances in November by supplying McCain with more than enough ammunition to attack you, using Clinton's words that all you have is a 2002 speech, not years of experience. This person is so self-absorbed she will stop at nothing to win and she has no concern for whether you can win in the general election, so you have no obligation to her. It's time for scorched earth politics: Make it clear that if she cheats you out of the nomination she will lose all of your voters' support and the result will be a McCain landslide. There is no difference between McCain and Clinton, and that's the message you need to push everyday. She has tried to blame the media, cry, cheat, yell, and play the race card in every state, so what exactly is holding you back from destroying her with some real, honest ads that show who she really is? It's really that simple: Start playing rough and end this thing or simply drop out now, before it goes to the convention in Denver and Mr Nice Guy gets mugged in a back room by Billary and has the nomination stolen from you, for as I clearly detailed they can't win this thing above board in terms of the delegate count, so they have to cheat. And they will. There will be blood: Are you Daniel or Eli? Do you have the toughness to drink her milkshake by winning Pennsylvania? Will you let Billary crush your skull with a wooden bowling pin? Are you a future president or "just a bastard from a basket"?
"I'm finished"

OMTS's Political Platform

2008-02-23T11:12:00.000-08:00

In response to many reader requests that I articulate my own positions on the major political issues in contemporary America, the following essay is an outline of my views on some of the most important challenges the country faces in 2008 and beyond. These positions are my own and in no way seek to mirror either political party's platforms. There will be no reference to the positions of the current candidates, and I have limited my discussion to 10 major issues and tried to keep my takes clear and relatively concise. The format is much more philosophical than empirical in most cases. Feel free to email me if you have any specific feedback or would like to join my political campaign:

CGG4@aol.com

1. Military and Foreign Policy:
America is in a difficult position: We would like to lead the world and spread our view of the fruits of democracy, yet we are mired in a financial crisis in which we borrow money from China to fight a war in Iraq, and we conduct business with horrible countries such as Saudi Arabia because we refuse to stand up to oil companies and begin seriously reducing our dependence on oil, foreign or domestic. We love our version of democracy but fail to appreciate that our reckless foreign policy has created a hatred for America that is so visceral in some parts of the world that democracy backfires. See how well democracy has worked for us in Iraq, Iran, Gaza, and Lebanon, just to name a few. People seized their democratic rights and voted for anti-American radical regimes that pose a greater threat to global peace than those they replaced. Such is the profound failure of the Bush-Cheney doctrine. In addition, America simply does not have the resources or the military forces to police the world with ground troops. A small force of 170,000 in Iraq has stretched our military to the breaking point. Think about that. In a real war--Germany in WW II--we put a million men in the country to stabilize it, but as I said, that was a real war, one where all draft age men served: boxers, professional football and baseball stars--everyone. We had 16.3 million men fight in that war, which lasted less than four years precisely because we were serious because we had to be. It wasn't an "everyone go shopping and let the poor kids fight" war that characterizes Iraq. It was the real deal. My relatives were there--a lot of them. In the 1940s Joe Louis was the heavyweight champion of the world, making up to $400,000 a fight. He gave up 4 years of his prime to enter the military, which was segregated, for a $21 a month paycheck.
Our current military is completely unprepared for any type of protracted ground war; however, what I support is the continued expansion of nuclear weapons, which are, quite frankly, the only reason we are living in relative peace and prosperity: Countries fear us and that is a great thing. The U.S. needs to invest significant money(the current 4% of GDP or around $500 billion budget is about right for now, after we cut out this ridiculous Iraq War) to protect and defend our country and interests from the forces that seek to destroy us, whether it be Russia, China, the Middle East etc. The problem with the military budget is the tremendous amount of waste and fraud. This department is screaming for real leadership. It needs to be streamlined and money should be allocated for useful purposes: soldiers' pay, health benefits, advanced weapons systems etc., yet the vast sums of money the DOD receives are not enough to provide basic medical(60,000 injured in Iraq) and disability benefits(224,000 have filed claims to date) for men and women who have been permanently damaged in this pathetic war? That's a crime. (Stats from Linda Bilmes, Harvard University, 2-13-08)
We need to negotiate from a position of strength and that does not come from ground forces: We do not--and will not--have the ground forces to match up with those countries in a conventional war, so we have to possess and continually develop weapons of mass destruction that will serve as a profound deterrent to any leader who may want to attack us. We are a country with 6% of the global population, so policing the world is simply not possible, and even if it were, would American citizens be willing to send all of their sons and daughters into the military for extended deployments all over the world? I think not. I wish the world were a place of peace and love, but the facts are very clear:
The history of the world is one that is awash in blood and warfare, so we have a choice: We can develop cutting-edge technology and weapons systems or wait around for the 21st century Hitler to show up. The pacifists are living in some kind of romantic novel world, and they are dangerous; I wish people would simply live and let live, but as a student of history I cannot find a single time period where that was the case, for it does not exist.
The changes that need to be made relate to the waste and corruption that defines the military machine, the one Eisenhower warned about 50 years ago. Spending and contracts need to be on the public record and examined by Congress. Therefore, much as it pains me to see such huge amounts of money spent on national defense, the fundamental truth is that it's probably the most justifiable use of our tax money. I would institute a policy that all immigrants will sign up for 4 years of military service as a requirement of U.S. citizenship and all native-born Americans will serve as a condition of significant college financial aid. Anyone who doesn't want to fight to defend this country is free to go live somewhere else. It's a big world. The biggest problem this country faces is simple greed. People want to enjoy the fruits of our society but are unwilling to sacrifice; they leave that to the sons and daughters of other Americans, usually the less affluent of course. In times of war, ALL 18-25 year-old men and women would be drafted. Period. There would be no exceptions for rich, cowardly losers such as Bush, Cheney, Clinton etc.

In terms of foreign policy, limited isolationism needs to be our policy in the sense that we simply do not have the money or forces to intervene in every perceived moral issue. Otherwise, we would have hundreds of thousands of forces in Africa for the next 100 years, but we tend to adjust our moral vision when poor black people with no oil are victims of genocide. We need to negotiate and expand diplomacy but should try to avoid military involvement except through NATO or a new more effective world force. Other countries need to step up and fight--and pay for--these wars that are in their backyards and potentially affect them much more than us. It's insulting that Americans pay billions every year to protect countries that offer no substantive
support to our social or economic systems. I would cut foreign aid drastically and clearly define our strategic allies and interests(Japan, Europe, Israel, moderate Middle Eastern countries etc.) and let them know that they will pay for our protection and support, both in financial terms and by providing troops.

2. Budget and Taxes:
The tax system needs to be adjusted at least to pre-Bush rate levels and loopholes need to be closed. We should not go to a national sales tax or this idiotic "fair" tax. The current system is flawed but this basic idea works: If one makes more, one pays a higher percentage. However, the lines need to gradually increase so that someone who makes $150K is not in the same rate as someone who makes $10 million. That's the problem with the current system. We need to give significant tax relief to all families making less than $200K, which in many areas is really middle class. In addition, the tax form needs to be simplified. Raising taxes continually is not the answer.
We need to return to a pay-as-you-go government. Social Security, Medicare and other social programs are threatening to bankrupt the country, so we need to address the fiduciary connection between what people pay into the system and how much--if anything--will be there when they retire. Currently, this system is all very nebulous for most Americans. They need to know exactly how much they will receive if they retire at a specific age so that we can begin pushing people to save significant amounts for their own retirements. Most Americans will be living in poverty without adequate health care if they do not assume responsibility for their own old age. That the reality: This government can only provide a very basic safety net, but we need to have a discussion about what role the government should have in our lives and how much people are willing to pay for that support. It seems obvious that a livable amount of income and basic health services are worth paying for so that our rapidly aging population does not enter old age in dire straits, unable to afford housing and medical care. That is not the type of society most of us envision, but it takes huge sums of money to cover all Americans over the age of 65. That is why we are facing a potential financial crisis that is truly unfathomable. We need to prioritize our values and create a realistic budget and tax structure that will enable us to provide the services and social programs that we need, while also stressing the need for individuals to assume responsibility for their own lives and futures. We need a balanced perspective that will require difficult choices, but it can and should be done, for what is the alternative?

3. Health Care:

First, this nonsense about our health care crisis needs to be addressed. We have a health care crisis because we have a health crisis! People are obese, smoke, don't exercise and wonder why we are in a crisis. When was the last time a politician had the guts to address the real issue? They talk about the care crisis but not the health crisis. People need to change their habits or no health care system is going to help them. That's the bottom line. Having said that, let's look at the facts: 47 million Americans do not have health insurance. One-third of them make over $50,000 a year, 7.3 million have family incomes over $75K, and 25% are 25-34 years old. The fact is some people simply do not want to purchase health care, perhaps because the cost is so high: The average annual cost for insurance is $4,479 for an individual and $12,106 for a family. $41.4 billion in health care was provided last year but not paid for, mainly because free-riders went to emergency rooms without insurance etc. federal law requires that people are treated at emergency rooms(NY Times 2-23-08)
There are several potential solutions:
1. Do nothing. People who have good jobs will have health care, those who don't are on their own.
The uninsured go to emergency rooms
2. Add a tax on all income(like the Social Security deduction) and force people to buy into the system to cover everyone. People do not have a choice whether to pay into the system.
3. Force people to buy insurance on their own and fine them if they do not. Massachusetts has a variation of this type of plan. They require individuals with incomes of over $31,200 and families with income of over $63,600 to purchase insurance. Otherwise, they face fines that started at $219 but will rise to as much as $912.

My plan would be to offer significant tax breaks to companies that provide health care for their employees and offer a government-run program at a reasonable, subsidized rates for lower income Americans to have health care that transcends emergency room services. People could sign up for a payroll deduction that would enable them to receive a health care card that would be accepted by doctors and hospitals. Basically, a government run HMO, not too different than Medicare, only all Americans who need it would be covered if they choose to enroll. I would not force anyone to enroll, and people who chose not to and decided to be "free riders" would face the same type of credit issues that people who do not pay their mortgages face. They would receive emergency care in all cases, of course, but their failure to pay for the services will result in a significant credit penalty. This incentive will lead most people who can afford insurance to either purchase it on their own or sign up for the government program . People who have insurance on their own or through their jobs would not be affected except for the fact that their premiums will probably decrease because there are fewer free riders. A 2005 study found that hospitals and doctors raise their fees so much to compensate for the losses from uninsured patients that it adds 8.5% to the cost of the average premium(NY Times 2-23-08).

4. Immigration
The idea of deporting 12 million illegal immigrants is ridiculous, so what can we do? First, we need to seal the border, not simply talk tough. Republicans have long opposed this because of the pressure from big business for a constant supply of cheap labor, but since this has become such a polarizing issue, it's time to look for solutions.
1. People who are here illegally need to have the opportunity to step forward without the fear of deportation, perhaps leaving their legal immigrant children behind. They should be given the chance to apply for citizenship, paying a fine that is double the cost of becoming a legal citizen, and they should have to go to the back of the line in terms of the timeline for achieving legal status. In addition, all immigrants need to learn English and show a willingness to participate in this society. Mandatory military service for immigrants will help filter out individuals who are motivated to come here simply to get paid and not to help build the country.
2. All illegal immigrants who commit felony crimes or have criminal records need to be deported immediately. We have serious crime problems as it is and cannot justify spending millions on illegal criminals. This is a simple process.
3. Drivers licenses, college financial aid, and government IDs should NOT be issued to illegal immigrants. Once they are identified they should be given the humane options of following the steps outlined in #1 or leaving the country. I encourage people to look at the policies some of our allies have. Try to get into Mexico through their southern border and see how tight their security is; they do not want anyone coming into the country from Central America, yet they talk about American discrimination. There is nothing wrong with a country closely monitoring who comes in and out of the country. 9-11 was the result of legal immigrants who should not have been here in the first place. We should not allow anyone into this country who may reflect the views of regimes who want to attack us. This is common sense stuff. If people come here and initiate radical anti-American groups, they should be deported immediately. Otherwise, this country will face the type of destruction from within that is currently spreading throughout Europe. Who needs it? This country is plenty diverse as it is and needs to take steps to increase the number of productive, taxpaying citizens who will help us expand our technological and economic edge in a world economy.

5. Education
Education needs to be funded at a rate that will enable us to compete with the rest of the world. The public education system needs equity, as some schools are funded and others are in a state that resembles a third world country. I personally have taught in schools with window fans in 105 degree heat and 6 buckets to catch water from leaking roofs during the winter. Kids who are not really interested in school are still perceptive; they can see what we think of them by the schools we give them. The message is clear: You're poor so you don't count. That's the reality of many schools in poor areas, and it's a disgrace. Period. How are we going to increase our middle class without solid public schools? Notice this is not about paying teachers more; it's about basics: books, facilities, technology, qualified teachers and personnel. Many schools are hopelessly underfunded and kids pay the cost. Take California, which will be ranked 46 out of 50 states in per pupil spending after the current cuts(we are currently 43rd, $2000 below the national average, which is shameful in a state this wealthy). We like to think we're a progressive state but lurking below that nonsense is the shocking reality that we are really just the West Coast Mississippi.
A college education should be available to all students who qualify, regardless of their financial situation. We need to have a variety of loans and grants that will enable all students to attain a college education. Public service requirements can help some students, while simple low interest loans can help others, but the message has to be clear: If you earn high grades you will be able to attend college. That is a promise America needs to make to all high school students in order to provide real hope and a chance to increase our dismal high school and college graduation rates. If we can spend $15 billion in Iraq for nothing, we can certainly invest that much in the future of our own children in this country, children whose parents pay for these pathetic wars and foreign policy bribes to dictators and leaders who share none of our values. It's time to reassess our own values and budgetary priorities. An educated population is the reason we are not living in huts, and if this country wants to lead in the future we need to address this situation immediately, before the other advanced countries pass us by, as they have in so many other areas, such as health care.

6. Criminal Justice:
We need to increase the penalties for violent crimes and immediately release all inmates convicted of non-violent drug offenses from prisons and relocate them to less expensive programs. This number is up to 50% of some states' entire prison population! What a profound waste of money. We talk about the need to build more prisons, but it's all a big lie perpetuated by prison guard unions and right wing politicians. We have plenty of prison space; we simply are wasting it on individuals who could be better served in a different setting. Murderers get out in 7 years so we can keep the crack dealer in prison for 20. That does not reflect the values of most Americans, who want to be protected from robbery, rape, murder etc., not necessarily from drug dealers, who can be treated in much less expensive facilities than state and federal prisons. Let's put those individuals into work camps, halfway houses, and electronic monitoring and save prison space, which costs as much as a Harvard education, for people who really need to be in prison, not just punished. If we make these changes we can keep violent criminals in prison for their entire terms, which would have a serious impact on recidivism and incarceration rates. People would think twice before committing an armed robbery if they knew for certain they were going to do 20 years in prison, not 1 or 2 and then probation. That's not the case now. We have a revolving door system because of the failed war on drugs. We need to protect people from each other, not regulate what they do to themselves. If someone drinks or smokes pot on his couch, that should not be a crime. If he gets in a car and drives, that should. This is common sense, so let's introduce some sanity into the system.

7. Energy Policy
Global warming is almost certainly a reality, but my position is that it's irrelevant, for what bad can result from recycling and creating fewer greenhouse emissions and other pollution? Really, what is the downside of creating a cleaner, better environment for our children? Again, common sense goes a long way. We need to develop cleaner burning fuels because the world's supply of oil is finite, and as countries with over a billion people (China, India) begin to develop their economies, the demand for oil will increase exponentially until it is gone. Wars have and will continue to be fought over oil because our entire economy is oil dependent. We need to begin addressing that now, since Bush ignored the chance to do so after 9-11 because he was born in bed with the oil companies and has never left their side.
The obvious alternatives are wind, solar, electricity, and nuclear, although there will certainly be new sources of energy to emerge as they become economically viable. Capitalism will demand that we diversify our choices, but government needs to take the lead, not follow the oil companies' demands, as Bush has. Change in this area can be accomplished if it is undertaken in a public manner that allows conversion time and tangible results for consumers. This is an area where leadership is essential, for most Americans really do care about the environment, but they are not extremists and are reasonably suspicious of much of the current science simply because they perceive the alternatives as inconveniences. If and when gasoline goes up to $10 a gallon they will come around, and perhaps that is what it will take.

8. Abortion
Theologians, scientists, philosophers, lawyers, and of course, the least qualified--politicians-- have debated the question of when life begins for centuries, so I have no intention of looking like a fool by trying to make the definitive statement on such a divisive issue; however, as it relates to public policy, reasonable laws need to be enacted.
First, religion has no place in the development of laws. I fully support an individual's right to practice any faith and live his or her life in a way that reflects a specific set of beliefs, but in no way should those beliefs be foisted upon the rest of us. Religion has a place in society and has made many people's lives better. I fully understand that, but religious differences are the core issue in most of the current conflicts on this planet, and not too many Americans want to live in the types of repressive theocracies we see in the Middle East.
We are generally a tolerant people and make laws that protect the rights of all individuals. Laws should reflect values that are accepted by the overwhelming majority of a country's citizens. Abortion is an issue that has no common consensus and that is why a person who kills a woman who is seven months pregnant will be charged with two murders but would most likely not be charged with two if the woman were seven weeks pregnant. There is a strong sense of ambivalence in a legal sense. No one is really comfortable establishing a legal definition of when life begins. We know that potential life begins at conception but we certainly would not charge a woman with murder if she drank alcohol or did some other reckless activity and caused a miscarriage when she was 4 weeeks pregnant and unaware of the fact. Is that a case of manslaughter? I think not. However, a woman who is eight months pregnant would receive much more scrutiny and perhaps even criminal charges. Why is that? Because people simply do not know when life begins, but they do know that the 4 week tiny cluster of cells is nowhere near the same thing as a viable 35 week fetus. That is common sense for all but the most ignorant of our citizens.
Abortion is not something that anyone should take comfort in, and in no way should it be some type of default birth control for people who refuse to use birth control for whatever reason. I understand people's opposition to abortion, and I respect their views if they are consistent: These people who say it's OK in this case and that case(rape, incest etc.) are hopelessly ignorant, for if you feel that abortion is truly killing an unborn child, you would have to be against it in ALL cases. Period. We do not murder the children of rapists or molesters in this country, nor do we kill a child because it poses a threat to the life of its mother. The unborn child did not commit a crime. That's not how our justice system works, so if one truly opposes all abortions, I respect that position, though I disagree with it, but once someone starts talking about exceptions he or she simply highlights his or her hypocrisy and ignorance.

My position is a simple one: Abortion should be legal and without restrictions for all women over 18 years old through the first trimester(12 weeks). Most abortions, thankfully, take place well before the 12th week, but after the 12th week abortion should be illegal unless a doctor deems it necessary because of the mother's health or the viability of the fetus. Children under 18 must have the consent of a parent or guardian.

9. Death Penalty

Again, religious arguments have no place in this discussion: I have heard plenty of the dueling "eye for an eye" and "thou shalt not kill" crowd to last a lifetime. In essence and theory, I support the death penalty. However, I cannot support it in its current form, where in recent history every person on Death Row in California was poor enough to qualify for a court-appointed lawyer. America cannot have a justice system that is so blatantly biased against the poor, who not coincidentally, are often minorities. The death penalty either needs to be given to all individuals who are convicted of first degree murder or no one at all. I fully support the execution of murderers as long as there is an adequate multi-stage appeals process and the penalty is imposed on rich and poor alike. I do not foresee that happening any time soon, so I support the current moratorium on executions until these issues are examined and resolved.

I know that there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the death penalty is not a deterrent to crime, and I fully understand that most murders are crimes of passion committed by someone who knows the victim. However, the fact remains that some crimes are so atrocious that the person does not deserve to live out his life at taxpayers' expense. Individuals who rape and kill little girls, serial killers, criminals who kill in the commission of robberies, gang murders, premeditated murders--these individuals have no valid reason to continue living. They need to be executed, as they offer nothing in the way of value to our society. I'm no bleeding heart who feels that everyone has something valuable to offer society. I had a machine gun held to the back of my head during a robbery and had one of my students arrested for first degree murder during one of my lectures. Perhaps everyone does have something to offer, but sometimes individuals make the decsion to throw away the "better angels of their nature" and embrace the base animalistic instincts that characterize the human condition, so while I value justice for everyone above all else, part of that responsibility is imposing just sentences that match the crimes, and occasionally the only possible sentence that comes anywhere near matching the severity of the crime is for the criminal to lose his life--usually in a much more humane way than his victim left this world.

10. Science and Technology

America needs to remain on the cutting edge of technological and scientific developments, as this is the foundation of an advanced, progressive society. We need to embrace science as a means by which we can confront health issues and help the rest of the world. As we have started to do in Africa, we can lead the world in helping poor countries develop vaccines and treatments for AIDS and other deadly diseases. We need to aggressively expand funding for a myriad of scientific endeavors in all areas, from energy and medical to advanced computer programs. We need to encourage children in this country to commit to a rigorous science education, and we need to back it up by provding schools and universities with the same types of resources the Department of Defense receives. We need to draw the line between superstition and science and fund innovative ideas such as stem cell research. Scientists have been attacked for centuries, some even murdered for suggesting ideas that all but the most ignorant now accept as fact. Are we a society that is content to believe that thunder is a reflection of God's anger and that evolution is just a "theory"? Will we also begin rejecting gravitational "theory" or the germ theory of disease? Let's hope not. Let's continue the traditions of inquiry that have made this country the great place that most of us know and love, and let's develop 21st century generations that boldly move us into the future through the process of investigation, trial and error, that is the foundation of science and the core of technological advancements. Let's dare to dream big, and more importantly, let's do the hard work that will enable us to continue to develop our scientific imaginations and intellectual foundation so that we can continue to discover more about this miracle that we call life. As Einstein said, "Imagination is more important than knowledge," so let's tap that great potential of the human mind and move bravely and confidently in the directions of our dreams.

Words DO matter...

2008-02-19T18:25:00.000-08:00

In the aftermath of Obama's stunning victory tonight in Wisconsin he delivered a 45 minute policy-oriented, highly detailed speech that was an overview of his solid positions on many of the most important issues of the campaign: Iraq, the economy, energy, education, health care, children, parenting, the political culture, immigration, and indeed the American character. There he stood, in front of 20,000 excited people in a Houston basketball arena, presenting a profound vision of the transcendental possibilities that makes this country a true beacon of hope. The irony, of course, is that it is Obama who is repeatedly attacked by dullards like Clinton and McCain for not basing his campaign on specific solutions for the mess that Bush has made of this once-great country.

I defy anyone to compare the trite, hackneyed rhetoric of Clinton and McCain's "speeches" tonight with Obama's. He slapped both of them down, rubbing his eloquence in their faces, beating back their desperate attempts to obscure the obvious reality of this situation: Obama is smarter and classier than either Clinton or McCain; more importantly, it is Obama who also has the real ideas to implement real change. Is the country really screaming for an 80-year-old with a horrible temper to have his hands on the nuclear button in 7 or 8 years? That is a frightening vision that is the answer to McCain's weak fear-mongering about the big bad world and how Obama cannot keep us safe from all those bad guys(like Bush's Saudi buddies that were here legally, taking their flying lessons, crashing planes into the WTC). Yes, McCain WAS a war hero--30+ years ago, before many voters were even alive. All he has shown recently is that he is out of touch with this world, the here and now that people care about, people whose kids are dying in a war so futile and pointless that it makes Vietnam look noble by comparison. McCain is a man whom time has passed by. He doesn't get it, and his ignorance makes him dangerous for all Americans. As Frank Rich wrote in last Sunday's New York Times, "Trapped in an archaic black-and-white newsreel, the G.O.P looks more like a nostalgic relic than a national political party in contemporary America." As for McCain, "in the vast arena of the internet he has been shrunk to Grumpy Old White Guy, the G.O.P. brand incarnate." Where were all those black Republicans to stand up and support McCain in his victory speech? There are NO black Republicans in the House OR Senate and black voters account for 2% of GOP primary voters.(2-17-08)
The reality, of course, is that all presidents work in concert with advisors, cabinet members etc. Obama, unlike idiots like Bush-McCain, seems especially willing to consider and even embrace divergent ideas and points of view. In essence, that is why he is not only winning this election but wiping out Clinton and McCain. Obama has a very real chance to step it up in Texas and close the show.

The more I see of Barack Obama, the more I am impressed with the dignity, class and restraint he has shown throughout this campaign. Yes, restraint, for imagine if it were Obama that had LOST 10 states in a row, most by landslide margins and all by convincing margins. The Clinton campaign would be demanding that he withdraw from the race, accusing him of tearing apart the party, claiming that he is driven by ego rather than reality. Well, where does that leave the pathetic spectacle that is Billary? She continues on, ignoring another trouncing tonight, refusing to acknowledge the failure that surrounds her, desperately attacking Obama, the "hope-monger" As Obama noted, "We don't need leaders who are telling us what we cannot do." Running a "No, we can't" campaign has never worked in American politics, and Clinton is paying the price for her ruthless cynicism and hypocrisy. Soon, the inevitable calls for her withdrawl will begin. Let's face the facts: When a team loses 10 games in a row, all by double-digits and most by 20 points or more, there is no way to spin that. There are no moral victories in politics. People are simply not that stupid; Billary's base may be uneducated, but even they can see the writing on the wall. This laughable attempt to continually move the goal posts, claiming that this state and that state favor Obama, is really one of the more disturbing events in modern political history.

Imagine if it were Obama who was dismissive of any state that he didn't win. What would the reaction be? How would he be characterized? She has lost 25 of 35 states yet is given a pass to define victory on her own terms. It's like the Miami Dolphins losing their first 10 games this season(as they did), only to say, "who cares, we're waiting for that Baltimore game, that's the big one." OK... Talking about Texas, Ohio etc. is irrelevant, for short of outright fraud or a total collapse of Obama's campaign, Clinton needs to forget about winning the party's nomination, despite Billary's ruthless pursuit of superdelegates. As the New York Times reported(2-17-08), there are 79 superdelegates from states and districts that Obama won by large margins that are supporting Clinton and over 100 of the undecided are from states that Obama won big, a clear indication of the flawed nature of the process. Obama won Washington state with 68% of the vote, yet the state's two U.S. Senators are both voting for Clinton? These are the types of politicians who need to be held accountable to the will of their constituents, as Tad Devine wrote in the New York Times: "The perception that the votes of ordinary people don't count as much as those of political insiders, who get to pick the nominee in some mythical back room, could hurt our party for decades to come."(2-10-08)

The reason I will not vote for Billary under any circumstances at this point has nothing to do with her qualifications or policy positions; it has to do with their complete and utter disregard for basic decency, fairness, and moral principles, whether it has to do with the race issue, the DNC rules, or the smug assumption of inevitability that is more suited to a monarchy than a democracy in a clearly transitional historical phase. First, the battle to claim Florida and Michigan delegates is simply disgusting: The candidates all signed a pledge not to campaign or contest the votes in those states; Obama's name wasn't even on the ballot in Michigan, yet Clinton wants to claim the "ghost" delegates. The bigger issue, and a shocking one, is that in Michigan she couldn't even break 50% of the white male vote in an election where she was the only candidate on the ballot!

Americans value a fair game and will not tolerate cheaters, as baseball players are learning the hard way, yet here is Clinton pushing to change the rules of the game after it was played, deciding that a Spring Training game was actually game 7 of the World Series or that a pre-season game was actually the Super Bowl. That's not how we do things in this country. The two states were told that their votes would not count if they moved their elections up, and everyone agreed to it, including the Clintons. Now they want to seize delegates that were uncontested because they are getting embarrassed in every fair fight they've engaged in. If the Clintons wanted those states to count, they should have asked to change the rules BEFORE the votes were cast so that Obama could have a fair chance to get his name out there. The interesting irony is that had the idiots in Michigan and Florida simply kept their elections on Feb 5th they would have had the huge influence that they wanted. The individuals who disenfranchised their own state's voters are the villains of this story. What the hell were they thinking? They were clearly told that if they moved their elections earlier than Feb 5th, their votes would not count, yet they did it anyway, played chicken with the democratic rights of millions of people...and lost.

The brutal truth is that the only significant states Clinton has won in the entire election are the Super Tuesday ones where Obama did not have nearly enough time to campaign. Think of the name recognitition advantage she had in a 20+ state single-day primary--and she lost over half of those states! People know the Clinton name, but once they get to know Obama, they drop the Clintons quickly. That's essentially what has happened in the last 14 days. As I predicted, when Obama has time to get into a state and mobilize his prodigious ground troops, he quickly turns the tide. That's why he's likely to win Texas and Ohio and end this thing if he doesn't make a substantial mistake on the campaign trail or in the debates.

The Clinton campaign responded to the first sign of trouble by trying to play on the worst instincts of Americans, playing the race card, characterizing Obama as another black radical, but to their dismay they found a new America, one that was ready to turn a significant page in race relations, and Billary is still reeling from this epiphany: They simply cannot comprehend what is happening, as states all over this country have rejected their smear campaigns and shallow rhetoric. Like a punch drunk fighter, they are trapped on the ropes, pummeled by 10 unanswered blows, waiting for the ref to step in, arms waving, and mercifully call an end to the fight...
On to the showdown on March 4th. It was on that day--March 4th, 1933, that F.D.R. gave his own little rhetorical speech, something about "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself," as the country faced the worst crisis in its history.
Just words...

"Men at some time are masters of their fates": Obama takes Control

2008-02-12T19:10:00.000-08:00

Listening to the Clinton campaign in the aftermath of the devastating results of the past week, it occurred to me that she and Rudy should form a "Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda" ticket: Unable to compete and helplessly watching her support slip away, she desperately tries to change the rules of the game, talking about her new "firewall" in Texas. It's laughably absurd to think that she will salvage some miraculous 5% victory and bounce back into the lead, as we all saw how that worked for the other "inevitable" candidate, Rudy. Down by over 100 delegates after tonight, the message is clear: start winning big or step aside. Billary is quickly becoming anathema to a Democratic Party that is beginning to really believe in the change that Obama speaks of, and as belief grows it is accompanied by a visceral need to shut the door on the past and turn the page on the Clinton era. There were 23 states left after Super Tuesday: Obama has won all 7 states since then, leaving him with 22 victories to her 10, and the road doesn't look any better for Clinton heading into Hawaii and Wisconsin. Billary dismissed caucus votes from the weekend, saying the caucus system is not inclusive enough, then got destroyed even worse in today's primaries. They enjoyed the caucus when they won in Nevada, yet they have been reduced to spinning their multitudinous defeats and talking about their past victories. Stressing your victories in big states such as California doesn't help you when you're getting wiped out day after day. Moreover, as the old saying goes, "In California, drive 50 miles away from the coast and you're in Oklahoma." Clinton won Oklahoma also, but that seemed like years ago in a campaign structure and media that feeds on what have you done lately.

We live in an era of TV attention spans, and all anyone sees now is a Clinton team that is 0-7 since last week and staring at 0-9 next week. The seats are starting to vacate and the supporters are slowly slipping away from the campaign, as well as campaign managers. Billary's arrogance led them to appoint a hapless neophyte like Patti Solis to run their campaign. Like a precocious child, Solis panicked when confronted with someone like Obama who stood up and punched back. It didn't take a genius to run an "inevitability" campaign. Thank goodness Billary was too cheap and confident to hire someone as competent as James Carville, who could have really helped craft a viable message. Instead, Hillary wanted a "yes woman" when she needed someone to demand that she control Bill before it was too late and that she develop a message that was more uplifting than the trite "ready from Day One." Instead, she hired someone who admitted that she thought it would be a much shorter battle to win the nomination. Indeed, as I suggested last week, Clinton may finish the rest of the season 0-23. It's really quite simple: Win all 4 states on March 4th with over 60% of the vote or do the right thing and drop out, which unfortunately, seems almost unimaginable for Billary, but one can hope that as Frank Rich discussed in the New York Times the Clintons do not counter Obama's 1960 with their own 1968 with "a race-tinged brawl at the convention some nine weeks before Election Day."

Obama is destroying Billary in state after state, and he may not lose another, certainly not by the numbers that he is trouncing Clinton: Obama won with 68% in Washington, 68% in Nebraska, 57% in Louisiana, and 59% in Maine this weekend, and tonight in Virginia, D.C. and Maryland the results were even more decisive. It was a drubbing beyond comprehension, as Obama wiped Clinton out in EVERY category: Last Tuesday he won 57% of young voters, tonight he won 68%; last Tuesday he won 35% of older voters, tonight he won 51%; last Tuesday he won 43% of women voters, tonight he won 59%; last Tuesday, he won 35% of rural voters, tonight he won 59%. The Hispanics whom Clinton aides cynically suggested were too racist to vote for Obama? He won a majority of them also. Those groups are the Clinton base voters, and Obama has effectively taken them from her, which in essence means this race is over unless she quickly reverses the tide or the Clintonian dirty trick machine can steal enough superdelegates through relentless arm-twisting or backroom deals to put her over the top, but that looks increasingly unlikely, for everyone--even superdelegates--loves a winner, and as Obama continues to roll through state after state with landslide after landslide, the will of the voters will be impossible to deny.

The whole notion of superdelegates whose votes count for as much as 13,000 or more votes is undemocratic and highly corrupt, especially when one considers that the Clintons' stated personal wealth is $35 million while Obama's is $1.3 million. Is anyone gullible enough to think some of those "supers" could not be purchased? How the Clintons, who came to D.C. in 1992 without even owning a home, amassed that kind of fortune is worthy of a serious investigation, but unlike Obama, the Clintons refuse to release their tax returns. What do they have to hide?
Superdelegates should vote for the candidate who won their district so that they are respresented proportionally to the popular vote in each state. This is the only way to avoid rampant corruption, and if that means that Obama supporters Kennedy and Kerry vote for Clinton because she won Mass., so be it, as long as Obama gets superdelegates in districts where he won. Americans value a fair game, and cheaters beware, especially if you're an elected official. Most politicians are afraid to throw the will of the voters in the toilet, so I remain hopeful that the person who wins the most states and delegates will garner the superdelegates necessary to secure the nomination. The alternative is downright frightening: Blood in the streets of Denver...

In the meantime, McFossil, surrounded by the same boring white bread he calls his base, delivered another somnolent "victory speech" after barely surviving another round with Ol' Huck-up. What does it say about McCain that he can barely beat someone as flawed as Huckabee? I don't get it, for as boring and dated as McCain and his views are, he is much more prepared to be president than an idiot like Huckabee, yet here is McCain, battling for every state in an election that is effectively over. He has the nomination but no one in the GOP wants him to have it. It's humorous and ironic, as he simply doesn't seem to have many supporters. To quote David Lee Roth who once famously claimed that music critics liked Elvis Costello because they all looked like Elvis Costello, McCain supporters are pretty much limited to guys who look like John McCain. Having said that, the guy may be the next president simply because this country is heading into unchartered waters. Will enough racists converge to vote against Obama instead of for McCain? That could very well happen, as it is clear that McCain has no appeal outside that narrow group that stood behind him on stage tonight. Why is race brought up? Because all McCain has proven is that hardly anyone is actually FOR him: Look at the numbers of voters who have actually showed up and cast a vote for the man. The number is miniscule compared to either Democratic candidate. This does not bode well for the general election, as McCain knows that no one is interested in voting for him, so he has to motivate them to vote against his opponent. The GOP smear machine is gearing up for a new level of slime, but whether it will be politics as usual remains to be seen. The future of the country depends on how the nation answers that question in 2008.

"We Are the People We've Been Waiting For..."

2008-02-06T17:00:00.000-08:00

So much for the coronation of the frontrunner, as Obama held his own and did what he had to do to take the fight into the later rounds, where his money, organization, and most importantly, momentum may very well help him close the show. While Clinton was favored in every state except Illinois, it was Obama who secured huge victories from coast to coast, Alaska to Connecticut, from Alabama to Idaho, and Utah to Minnesota. Clinton won the states she was supposed to win, but with the possible exception of Massachusetts, there were no real surprises. Obama caught and rode the wave that is still building. As Bob Herbert noted in the New York Times, people "are just fed up with the status quo, and they want change...Winds change. If you're sailing against the wind today, it may be different tomorrow. And there are few things more powerful than the winds of history"(2-5-08) What's really going on here is there is a generational war unfolding: Young people who have grown up in a world where race and gender are not huge considerations are flocking to Obama(he won nearly 60% of 18-29 group), while the older voters, especially those over 60(he lost nearly 60% of 60+ year-olds), are mired in the old vortex of racial assumptions that prevent them from transcending their own prejudices. Unfortunately, the results clearly support this assertion, so this is essentially a battle between past and present, and what this country has been and what it can be. As Obama succinctly conveyed, we are indeed the people who have arrived to try to prod, cajole, and help lead this country forward into the 21st century. "This must be the new world..."(John Doe,X)

With the Clinton name recognition and political machine, her campaign thought they were going to finish Obama off, but despite impressive but expected wins in New York and California, Clinton is running scared, today admitting that she and Bill loaned her campaign $5 million and asked staffers to work for free, a move that conjures the image of Romney and Huckabee, not the self-proclaimed inevitable nominee who assured her supporters at a December meeting in Sacramento that the race would be over on Feb 5th. In a humiliating bit of news late in the day it was reported that Obama had raised $5 million of his own since the polls closed on Feb 5, less than 24 hours. That's the reality of the situation; he raised $32 million to her $13 million in January because he has a much broader base of support that is building while hers is contracting. Clinton's spin experts were busy today claiming victory, but when she was forced to reluctantly admit her "investment," it exposed the obvious reality: Democrats are abandoning Billary at an astounding rate, as all but the deluded "core" see the writing on the wall: The calculated attempt to play the race card was a disaster that has left her core group as lower income and uneducated white and Hispanic women. Those are the facts, humbling as they may be, as the results indicated. Obama not only won educated, upper class voters and black voters: He won white males nationwide, a group that usually supports Republicans and an essential group for any Democrat who wants to be viable in a general election. Obama won nearly all the "red" states.

As I explained in an earlier post, Billary's "core" is not enough to get elected president. She is a highly divisive figure, whom one either loves or hates, and she has failed to expand her base. Indeed, it is Obama who is taking votes away from her base, while gaining ground everywhere. Look at the polls a month ago in the states Obama lost: He was down by 20-30% in every one of those states but ended up competing in ALL of them, while Clinton was crushed in many states: She only won 17% in Idaho, 31% in Georgia, 26% in Kansas, 25% in Alsaka, 32% in Colorado and Minnesota, 33% in Illinois, the state she grew up in! Obama had over 40% of the vote in EVERY state except Arkansas.

So who has a better chance to force Dead Man Walking(McCain) to spend time in red states trying to defend his base in a general election? For instance, Obama may lose Georgia but it's not a given. It will be a fight. His youthful energy and enthusiasm will provide a stark contrast to McCain's hackneyed rhetoric and combative demeanor. This is no country for John McCain, a relic of the past. The country is not clamoring for a leader born in the 1930s. The country expressed a desire for change last night and McCain is anything but change. He can't have it both ways of course, bragging he's "experienced" and innovative. He's neither. He's a grocery boy, come to collect his nomination.(Brando) If Billary wins the nomination, those states are safely McCain's and there are a lot of them. This is, after all, an electoral college election. Popular vote and a few big states will not cut it, yet that's all Billary can win, as they painfully demonstrated last night.

Super Tuesday was not so super for either candidate but made it clear that this battle could progress to the floor of the convention in Colorado, where the disturbing image of an all-out bloodbath becomes a distinct possibility, especially if the party insiders steal the nomination from Obama through their super delegate nonsense and the sleazy attempt to seat delegates from the uncontested "beauty contests" in Michigan and Florida, events that Obama did not contest because he is a man of his word. There was an agreement not to campaign in the states, yet now the Clintons want to claim victory? I now fully understand the people who have told me that the Clintons were slimy cutthroats. How low will these people sink? The Clintons should be thinking about a graceful exit from the campaign, not a way to consolidate insiders and rig the convention. Obama's loyal, passionate followers are likely to converge in Denver and make Chicago '68 look like a civil disagreement if he "loses" the nomination because of a few fraudulent super delegates or the seating of delegates from uncontested elections in Michigan and Florida. Howard Dean, as he indicated today, is terrified of this potential scenario. And he has good reason to hope it is over before the convention, but will it be? All the remaining states are ones that Obama can win. The momentum is with him, and he is not going to lose all those states, so what is the endgame? Believe me, the DNC is scared to death today...

So What About the Issues?

Obama has a strong argument on the following issues:
1. He was right about this war fiasco. People want us out. Period. He can declare victory and leave, as Bush should have done. It's not about giving up. We changed their leadership, remember "Mission Accomplished" Let them sort out their country now.
2. His health care plan is prudent but not as extreme as Billary's, which will be rejected once people fully understand that their wages will be garnished if they do not sign up. She reluctantly confirmed this last Sunday morning on "This Week..." Her plan makes it mandatory that everyone purchase it. Period. Good luck selling that.
He will cover basically anyone who really wants to be covered, which is good enough.
3. He's pro-choice. McCain is not. The U.S. population does not support the GOP platform's call for a constitutional amendment to ban ALL abortions. That's ridiculous.
4. He has a reasonable plan to deal with the illegal immigration issue(e.g. pathway to citizenship, pay fines, seal the border etc.) McCain shared this position until the agents of intolerance took over his campaign team. Obama made a BIG mistake supporting driver's licenses for illegals. It's a reasonable idea in public safety terms but a loser politically and did not help him with Hispanic voters, so why go there. It will cost him a lot of votes if he wins the nomination. He should back off now, as Clinton did.
5. Sound environmental record; McCain is generally sound here also, but his party is not. It's one of the reasons they hate him: He cares about the environment and doesn't hate Mexicans, which is a sin to conservatives.
6. Tax policy: McCain voted against Bush's idiotic cuts for people making over $250K(another reason the GOP hates him), but now he supports them. Obama wants to roll them back to pre-Bush levels to help balance the budget. That's the reasonable position. His economic stimulus package is reasonable, with a little extra money for old people and unemployed persons($250 each). May not help but won't hurt.
7. A good energy policy that invests in clean energy sources($150 billion over 10 years) and doubling fuel efficiency standards.
8. An education policy that wisely invests in Head Start and pre-school, where it all begins to go wrong for too many kids, and also supports $4000 college education tax credits. McCain supports vouchers for rich people to get tax credits to pay for their rich kids to go to rich private schools. That's a great use of our tax money: Wake up you middle class GOP fools: The Republican party laughs at you. They know you are idiots who will blindly support their efforts to finance tax breaks for millionaires at your expense.

Barack Obama is the only candidate left who has earned everything he has achieved. Let's face it, McCain is winning because he is running against some real losers--a Baptist preacher with 2 years of education at a Baptist school and a Mormon who is ONLY in it because he is rich. Period.
Hillary Clinton could not get elected to a school board if her last name was Jones. The "feminist" is in this race because of her man's accomplishments only, and she has hidden behind him every time the going has gotten tough. Oh, the irony of that...

Barack Obama has come out of nowhere to seize the momentum and leave the Clinton machine reeling and disoriented; now he needs to get out there and take it, for it won't be easy. He must get into all of the remaining states and do some real trench warfare: Fight for every vote. Make it happen. The country needs you.

OMTS Endorses Barack Obama for President

2008-02-01T17:46:00.000-08:00

It was gratifying to witness the return of civility and discursive language to last night's debate; it also made it clear why many of us had an affinity for both candidates when the campaigns began last year. Indeed, the putative frontrunner Hillary Clinton is certainly a capable politician who has many innovative ideas and a generally sound vision of where she would take the country if elected, despite her unseemly celebration of winning the phony Florida primary and the much-anticipated American Samoa primary. You know a campaign is in trouble when they are talking about polling well in territories... The problem with Hillary Clinton is not her policy positions but rather her status as the most divisive political figure in recent memory, as well as her lack of judgment as it relates to the Iraq War and her husband's role in her campaign: Clinton's inability to acknowledge her mistake in supporting the war criminal Bush and her tacit approval of Bill's overtly racist campaign rhetoric has transformed her into a fatally flawed candidate who essentially has no realistic chance of uniting the Democratic Party or, more importantly, winning what will be a bruising general election. We all thank Hillary for putting Bill back in his doghouse. Someone finally had the temerity to jerk his chain. Problem is, it's too late for Ted Kennedy and indeed for all but the most dedicated myopians. On January 8th I wrote about the anger I felt at Bill's "fairy tale" comment, and it was equally painful, though not as surprising in light of the last three weeks, to see him come full circle with his most offensive comment yet, the unsolicited comparison of Obama's 28-point landslide in South Carolina to Jesse Jackson's victories in '84 and '88. Ignoring Rep. Clyburn's advice to "chill," he got one last race baiting barb in before he left South Carolina after the old fashioned ass whuppin' he took, as black voters saw the Clintons for what they have become and rewarded them accordingly. Even Toni Morrison, who much to her discredit coined the "first black president" nonsense that Bill wrapped himself in, came out and endorsed Obama this week.

Not content with alienating black and white voters, the Clinton campaign even sent a pollster out to claim that "the Hispanic voter has not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates." Would he still have his job if he said this about white voters? You tell me...As one Hispanic columnist wrote, "why in the world would the Clinton campaign want to portray Latino voters as too unrelentingly racist to vote for Barack Obama."(LA Times) Let's call it as it is: The Clinton campaign knows they are on the wrong side of the main substantive issue--Iraq--so they have resorted to the old-school tactics of divide-and-conqeur racial politics. Much was said about their backing off once the show arrived in Hollywood. Is that a surprise? That's where they raise money, and overt racism isn't going to fly with educated California liberals, but the genie's out of the bottle. The pit bull Billy did his damage. They called off the dog simply because they feel as though they achieved their goal of blackening up Obama enough to take him down in a one-on-one contest. However, what seemed to galvanize the Democratic Party this week was the collective rejection of the Clintonian win-at-all-costs brand of politics. Hillary's "making nice" is a product of necessity, as the Clintons watched one Democrat after another bravely stand up and turn their backs on their methods. Even right wing columnists had it right, as William Kristol's piece in the New York Times conveyed: "But it is now clear that putting her in the White House brings a hyperactive Bill back in with her. Who needs it? Liberals and Democrats can get basically the same policies without the Clintonian baggage, and in choosing Obama, they can nominate a more electable candidate."(1-28-08) All Democrats should heed this advice and vote to give our party a real chance to win in November, for Billary will lead to a humiliating defeat that will have the collateral effect of disillusioning millions of Obama's supporters, left to say, I told you so...

John McCain is a pathetic candidate, with his big cheeks bulging with all the BS that comes out of his mouth about the great success of the surge and how Americans want to stay in Iraq for 100 years. Remember it was McCain who went to Iraq, a place so safe that he literally was afraid to walk down the street unless he had soldiers, tanks, and even air support Blackhawks to protect him. Ah, the fruits of democracy. Talk about the surge when he goes to Iraq and walks down the street with only his Secret Service guys. I would pay to see that. But he is the best the GOP has to offer, and the party faithful will unite behind him, especially if Clinton is the opponent. It's laughable to suggest that any Republican is going to vote for Hillary Clinton because McCain isn't conservative enough. Think about that logic...Of course, they will support "McStain." As the old saying goes, "Primaries are for falling in love, general elections are for falling in line." No one is better at falling in line than Republicans; they will support McCain, despite their bruised egos. Thus, the Democrats are left with the following predicament: Who is best equiped to compete with the Republicans in November and secure an electoral college majority?

I have often been asked if I think Barack Obama can be elected President of the United States in 2008. My answer is an honest one: I do not know. But what I do know is that Hillary Clinton will not defeat John McCain, a generally moderate Republican, despite his protestations that he is some kind of conservative. Clinton's only real chance was against a right wing fringe candidate, such as Huckabee, but with her high negatives she would have to win every state Kerry won, plus a few more where she trails McCain badly. She would start the race at least 20 states behind, as she would have no chance to win any Southern or Western states. Face it, she can only compete on both coasts and the Northeast. Even the Midwest is a dicey proposition for Clinton, especially against a moderate. As in 2000 and '04, the GOP and McCain could focus on one or two swing states and the election is over. As Frank Rich wrote in the New York Times last Sunday, the spectacle of "Billary" is a losing proposition: First, all the Clinton baggage becomes the biggest albatross in political history, as suddenly Bill's actions over the last eight years become fair game, since he has thrust himself into this campaign. More importantly, Hillary is not a strong contrast to McCain, as they voted the same on many issues and McCain, as a much more experienced Senator and a real war hero, takes the thunder out of her main argument. As Rich said, "the moment she attempts it, McCain will run an ad about how he was being tested when those 35 years(of Hillary's experience) began, in 1973. It was that spring when he emerged from five-plus years at the Hanoi Hilton while Billary was still bivouacked at Yale Law School. And can Mrs. Clinton presume to sell herself as the best equiped to be commander in chief 'on Day One' when opposing an actual commander and war hero? I don't think so."(NY Times 1-27-08) Basically both McCain and Clinton are one trick ponies running on their perceived experience, while the country is yearning for CHANGE. If people were so concerned about having an experienced president, they would be screaming for Cheney to run, as it's clear he has much more experience than all the candidates. So much for experience...

Obama, however, provides a sense of hope, as well as a stark contrast with the bitter curmudgeon, McCain. And, in reality, as an Illinois State and U.S. Senator he has eleven years of experience as an ELECTED public servant(four more than Hillary Clinton, who touts her experience) Obama has the potential to compete in Southern states and put the GOP on the defensive over their failed war and irresponsible budgets. While Hillary and McCain were on the Senate floor voting to enable Bush to launch an unprovoked attack on a country that had nothing to do with 9-11 and no WMDs, Barack Obama had the insights and COURAGE to speak the following words:

"I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military is a fraction of it's former strength. I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than the best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of Al Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I'm opposed to dumb wars."
Barack Obama October 2, 2002

Think about Obama's words, spoken well before our misguided invasion. Think about how this country could have been different if his words would have been taken seriously. Think about the 4,000 young Americans whose lives could have been saved, along with tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians. I have ex-students who have DIED in this war and others who are there now. We continue to spend over $12billion a month. Think about those numbers. The $600 rebates the government is mailing out will cost $150 billion. My family will get $1200. We could have received $1200 EVERY YEAR for the same cost as the Iraq war! American families are paying that much for this war. $1200 you could save for your child's education, for your own retirement, to pay bills, to buy healthcare. That is a tangible reminder of how much we are paying for this war: Each year Iraq is costing us more than literally sending every taxpaying family $1200. And what have we gained from the $6000 my wife and I have spent on the Iraq war these past FIVE years? Nothing. Much of the world hates us more than ever, our economy is crashing, and the national psyche is in tatters. You chicken hawks and cowards, masters of war, who, like Bush and Cheney, ran from war when it was your time to go, should "bury your face deep in the rag, for now is the time for your tears...Even Jesus will never forgive what you do"(Dylan)

Barack Obama is a man of vision, integrity, and sound judgment--qualities that have been noticeably and painfully absent from the current adminstration. He can reach out to a world that is looking for America to once again be a moral leader, not just a military power. He deserves your vote on Feb 5th.

The Real State of Our Union

If ever a country was screaming for regime change, it is our country, here and now:
We have a president whose approval rating has gone from 84% in 2002 to 32% in 2008(Gallup Poll, 1-20-08) while Exxon, a Texas company of course, posted the largest annual profit of any U.S. company in the history of this country--$40.6 BILLION. They made this money on the backs of poor people, who paid continually increasing prices for gasoline, home heating oil etc. This supply and demand nonsense that Bush talks about is out the window: The truth is that the oil companies manipulated crude oil markets and futures in order to create these profits for the largest publicly traded oil company. The entire Bush family have been in bed with the oil companies for years. Now that Exxon got their 40 billion this year, it's time for them to kiss Georgie goodbye, roll over and put their pants on. I'm sure they paid him well for his services.

"Sweet Carolina, what compels me to go..." Obama Trounces Clintons

2008-01-26T11:15:00.000-08:00

Obama wins South Carolina, a state where 61% of the voters were female, by fighting and wisely staying positive, leaving Hillary and Bill wallowing in the mud and muck of the low road, a place where in very early returns they were mired in 18% to Obama's 70%, complete and utter devastation and a resounding rejection--by blacks, whites, women, everybody--of the type of slimy politics that the Clintons and their cult of personality embraced. Bill and Hillary's act has become one of genuine pathos.
The bumper sticker in South Carolina was humorous and prophetic: "I'm not going to vote for Monica's ex-boyfriend's wife." It's hard to feel sorry for either Clinton in the aftermath of their destruction of their own reputations and the likely end of Hillary's chance for the presidency, which is all they got out of their race baiting tactics and outright lies that they desperately tried to ride to victory in South Carolina. One can only imagine the Machiavellian nature of their discussions behind closed doors, as the ambitious Hillary prodded her attack dog husband to go for the jugular:

MacBill: "If we should fail?"
Lady Clinton: "We fail? But screw your courage to the sticking place,/ And we'll not fail"
MacBill: "False face must hide what the false heart doth know." (Macbeth 1.7.60-83)
Unfortunately for the Clintons, Obama showed in the Monday debate that he's no Duncan who is going to let MacBill come into his room with his pride, ambition and daggers to do his wife's dirty work. Long term, the Clintons may have achieved their goal of defining Obama as a black candidate, but at what cost? That cost will be clear in November if Hillary wins the nomination, when many of us will search for any viable alternative to voting for the Clinton co-presidency. It was an unpleasant spectacle to see Obama and Clinton trading sucker punches in the middle of the ring, but that's what the Clintons needed, to bring Obama down into the mud they wallow in so gracefully, to strip the aura of hope and optimism and make him look like another hypocritical fringe black candidate. Obama, to his credit, had to engage in the fight; he simply had no choice but to respond forcefully against the two-headed Clinton monster or lie down and fade into the dustbin of history. In essence, he did what he had to: When a fighter is pinned against the ropes he either covers up, holds on, or comes out swinging: Obama wisely chose the latter, as James Carville observed if he had taken a different path, "Obama runs a risk of being wussified."(NY Times 1-25-08) Indeed, he would be more of a "wussy" if he left the heavy lifting of attack politics to his capable and perhaps too articulate wife, Michelle, who has been deemed too "edgy" by his campaign. Translation in political speak: She tells the truth too much.

As Thomas Jefferson famously wrote in 1796, "No man will ever bring out of the presidency the reputation which carries him into it." Indeed, but Bill's demise into the orange tie wearing, red-faced blowhard who sleeps through Martin Luther King Day speeches, only to wake up refreshed for a new round of lies about Obama--radio ads that say he loved Reagan, supported the war, is a closet Muslim extremist, was a street level drug dealer, is in bed with a slumlord(the one who posed for a picture with Bill and Hillary at the White House of course)--is surely the most disconcerting image liberal Democrats have had to digest in years. When Bill Clinton is basically being told to shut up by party elders such as John Kerry, Pat Leahy, and Ted Kennedy, one would think a moment of reflection and self-analysis is in order, yet Bill carries on, cynically blaming the media for bringing up the race issue, when it was his own wife who stated the obvious by saying it "took a President" to get civil rights passed. Bill's own lead lawyer who defended him in his impeachment case came out and endorsed Obama this week, and in today's New York Times Bob Herbert claimed Clinton "has at times sounded like a man who's gone off his medication. And some of the Clinton surrogates have been flat-out reprehensible."
In Obama's words, Bill has essentially been reduced to "bamboozling" voters. Supporters are fleeing the Clinton campaign at an astounding rate, as some of us actually have principles, actually believe in some of the equality, justice, and unity themes that the party we support used to stand for, at least we thought it did. The New York Times reported that "Mr. Clinton is deliberately trying to play bad cop against Mr. Obama, campaign officials say, and is keenly aware that a flash of annoyance or anger will draw even more attention to his arguments...Mr. Clinton has treaded onto far more combustible ground, like race."(1-25-08) Hillary Clinton entered this campaign with the highest negatives of any major candidiate in recent memory, and as those negative feelings expand exponentially, the end result for the Democratic Party comes into clearer focus: If Hillary gets the nomination, the Republicans--even with their horribly flawed candidates--have to be favored to win in November beacause, unlike the Democrats, they will be united and galvanized by three words that strike fear into their hearts: President Hillary Clinton.

It's hard not to feel like Buckingham in Richard III, who pauses before responding to Richard's request to kill the two innocent children(one the rightful king) in the tower. He had followed Richard in all his devious plots to that point, but everyone has his or her personal limits, a line we simply cannot cross and still retain our personal sense of morality and values. In Shakespeare's play, Buckingham makes a run for it because he knows that he will literally lose his head if he sticks around.

In South Carolina, for many of us, the only possible way to avoid the downward spiral of racial bigotry and divisive politics was to flee the Clintons for good, to close the chapter on a legacy that made the 1990s an era that this country can and should celebrate: Bill Clinton was an outstanding president, despite his personal flaws. Humanity is flawed--that is the reality of human nature. It always puzzles me how much more enlightened Christ was than his generally ignorant followers: "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone." The Bible is full of excellent advice and principles to live by, but by and large the Bible has become no more than a primary source for fanatics who take a phrase and paste it to their forehead, claiming they know "the word." Bill Clinton's personal flaws aside, he did much to help this country rebound from 12 years of tax and spend Republicans, who created a tremendous budget crisis that Clinton managed with acuity and a good deal of common sense. Thus, it is with a tangible and profound sense of sadness that I see this man I supported as leader of the free world wandering around South Carolina in his obnoxious suits, providing cover and engaged in full-on attack mode for his wife, the one who claims she is ready to lead from day one but cannot even fight her own battles, the one who is afraid to utter the nonsense that she assigns to her presumed "first lad" husband and his odious henchman. As Bob Herbert asked in the NY Times today, "What kind of people are the Clintons?" When a respected liberal black writer is left to ponder this question, what is the country left to think? I no longer know these Clintons, and frankly, I have no desire to know either of them anymore--not now, not on Feb 5th, and certainly not in November. To millions of free thinking, liberal-minded Americans, the Clintons have become strangers.

1-20-08: One Year from Today, Our National Nightmare Will Be Over. Let's hope...

2008-01-20T08:57:00.000-08:00

"I'll read enough, When I do see the book indeed
Where all my sins are writ, and that's myself..." (Richard II)

George W. Bush took office under an ignominious cloud, hiding in his limo, being pelted by eggs and tomatoes, after losing the U.S. popular vote and being installed as President by a 5-4 Supreme Court vote, swung by politicos appointed by his father and Reagan. It was perhaps the most disturbing day in modern American political history, and a year from today, it will come to its logical conclusion, as W will leave Washington as the worst President in at least the last 80 years, if not ever. That point is not really contested by any serious student of history; indeed, even the common man can appreciate the incompetence Bush has displayed, from Katrina to Iraq to the English language itself, which has endured a continuous and unmerciful beating at the hands of Bush, to the point that the parents of Miss Teen South Carolina should really demand a DNA test to make sure that she is not Bush's kid. The only appropriate conclusion would be to tar and feather Bush and Cheney and ride them out on a rail, like the Duke and King in Huckleberry Finn.

"One man came in the name of love..."
Today is MLK day, a good time for reflection on where the country is and where we have arrived from. There is a profound sense of optimism today, knowing that the idiot Bush will only have another year to destroy our country's economic system, our standing in the world, our military preparedness, and perhaps most importantly, our sense of values and respect for the freedom that is embodied by the Constitution. On this day of reflection, it is especially sobering to recall that several months ago all the major Republican candidates(except Huckabee) for President of the United States in 2008 refused to even participate in a debate hosted by an African American university. This, my friends, is the real state of race relations in the GOP: Outright hostility towards all but rich white males, as the 10 rich white males who originally ran for the nomination indicate, as they embrace xenophobia that is certainly unAmerican and anti-families that the GOP seems to care so much about. One would think that in a multicultural country that finally seems to be confronting worn-out assumptions about race and gender, the democrats would pounce on this opportunity to define the GOP as the bigoted, narrow-minded minority that is has become in contemporary America, yet here they are engaged in a blood-letting that may very well lead to deep divsions among racial fault lines that will open the door to the type of divide-and-conquer politics that Rove used to miraculously get a dullard such as Bush elected in the first place. With the state of America heading into 2008, it truly seems almost incomprehensible that a Republican can once again win the White House, but if the democrats do not redefine their priorities and consolidate their fragile power base, the inconceivable is exactly what will happen in November.
Nevada was a chance to see the raw, opened wounds of racial politics, as the Clintons successfully played the race card. Let's be honest about this: The only possible reason Hillary would have to make the LBJ-King comparison, which essentially started the race baiting, was to accomplish the Clintons' cynical goal of "blackening up" Obama so that they could take away his coalition by peeling away white and Hispanic voters, which is exactly what happened in Nevada. Obviously, there is a long and painful history of Hispanic racism against blacks in the West(and vice-versa in some cases, obviously), a history that many like to deny, while claiming that whites are the common enemy; however, one need only look at the transformation of South Los Angeles--and the racial hostility that has and continues to accompany it--to see that there is a tangible issue between these two groups, who far too often have competed at the lower economic levels of society. The brunt has fallen on blacks simply because they are far outnumbered in a city such as LA, which is a majority Hispanic city. Regardless of any real or preceived tensions between the black and Hispanic communities, Los Angeles political history has made it very clear that the groups have often supported each other, from Tom bradley to Maxine Waters to the current Mayor. Remember, it was Bill Clinton who claimed Nevada union workers were being threatened to work shifts that would prevent them from voting if they did not support Obama, which is illegal of course, but where was the follow up media report and investigation? Nowhere, because he made it up--another divisive lie, as the vote tallies showed, with Clinton getting plenty of union support, enough to win the state, in fact. Indeed, Bill has simply shown that he has another Sister Souljah moment in him(his 1992 pandering to the Southern white vote by comparing some second-tier rapper to KKK wizard David Duke). He didn't get it then and he doesn't get it now, but it worked in '92 and whether or not it will work in '08 remains to be seen, but since Bill has promised to go door to door in Carolina many of us are hopeful that black folks will get in his face and call his bluff: He's not running for president; he's a spouse and should know his role, and someone, since Hillary seems unwilling(which is troublesome if she wants to be president) needs to tell him to check himself and his ego. Clinton's campaign director's assertion that Bill is a "huge asset" is laughable when he should be excoriated for acting like a "huge ass."
The obvious truth is that Obama AND Clinton care more about the needs of BOTH groups than any GOP candidate, but Clinton knows that the only way to win the nomination is to leave Obama with a relatively small core group consisting of blacks, young voters, and educated white males. Thus, she sent out the red-faced Bill, angry and whining, to attack Obama, while now inadvertently portraying himself as some kind of bad tempered soccer dad, calling for fouls against his child's team. Indeed, it strikes one as childish and un-feminist for Hillary to have Bill out there doing her dirty work, fighting to protect his little lady, even while tacitly ignoring push polling phone calls that said "We cannot take a chance on Barack Hussein Obama," a clear echo of Bill's own words in an interview last month,as well as clear voter suppression efforts in Nevada. I knew those tactics would emerge in the general election, but in the primary, and from the Clinton side? How far have they fallen...And what does this mean if and when Hillary gets the nomination? I would force myself to support whomever the democratic candidate is simply because the GOP is so far outside the mainstream values of our society that I cannot justify staying home and not voting, but does anyone really believe that Obama's young, proud, hopeful, independent coalition is going to forgive and forget and run to the polls to support someone whom they view as smearing their candidate with racially divisive politics? And why should they?

"What news in this our tottering state?"
"It is a reeling world indeed" (Richard III)
Our national psyche has been the most troubling collateral damage in Bush's war against the middle class, as average income per taxpayer in this country--adjusted for inflation--is actually $4,000 LESS than it was in the 1970s(NY Times 1-20-08). Much has been written about the increasing gap between rich and poor, and the only thing Bush has accomplished is making the top 1% much richer, while middle class has seen wages stall and jobs leave the country. Bush has become so irrelevant that he is reduced to sword dancing with our great allies the Saudis, hat in hand, begging for lower oil prices and help with the mighty power Iran. And even those requests were rebuffed. Really, how much worse can his image overseas be? How can anyone be puzzled by the collapse of the housing market, the dollar, and the stock market? When a country sells its soul to make stockholders rich by sending $20 an hour jobs to countries that pay 20 cents, leaving $10 an hour jobs for our own workers, guess what the predictable result is: Stocks increase because of higher profits, credit becomes easier to procure, and housing expands, but then the house of cards falls because the average worker--with his or her lower paying job--cannot meet the payments when the easy credit dries up. This country is facing severe economic realities that anyone with a basic understanding of economics can appreciate. Many of us wrote about it at the start of the year, and the serious bad times are yet to come, as the desperate Bush stimulus plan is too little, too late. The real way to stimulate the economy is to cut military spending(10 billion a month in Iraq alone) and spend money on infrastructure and building things other countries will buy, not waste all our money on a hapless war. Radical thought? That's exactly what Clinton did in the 1990s to eliminate the federal deficit and stimulate the largest sustained economic expansion in the history of the country--tough medicine to swallow for the hummer-obsessed neopuritan hypocrites presiding over the economic and spiritual collapse of the nation.

No Need to Play this Backwards: Paul IS dead...

2008-01-13T10:21:00.000-08:00

"I come to bury Caesar[Paul], not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them." Julius Caesar( 3.2.76)

Indeed, "the fault dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves."(1.2.140-1) I do not want to spend too much time and space focusing on a candidate who is fading fast and irrelevant
but because Ron Paul raised $20 million and has thousands of well-intentioned lost souls who can grasp his bumper sticker ideology but evidently cannot access his own very public record, it's time to acknowledge the reality that the novelty of an anti-war Republican has turned into yet another right-wing fanatic with views on race that place him in the infamous company of his peers who deny the theory of evolution. The charade is over, Paul supporters.
I owe an apology to the Republicans. In an earlier post I said that they were treating Ron Paul like the crazy old man in the attic. Now I see why: He IS the crazy old man in the attic, actually the conspiracy-minded bigoted old man who doesn't even deserve the attic, or the basement for that matter. James Kirchick's article in The New Republic--"Angry White Man"--is devastating not because of anything Kirchick says, although his astute observation that the "Ron Paul Reports" published by Paul's supporters "reveal decades worth of obsession with conspiracies, sympathy for the right-wing militia movement, and deeply held bigotry against blacks, Jews, and gays. In short, they suggest that Ron Paul is not the plain-speaking antiwar activist his supporters believe they are backing--but rather a member in good standing of some of the oldest and ugliest traditions in American politics," but because of the words attributed to Paul himself: Read the reports themselves, especially you myopic apologists who claim The New Republic is liberal etc. Forget the article, simply follow the link to Paul's documents. They speak for themselves: Blacks as "Animals Take Over DC Zoo" ; "I've urged everyone in my family to know how to use a gun in self-defense. For the animals are coming." MLK holiday as "our annual Hate Whitey Day," support for KKK wizard David Duke and on and on.
All the typical code language that racists use all too well permeates the "Ron Paul Reports": AIDS was created in a World Health Organization lab; Israel setup the 1993 WTC bombings; "I miss the closet" for gays; all the black welfare mothers who take all our hardworking white folks' money(even though the FACT is that more whites collect welfare than any other race). The Paul apologists are already out there with their, "Dr. Paul would never condone this type of racism" etc. Obviously, it's difficult to have one's dreams shattered but such is life, and especially the cold, calculated, cynicism of Republican political discourse. In America there are LAWS against publishing words under someone else's name without his approval, so where is Ron Paul's libel lawsuit? Isn't that what they say about the steroid athletes: Why don't they sue these guys who say they took steroids? Good point, so what is Paul's excuse if he had nothing to do with all this hateful garbage published with his name splashed across the top of the pages in large, official-looking words? Obviously, he either wrote these hateful diatribes or approved of their publication. Otherwise, he would be screaming how he didn't know about them and that he was going to sue everyone involved, but Paul has offered only a meager and insincere attempt to disassociate himself from his own newsletters. As Kirchick noted, only stating the obvious, "it is diffcult to imagine how Paul could allow material consistently saturated in racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and conspiracy-mongering to be printed under his name for so long if he did not share these views. In that respect, whether or not Paul personally wrote the most offensive passages is almost beside the point. If he disagreed with what was being written under his name, you would think that at some point--over the course of decades--he would have done something about it."
He knows it's over and it can't happen soon enough. As Macduff said, "Fit to govern? No, not to live."(Macbeth 4.3.102-3)

As for the democrats, the unfortunate race war is brewing in Carolina, as I suggested it would well before the media understood the gravity of both Clintons' ill-chosen comments before New Hampshire, and Hillary continued to dig herself a deeper hole by implying that it was wonderful LBJ who actually got results in 1964. The problem is, Hillary, that 1964 was a decade after black leaders had been fighting the real war in the streets of America, often with little help from politicians from either party. Remember, this was the time period when all those racist Democrats fled to the Republican party in protest of integration and established the racist GOP that now dominates the South. It sure isn't the party of Lincoln anymore... No one should know that better than the Clintons, so what is the point in saying something as ill-advised as that? Yet there was Hillary Clinton on Meet the Press, awkward and uncomfortable, trying in vain to rationalize her husband's literally ignorant assertion that Obama had been given a free pass by the media(Russert reminded her that he himself questioned Obama about his war stance during his interview on the same show on November 11th, 2007). Moreover, the juxtaposition of Hillary's speech on the Senate floor and Obama's prophetic anti-war speech in 2002 essentially destroyed any notion that Clinton has better judgment, for in her zeal to be a strong woman, she allowed herself to be manipulated by the most dishonest administration in history: She showed herself as no more than another enabler for cowboy George and his reckless march to war against an insignificant country that had no tangible connection to the real war on terror, if there can even be such a thing. Obama's perceived paucity of legislative experience is insignificant compared to Clinton's reckless disregard for the truth and her inability to analyze the machinations of an administration defined by fraud and incompetence.
So why did Obama lose New Hampshire? Some suggest voter fraud, but it's more likely that Obama simply was overconfident and decided to get on his bicycle and run around the ring during the last few rounds instead of digging in and going toe-to-toe to earn the knockout. Playing Stevie Wonder's "Signed, Sealed, Delivered" at a concession speech was a painful reminder of a campaign that was looking past this fight and ended up losing a close decision. Personally, I think it was Bill's slump-busting that probably saved the day. While Hillary's supporters worked the phone banks and drove voters to the polls, Bill worked the slump-busters(a little side joke for the Jim Rome "clones"). Anyway, it was a monumental mistake to underestimate the Clinton political machine, and Obama's arrogant line at the debate may very well have struck a nerve with many women who have been treated dismissively by men. The wise move at that moment was to keep his mouth shut and let Hillary wallow in self-pity, not throw her a lifeline with an off-hand remark that would surely be viewed as offensive. It was not Obama's finest moment but losing New Hampshire by fewer than 3% is not anything to be too concerned about: The nomination is still Obama's to lose; he needs to show that he's a fighter, and he'll have plenty of chances to step it up as the race heads to the South. It's called the "Dirty South" for a reason, Barack, so get ready to get down in the mud and take it away this time. Be a closer. As David Mamet famously said, remember your ABCs: Always Be Closing. "Coffee's for closers", Barack, so close the show in Carolina, Nevada, and on to Feb 5th for the big showdown...

New Hampshire Primary

2008-01-08T15:28:00.000-08:00

The sad spectacle of Hillary losing her cool(both Saturday and Monday) and Bill destroying the goodwill he earned from African Americans is an ominous portent of where this race is heading: Saying that "President Kennedy was in the Congress for 14 years and he was a war hero"--as Hillary did--smacks of desperation, as Bill was a draft dodger who had no more experience to be President than the laughable Huckabee, just two hicks from Hope. And for the record, I voted for Clinton twice and thought he did a much better job than Bush, who has brought the country to the brink of economic collapse. However, Bill Clinton is positioning himself to exit the stage like Nixon waving goodbye on the jet to oblivion and disgrace. His calling Obama a "fairy tale" was highly inappropriate and offensive, especially in the black community, suggesting that the uppity young black man should know his place, despite the fact that he is a Harvard-educated man of integrity who has spent his entire adult life in public service. The message is clear: How dare Obama have the audacity to think that he would be a better President than a woman who couldn't even manage her philandering husband while she was in the White House. It's sad to see an excellent leader like Bill Clinton stoop to the level of Bush by implying that his wife's last name makes her somehow more deserving to be elected. No wonder that the backlash is building against the Bush-Clinton monarchy of the last 20 years. Suddenly, people seem to be genuinely interested in real leadership change, and that is bad news for basically everyone except Obama. Let's see how Clinton holds up outside of the vanilla states and their 95%+ white populations, as the race heads into the real America--South Carolina(50% black), Nevada(heavily Hispanic) and Super Tuesday and let's see if Obama has enough fight in him to take off the gloves and land a knockout punch on Hillary's glass jaw.
Obama's political credentials are equal to those of either Clinton at this stage in the process, and his academic and intellectual qualifications dwarf those of Bubba Bush. Hillary Clinton has no tangible foreign policy experience, and the fact is the Clintons just don't get it and cannot accept the reality of American politics in the American Idol world: Star power and personal qualities own the day, not the "experience" and "we know better than you" smugness of Clinton and his other relics that stood on that Iowa stage while Hillary regurgitated her stump speech. Bill, Hillary, Albright and Wes Clark looked like what they have become: Hopeless museum pieces in a country that is quickly saying, "thanks for coming..."

On the Republican side, the forces of reason finally made their voices heard, but McCain's victory was hollow for several reasons: First, look at his competition: Huckabee is woefully unqualified, and Ken doll Romney is finding out just how intolerant the Republican base is. Those great social conservatives he has been courting would rather swallow their anger and vote for McCain than support the Mormon. That's the reality that no one is talking much about and it will become very clear in South Carolina, where Romney will be destroyed by both Huckabee and McCain. As the old Southern saying goes, lie down with dogs, rise up with fleas...
Romney made the huge miscalculation to cast his lot with a group--social religious conservatives--whose religious intolerance is such that they would rather vote for someone like McCain, who called their beloved leaders Falwell and Robertson "agents of intolerance," (which was entirely accurate) than vote for a Mormon. It's that simple and it will not get any better for Romney. He's essentially finished unless someone makes a huge mistake that lets him and his money back in the race. Really, what chance does he have if he couldn't buy an election against someone like McCain, who is despised by most of the base. Indeed, "Mc is back."
Trouble is, in a state that Bush won in 2004, McCain garnered a fraction of the votes of both Clinton and Obama. Uneasy lies the head that depends on independent votes and watched most of them go to the democrats. A fossil like McCain who is out of touch with so many issues that the American people care about doesn't present an overwhelming challenge for someone like Obama, but the reality is clear that he is the best the Republicans have to offer, so they better ride that horse for all he's worth, for look at their other options besides the fatally flawed Huckabee and Romney: "Slimy", er Rudy, is so hopelessly corrupt and unappealing that he can't seem to scare everyone into voting for him because of his distinguished record of mismanaging 9-11, while Thompson, who looks like dead man walking, was struggling to break 2% or 1,000 votes early tonight. So much for the savior of the party, the new Ronald Reagan. He's just a another bad actor. Perhps he can make another Cape Fear...He'll drop out and go back to sleep. That leaves Paul, who has been mocked by the party he represents. They don't want him around and continue to treat him like the little old crazy guy, even though many of his positions are much more honest and lucid than the other candidates. Nonetheless, it's hard to feel sorry for someone who bears the ill will of a group of ignorant and intolerant people otherwise known as the Republican base. You reap what you sow, my friend. Paul should have dropped out of a party that views him as no better than a fringe candidate. Face it, if you can't break 10% the show is pretty much over. In that great Westerbergian phrase, he's become a rebel without a clue.

The American Myth: Republicans favor small government

2008-01-05T12:45:00.000-08:00

One often hears that the Republicans support smaller government, lower taxes etc.;however, as the Bush tax policy makes very clear, what they really support are tax breaks for families making over $200K per year, which is hardly the middle class. They are brilliant in their assessment of the average American as someone who cannot analyze much more than a simple bumper sticker, so they get the typical blue collar guy thinking that the Republicans are really looking out for their best interests.
For instance, my representative, one John Campbell, mailed me a beautiful brochure, at taxpayers' expense, bragging about HIS new tax bill that he wrote along with another GOP fraud: The policy would be very simple: a 10% tax rate for families who make under $100K per year and a 25% tax rate for families who make over $100K per year. Think about that: A family, such as mine, who is over 100K but by no means rich pays the same rate as a family making 1million or more. Somehow, I think that that 25% will hit a middle class family making 101K a year much harder than it will hit a family making a million. And does it really make sense to have a family making 99K a year paying 10%, while a family making 2,ooo a year more is paying 25%? That 15% difference is a huge tax burden, nearly $10,000. Is that the way to treat middle class families? Where I live, in Orange County, as Mr. Campbell knows very well, $100K will not even get you into the middle class. My family makes much more than that and still lives in a condo in a county where $1,000,000 will get you a basic 3 bedroom house that would sell for $200K in most parts of the country. These politicans know all this, but they are trying to help folks making 2million a year and they have nothing but derision for the family making $102K. In fact, they want that family to subsidize the tax breaks for the top 1%. That, in essence, is the Bush policy and it has increased the gap between the rich and poor faster than any president in history.
This is the kind of idiocy that characterizes the Congress and the President. It is really common sense. Supporters of the Republicans say that it is the Congress that actually spends the money. True enough, but if you paid attention in 2007 you saw the power of the veto when the Dems wanted to get out of Iraq, which makes it very clear that the President has the power to prevent any spending or legislation he opposes as long as the rival power does not have the super majority(60+) in the Senate. Remember, it was the REPUBLICANS who introduced out of control budget deficits and the expansion of the welfare state. Let's look at a few facts:
Between World War II and the time Reagan took office, the largest budget deficit in history was around $70 Billion, in 1943 and 1977. Reagan's policy of cutting taxes AND increasing spending. most notably on defense, led to budget deficits over $70 billion EVERY YEAR he was president, including deficits well over $200 billion in 1984, 1986, and 1987. In fact, it was Reagan who had more billions in budget deficits than the all the other presidents in this country's history COMBINED. As he used to say, "Facts are stubborn things." (SOURCE: Federal Budget: Office of Management and Budget) Bush has taken Reagan's and his father's budget irresponsibility to a new level. Take a wild guess what the budget deficit will be this year...
How about Welfare? AFDC(Aid to Families with Dependent Children): When Reagan took office there were 11,079,117 individuals receiving welfare, and by the end of the 12 years of Reagan and Bush I, that number had increased to 14,205,484, when Bill Clinton took office and actually developed a welfare-to-work policy. By 2001, the welfare rolls had dropped to 5,362,700(a 67% decline!), in a country where the population increased over those 8 years.(SOURCE: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families) Moreover, feel free to look at the Clinton budgets and compare them with the fiscal criminal in the White House now, the one whose same idiotic tax policies are leading to the recession that will dominate 2008. His hapless speech on Friday sent the markets tumbling.The collapse of the dollar, the ominous opening days of the stock market, the oil futures trading at over $100 and the continuing financial meltdown related to the mortgage mess are clear indications that this last year of the Bush presidency will be more of the same incompetence that has characterized his entire political career. If his name wasn't Bush, he would be cleaning out cattle stalls in Texas, which would at least be honest work.
Yes, facts are stubborn things...

The 2008 campaign begins for real: Iowa votes...

2008-01-03T20:12:00.000-08:00

Watching the results from tonight's Iowa vote, a few things became very clear:

First, the contrast between the Republicans and Democrats could not be more profound:

Huckabee's victory shows just how diminished the core of the Republican party has become: The base is now evangelical homeschoolers? How much farther can they sink? And people wonder why veteran GOP lawmakers are retiring at a rapid pace. The party looks like the Titanic heading toward an iceberg that they'll hit in November, but at least they'll have Old Huck-up to play the music this time, as he can strum his bass as the ship sinks.
Huckabee is the voice of the Republican party? A man as idiotic and clueless as any serious politician I have ever seen. He's laughably unprepared to run a laundromat, let alone a country!
A man "educated" where? Check his education record. I love to hear him speak, just to see what kind of "Huck-up" he'll make, whether it's not knowing where Pakistan is, Iran's nuclear plans, apologizing for the assassination of Bhutto. Talk about a lightweight: The man is two pounds lighter than a straw hat!
A man who held up aid for tornado victims because it was characterized as "an act of God" and seeks to impose his Christian views on a country that has a Constitution in which the word God is NEVER mentioned and was written by deists who wanted a secular government. The ignorant, uneducated historical revisionists would like to somehow claim that this is a Christian nation, but it is a country founded on religious freedom, not the establishment of religion. Thus, Huckabee, and Romney for that matter, are hopelessly out of touch not only with the moderate, rational majority in this country, but the historical reality of this nation, which many of us love. This country is about freedom, not freedom to be a white Christian or a second class citizen, which is the choice people like Romney conveyed in his hapless speech about his religion, saying "part of freedom is faith." Talk about someone who doesn't get it. He learned tonight just how closed-minded his religious Republican friends are, for he lost because of his Mormonism, obviously. The core voters were evangelicals, who nearly all voted for Huckabee, who gave perhaps the most boring victory speech I have ever heard. I was desperate to see even a token minority on the stage as he spoke, yet there was not a single one. Instead, I got Richard the Third up there: "See where his Grace stands, 'tween two clergymen! / And, see, a book of prayer in his hand / True ornaments to know a holy man."Once again, Shakespeare knew very well how cynical and corrupt leaders use religion to sway the ignorant masses.
The Republican field is pathetic: A bunch of middle-aged white men with their plastic white supporters. They are a group of characterized by pathos: The world has passed them by; it's not 1952 anymore...Ron Paul has fresh ideas? What a joke...His ideas are fresh to someone who has had his head in the sand for so long that the libertarian platform is some kind of revelation. Sure, many libertarian ideas are great, especially the anti-government role in personal behavior such as drug use etc., but Paul's foreign policy and knowledge of basic economics and sociology are ridiculously simplistic. Government programs were established for a REASON: Unchecked capitalism leads to the deplorable conditions that existed during the industrial revolutions in Britain and this country. Read Blake, Dickens, Sinclair and the hundreds of non-fiction accounts of the conditions in England and this country before government oversights. This view that we can abolish basically every government agency is the most childish and ignorant idea in a campaign that is full of non-issues. Humanity is defined by greed, and programs such as Social Security, labor unions, regulatory laws etc. were created because of the way employers abused employees; that is why all of you are not working for 50 cents an hour! Wake up! Paul is in fantasy land and that's why he will get his 10% and eventually fade away, as all the other Libertarians have, including the last time HE ran for President. He's got a bunch of internet geeks on his side because he's a Republican who is against the war. Well, you see where that position got him in his wonderfully intolerant party--banished from the Fox debate and relegated to the role of the crazy old man in the attic. It's great how rich old white guys can convince all these middle class fools how horrible the government is, the same government that provided public schools and universities that helped us become educated professionals, rather than peasants in third world countries. Your smaller governments are waiting for you, just head south of the border. I've been to all the Central American countries--go see how their small government works for the lower classes. In the meantime, Paul, the hypocrite, will continue being one of the leading earmark abusers in the Congress, spending the COUNTRY'S money for his pet projects in his backward little Texas district. It's time to wake up Paul supporters, for whatever issues lead you to support Paul will be much more important to the eventual DEMOCRATIC candidate than whomever wins on the Republican side. Your man has been dismissed by a party that, as your man says, simply wraps itself in the flag and carries its cross, talking about freedom...
Rudy is not even worth talking about: Perhaps the most dishonest, corrupt person to ever be a serious candidate, he has nothing to talk about except 9-11, which he made much worse because it was his idea to place the command center in the WTC buildings. What did he do to be a hero? He didn't hide in his office? OK, he was on the scene, being a MAYOR, which I thought was his job, but I guess when the President reads to some children with a deer-in-the headlights look on his face when the country is under the worst attack since Pearl Harbor, that made Rudy look like a real hero. Such is the pathetic reality of low expectations we associate with our leaders that if a marginal mayor shows a basic level of leadership in a crisis he is somehow worthy of being the leader of the free world. Is that what this country's come to? Really, what are Rudy's qualities? What does he have to offer? What tangible policies has he outlined? I know, "Fear is our only God" Rudy. I remember the Rage Against the Machine song, but that was so early 90s. Talk about a one-trick pony...
The only viable GOP candidate is McCain, who is over 70 years-old and is a genuine war hero who somehow lost to a draft-dodging AWOL drug abuser--our President--in 2000. Moreover, he has cast his lot with the "Surge" supporters, who are going to have a hard time defining an endgame and getting our 160,000 troops out of Iraq. Yes, violence is down and that is a great thing, but we can't leave National Guard troops there forever. Let's see what happens when the Surge is over and we need to get down to the business of stealing their oil for the next 30 years, which is the agreement we made with the new Iraqi "government" and is the unspoken reason why we didn't just claim victory and leave after we captured Hussein: We can't just leave because we need troops there to protect our companies(e.g Cheney's crew) who are there to take their oil, which was what this was all about in the first place. I would have much more respect for these politicians if they would simply state the obvious: We need oil to support our economy and we will have to fight wars to procure an oil supply until we wake up and develop real alternatives, as if the oil companies that made $40 billion profits last year will allow those profits to dwindle...
If we cared about democracy we would have troops in the plethora of wars going on in Africa, where our fellow human beings are continual victims of genocide, but poor black people with no oil somehow do not need or deserve democracy as much as those wonderful Islamic fanatics who want to kills us, not have our political system, so we give the Africans some bags of rice and a few rock concerts and focus on the great desire for freedom in countries such as Pakistan. Indeed, when they have democracy, they vote for anti-American extremists. Look at the Taliban, a group that we trained and supported, along with bin Laden, who we armed and trained when he was fighting those evil empire Soviets. Call me when this country is going to invade Saudi Arabia because they educate their children to hate us and attack us and indeed they sent the guys who hijacked the planes, as we all know, so let's go attack them and take THEIR oil, for there's much more of it, and at least there would be a sense that they had it coming, since their backward society and education system led to the attack on this country, but wait, I forgot that the entire Bush family has been in bed with these wonderful people for decades. When the Bush family has made millions off the wonderful Saudis, why would we expect them to actually hold them accountable for killing our citizens in our own country; it's so much easier to find a different Muslim country to attack. And so it goes...Corruption is by no means only a problem of the Republican party. Politics is a dirty business and honesty doesn't get one very far, but both Bush presidencies have been horrific failures and it's simply time to turn the page, but where do we go in a country that has lost any sense of political unity

On to the Democrats and the future:

"There's something happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear..."

When Franklin Roosevelt died, a man was standing by the road crying as the motorcade passed, and a reporter asked the man if he knew FDR, to which the man replied, "No, but he knew me."
For what it's worth, Obama's speech was markedly different than the others because he spoke with passion and conveyed the sense that he cares about people, not simply his own ambition. It was interesting to compare the crowds at the speeches. Hillary's group on the stage looked like a reunion of Bill's supporters(the median age must have been 60), and her speech was flat as day-old beer. In Obama's speech there was actually hope and diversity, with young people, old people, men and women, all ethnicities on that stage, people who believe that a Harvard educated black man may actually be a better President than some backwoods preacher from Arkansas or some plastic Ken doll whose views change with each new opinion poll.
Race: This country has always been defined by it, as most of our history as a country was as a slave state. The economy we all enjoy was built upon the backs of Africans who were forcibly relocated here to create the wealth that we all enjoy. You don't live in a hut in a third world country largely because of the efforts of Africans in this country, as they built the great wealth that enabled the US to develop an industrial economy that allowed us to flourish.
Black men and women helped this country defeat Hitler in World War II, only to come home to a country that would not let them eat at a lunch counter, use a bathroom, or play professional baseball, and now, half a century later, a black man is now a serious candidate for President of the United States. It's a wonderful day in this divided country, as it's obvious that Obama is a solid candidate, although Edwards is also qualified, and Biden had perhaps the most solid credentials.
The intellectual qualities of the Democrats are so far beyond people like Huckabee that it's like comparing a professor to a child. Imagine Obama in a debate with Huckabee. I guess old Huck can just make up some funny one-liners. This was the problem with Bush: Idiots used to say he's the guy they would like to have a beer with, so that's why they voted for him, and therein lies the problem: The last thing we need is someone who is NOT educated about economics, history, world affairs etc. I want a president who is so much smarter than I am that I am amazed. I want to say, wow, that guy really has a handle on things. He knows what is going on! You know, a Harvard guy, perhaps, not someone who got into Yale because of his family connections. I don't want an average Joe operating on me, flying my plane, fixing my car etc., and I sure as hell do not want to put the future of my family and country in the hands of someone as clueless as our current President. Too much is at stake in this world, as we face threats from countries all over the world. We need someone who understands the nature of these threats and has a plan, not someone who doesn't even believe in Evolution. I know, it's THEORY. Yes, just as gravity is a theory and there's something called the germ theory of disease. I also believe in those two "theories". Anyone who doesn't "believe" in Evolution really needs to be living in a cave, not running for President. Read "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" if you need a little refresher course on why your fetus has a tail while it is in the womb... Guys like Romney and Huckabee are guided by superstitions more suited to the Middle Ages than the nuclear world we live in. They actually have much in common with the fanatics that we are trying to defend our country against. Facts are stubborn things.
The next few weeks should be interesting. I have no predictions to offer, as I already was wrong about Edwards winning Iowa, although I found it hilarious to listen to Huck and McCain crying about the dirty ads Romney was running in Iowa. What kind of things do you think the GOP will say about Obama or Hillary if they run in November? All the Republicans have left are their core group of white racists(the religious ones, of course), and a few sincere small government folks, who remember the party when it actually stood for something before it began being the tax and spend party of Reagan, the one who created the largest deficit in the history of the country when he cut taxes and increased defense spending(you can look that up). Anyway, the only hope the Republicans have is to go back to their racist rhetoric that they used so well in 2000 and 2004. You know, the "Southern Strategy" as Rove called it: Unify the redneck racists and the capitalize on the inequity of the Electoral College to win the Presidency. It's all very insidious but effective. Indeed, they surely fear Edwards much more than Obama and Hillary, knowing that the last non-Southerner Democrat to win was Kennedy in 1960!
But with the hapless group the GOP has nominated this year, even they must be a little worried tonight that truth, justice, liberty, and hope may actually be more than hollow words used to win an election. Perhaps that black man who speaks of unifying this country IS someone to be reckoned with, even if his name is Barack Hussein Obama. I'm sure their homeschoolers' textbooks can say his name is Osama Hussein. You know, a little typo...

On to New Hampshire(1-8-08), where things will get rough on both sides...
There's an old saying, "In Iowa they pick corn, but in New Hampshire we pick Presidents," and make no mistake about it, New Hampshire is essentially a must-win situation for Clinton, Romney, and even Obama, who needs to show that Iowa was not a fluke. We shall see...

2007: The Year in Review

2008-01-03T18:41:00.000-08:00

Before I turn my attention to the new year, let's look at some of the developments in art from 2007:

It was an interesting year, with the regular flood of garbage films. There were nearly 600 films released this year! I saw 30 movies, all carefully chosen(No Alvin and the Chipmunks etc.)

Top 5 Films of 2007:

No Country for Old Men
There Will Be Blood
The Orphanage
Once
Juno

It was not a great year for new music, as the industry remains locked into a routine of releasing vapid, trite hip hop(except for Common), pathetic pop and weak "alternative" bands. The most creative CD, by far, was from the jazz world, as saxophonist Redman produced his most accomplished work of his prolific young career. Check him out!

Top 5 CDs of 2007:

Back East by Josh Redman
Easy Tiger by Ryan Adams
Magic by Bruce Springsteen
Baby 81 by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
Road Trips Vol 1 Grateful Dead

It was a great year for live music, and I was lucky to see 30 concerts. Here were the top live shows.

Top 10 Concerts of 2007:
Radiators January 27, Tipitina's in New Orleans
Ratdog February 10th Ventura Theater, Ventura, CA
BRMC May 8, Wiltern Theater. LA
Frank Morgan June 30, Jazz Bakery LA
Ryan Adams July 19 Wilshire Theater Beverly Hills
Bruce Hornsby Jazz Trio August 22, Hollywood Bowl
Bruce Springsteen October 26, Oakland
Spiritualized November 12, Vista Theater, Hollywood
Van Halen November 20, Staples Center, LA
Cracker December 30, Belly Up Tavern, Solana Beach

A vision for the future...9-16-07

2007-09-16T20:46:00.000-07:00

Shakespeare:

"O, it is excellent / To have a giant's strength, but it is tyrannous / To use it like a giant." Measure for Measure 2.2

This blog will comment on, evaluate, and deconstruct current important social and political issues as well as salient trends and developments in areas as diverse as literary theory and baseball. Public figures are certainly fair game to be named; however, any comments that seem to be directed to a specific anonymous person are purely coincidental. The focus of this page will be analytical. If you have no interest in philosophical discussions, there are many sites in this brave new world we call the internet. For those of you who want to think and be challenged, let the ride begin...
First, this is not a page dedicated to a political party or "liberal" or "conservative" base. One of the most disappointing developments in contemporary society is the death of intellectual curiosity. People who say they have political views are "educated" by right and left wing radio and TV. Their minds have long ago ceased to be their own, and they wouldn't recognize an original thought if they had one. What does Rush think...? What is Hillary's position...? What would Jesus do...? Who cares... As Emerson said in "Self-Reliance," A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen...Speak what you think now in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today." The point here, of course, is not that I am endorsing "flip flopping" but rather the very positive quality of thinking for yourself, as "nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind."
As most of you, I hope, I love my country and want it to be the beacon of hope in a hostile world that it should be, the "shining city on a hill" that has turned into a sad joke in these cynical times.
Shakespeare spoke of the abuse of power in the brief quote above. He knew very well the consequences of absolute power, as he was writing plays at the time of the Jamestown settlement; indeed, it was in one of his last plays, The Tempest, where he coined the phrase "brave new world" that I mentioned in my opening parargraph. Will our future be defined by continual war? Will our "allies" be there to defend us if and when "they" follow us home? Do we care about Mexico's perception of our country? Is Canada going to halt an invasion of this country? It always amazes me when people talk about the evils of nuclear weapons when, as ironic as it may be, they are the only reason we have not had World War III. No country claimed responsibility for 9-11 because they fear nuclear annihilation, not because they wouldn't like to wipe our country off the face of the earth. Human instinct at its core consists of self-preservation. As with all animals, we want to survive. Period.
I come from a family who actually fought in wars. I have my grandfather's Purple Heart in my safe. He was a middle-class Italian who went to France and took three bullets to help prevent a Nazi takeover of the world. Is that what we face now? Come on... In World War II, if you were able-bodied you fought in the war, as my grandmother's four brothers also did. Our "volunteer" army is in a practical sense a destination of last resort for MANY--not all-- of the young men and women in this country who choose to join the military. Many others join because of a sincere love for this country and a sense of patriotism that is far beyond that of the old men in Congress who send young men and women to die, as they are concerened more about stocks and money than freedom and justice. The Democrats are a joke because they are too cowardly to risk their coveted power by actually doing the right thing in Iraq. They need to learn from the Republicans, who at least know how to play hardball, divide-and-conquer politics. Who else could make a bunch of middle and lower class white men think they have something in common with millionaires they elect. It's genius: George Bush isn't really a Yale man, he's Bubba...
Military recruiters scour lower income high schools, with promises of cash for college to kids whose options are limited because they are products of a criminally deficient public school system. The military knows that many of these kids do not have the academic skills to succeed in college. Where is the military presence at upscale public and private high schools? Where is the call for all men and women to enlist so that we can defeat this grave threat to our way of life? Isn't that what the President should be saying: Join now so we can win this war and save our way of life! Where is the draft? We were able to secure Germany in the aftermath of WW II because we had 1,000,000 soldiers there! Surely, we could do the same in Iraq, where we currently have somewhere around 170,000 troops.This is a stealth war fought by courageous young men and women who are being manipulated by cowards, and for what? We have a government that cannot even define victory, let alone achieve it. What is the endgame?
We will not bomb Islamic terrorists into a love of American values. They have always hated us and that hatred has only multiplied exponentially in the past 4 years. The most naive of us speak of the power of democracy, without thinking about the painful reality that when given the vote, many people actually embrace our enemies, not our system or values. As Yeats said, 'The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity." One need only look at the elections in Iran, Lebanon, and Gaza to see how that inane logic has worked for us. The pathetic and misguided idea that people in Iraq were somehow going to embrace our values is truly one of the most tragic miscalculations in this country's history, and it is our children and their children who may very well have to continually fight the wars that are spawned by this folly. And the next generation will not have the luxury of watching the war on CNN...
Now that our government has been taken over by chicken hawks, men whose "patriotism" led them to a plethora of military deferments in Vietnam, our saving grace is that science, not religion, has provided us with the technology to create weapons of mass destruction that are a tangible and profound deterrent to those who would love to destroy our country and the freedom it stands for. As DeLillo said, they hate us because of our modernity and our perceived godlessness, as we are a secular society in which religion is no more than a symbol of propriety for the vast majority of our citizens.
Realism dictates that we cannot be pacifists: If only the world was a kind, peaceful, loving place, but the tide of history is awash in the blood of the guilty and innocent alike. The times call for a return to limited isolationism, with military involvement only in areas that are real threats to the security of our state or those of our true allies. Diplomacy and the threat of catastrophic military consequences have been used to avoid WW III, and it's an unpleasant but very real status quo that we have to maintain and cultivate.

"And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"