Political/CulturalCommentary

Freedom's Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose: The Health Care Reform Proposals Are Putting Us At Freedom's Door!

2009-11-12T12:32:00.029-06:00

Does good, "Progressive," legislation result when Democrats control both Congress and the White House? It’s becoming increasingly clear that the important social/political decisions favor the wing-nuts in the Republican party who in sheer numbers control neither the House nor the Senate but who, in fact, seem to have all the political clout.

President Obama didn’t as much as utter a syllable in support of the Gay Rights laws challenged by the wing-nuts in the recent election in Maine, not to mention his silence on the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. This was not the Obama who made great promises of fairness and equality for all on the campaign trail as he curried the support of the gay community; not the Obama who promised change we could all believe in.

The nation's immigration problems similarly languish in the sea of political neglect even though it can be fairly argued that it was the Latino vote that put Obama in the White House.

And on the matter of health care, the Obama Administration has largely left it to a leaderless Congress to come forth with a reform plan; thereby, opening the door to the wing-nut influence, or should I more accurately say control by the wing-nuts. How much more bazaar can it get than the situation we've all witnessed: Sen. Grassley, one of the Republican players who was included in the small group of six senators on the Senate Finance Committee charged with the responsibility of hammering out the health care proposal, was out on the campaign trail telling his Iowa constituents that Obama and the Democrats are coming forward with a plan designed to kill Grandma! At the time he knew that was not true; yet, he was allowed to continue his game on the committee back in Washington in the vain hope that he would ultimately support the reform bill. This form of bipartisanship goes beyond stupid to outright idiocy.

The following story from today's New York Times underlines yet another victory wrought by the Right!

A GRIM reality sits behind the joyful press statements from Washington Democrats. To secure passage of health care legislation in the House, the party chose a course that risks the well-being of millions of women for generations to come.

House Democrats voted to expand the current ban on public financing for abortion and to effectively prohibit women who participate in the proposed health system from obtaining private insurance that covers the full range of reproductive health options. Political calculation aside, the House Democrats reinforced the principle that a minority view on the morality of abortion can determine reproductive health policy for American women.
Many House members who support abortion rights decided reluctantly to accept this ban, which is embodied in the Stupak-Pitts amendment.
--New York Times, 12 November 2009

None of the Progressive politicians in Congress were invited to sit at the table in the recent national health care debates; none of them were a regular feature on the nightly news. But there was Olympia Snow, Charles Grassley and Ben Nelson pretending to be in favor of health care reform, but really using their position at the table to torpedo any genuine reform efforts. (There were a few others too) telling us on a regular basis what they could or could not support. With the exception of Sen. Nelson, who sold his vote, Snow and Grassley voted No with the rest of the Republican opposition.

The Progressive role is reduced to that of "watching" government action controlled by a monopoly or a political oligopoly of one or two Senators--Senators from the opposition at that; the Obama Administration seems oblivious to what those of us on the left side would like? In the current political calculations progressives don't count. No wonder young people, Hispanics, Blacks and many gays ignored the ballot box during the recent off year elections in New Jersey and Virginia.

And, it's important to keep in mind that the Democratic party success in New York's 23 District came not as a result of any new Democrat initiative. No, the Republican Party had easily controlled that seat for well over 100 years. Indeed, not since the Whig party had held that office in the mid-19th Century had another party held that seat. No one should entertain anything approaching pride in that Democratic Party win. The record in New York clearly indicates that the wing-nuts, led by Prick Armey, successfully committed political suicide by sponsoring a right-wing challenge to the Republican Party standard bearer.

Such political nonsense on the Right is not new. . .similar tactics have all but eliminated the modern day Republican Party in the North East, and former Florida Governor Christ seems to be in the wing-nut cross hairs at the moment. (See Kate Zernike's, "A Florida Republican Becomes a Right-wing Target;" New York Times, 16 November 2009. Ms. Zernike wrote,"A raft of conservative groups, commentators and politicians are supporting a primary challenge to Mr. Crist by Marco Rubio, a telegenic former speaker of the Florida House christened a Reaganite’s answer to Mr. Obama by The National Review."

The important point here in a political sense is this: the voters in poll after poll indicate that they want political reform--reform of the broken health care system, reform of the disasters financial system that has nearly destroyed our economy and certainly undermined the retirement investments of literally millions of people, and reform of a political system that makes power brokers of states that are essentially empty--that is without people: North Dakota, Kent Conrad; Maine, Olympia Snow; Nebraska, Ben Nelson; Montana, Max Backus ;Iowa, Charles Grassley. The list goes on!

The fact is many of the small states have suffered huge population losses over the last fifty or more years, yet, because of the way our government is structured, continue to have political influence far beyond what their census figures would justify. North Dakota's population , for example, peaked in the 1920's and has been on the decline every since. The same can be said for most of those "empty" Western states.

Ironically, many of the folks in those large empty western states are rabidly conservative and mouth a political philosophy roughly equivalent to up from the bootstraps, a form of rugged individualism at the drop of a cheap straw hat. These are the same folks who receive largess from the Federal Government in the form of agricultural subsides like you wouldn't believe.

Most people aren't aware that they, as citizens of this great country, own, in addition to the National Parks and the like, huge Federal pastures in the west. Many ranchers get grazing rights from the federal government to run their cattle on our public lands; the grazing rights are legally attached to neighboring ranches and are even deeded with the ranches from one owner to another. The fact is, if you wanted to buy and run cattle on your land you'd be out of luck. No, you don’t have the special “grazing rights privilege” needed to graze cattle on public land.

The point is, these folks talk a good line with that rugged individualism crap; but, make no mistake about it, they've got their big paws out grabbin' every god damned federal dollar they can get their greedy hands on. . .don't be fooled by that poor talk that routinely drops from their lips. . .they perfected their own unique style of handout cupidity long ago–actually it's not at all unlike that used by many large corporations. . .the pharmaceutical industry comes immediately to mind, but that’s a story for another day.

I'm tired of the conservative shell games being played out in Washington. . .it's time for the progressives to become more assertive. We need to stand on principle, and if that means losing a few, so be it! At the moment the victory column for progressive causes suggests that there ain’t nothin’ left to lose. . .and I guess that equals freedom! Kris K. was right!

Ever on the watch for ya,
Davy Crockett

Obama At Notre Dame: Render Unto Caesar What Is Caesar's and Unto the Lord What Is The Lord's

2009-05-17T11:36:00.015-05:00

Update: 4 September 2009 From the Ny Times:

NATO Plans Inquiry After Afghan Strike Kills Scores
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. and ABDUL WAHEED WAFA 21 minutes ago

Friday’s strike on two fuel tankers, which killed 80 or more people, came three months after Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal imposed stricter rules on airstrikes.

To engage in understatements, there are many positions taken by the Catholic church and/or their supports that I find completely mystifying; this from a one time Catholic. The current hubbub surrounding President Obama's scheduled commencement appearance at Notre Dame today represents a case in point.

I do understand the Catholic opposition to abortion and stem cell research . . .that's pretty clear; however, I don't pretend to understand the hypocritical pick-and-choose approach to the days great moral issues that seems to mark present day Catholic practice.

The death penalty, practiced by only a couple of this world's nations, doesn't make the moral screen many Catholics consult for guidance. Similarly US Military campaigns seem to get a free moral pass; they never seem to excite any protest; one looks in vain for even the mildest expression of concern. To be sure, the militaristic jingoism associated with the late Cardinal Spellman lives on undiminished in today's Catholic church. (I do not exclude from criticism other churches generally who practice the same sorta moral nihilism.) Today the NyTimes reports that the drone aircraft the United States is flying over Pakistan have killed something like 700-800 innocent civilians and killed, maybe, 14 terrorists.

Press reports suggest that over the last three years drone strikes have killed about 14 terrorist leaders. But, according to Pakistani sources, they have also killed some 700 civilians. This is 50 civilians for every militant killed, a hit rate of 2 percent — hardly “precision.” American officials vehemently dispute these figures, and it is likely that more militants and fewer civilians have been killed than is reported by the press in Pakistan. Nevertheless, every one of these dead noncombatants represents an alienated family, a new desire for revenge, and more recruits for a militant movement that has grown exponentially even as drone strikes have increased. NyTimes 17 May 2009

The moral silence from the Catholic Church, when military atrocities occur, stands in sharp contrast to the hundred or so protesters who stand today in South Bend to protest President Obama's appearance as commencement speaker.

Folk singers used to ask, "Where have all the flowers gone?" Now one can legitimately ask, “What happened to selectively castrate Catholic moral outrage?” Let us not forget, the Pope and his advisers did issue a strong condemnation of the Iraqi War as immoral, and it had the moral effect of pissin' in the wind; there has not been any anguished moral out cry against the injustice, the inhumanity of that war.

Who will sing for us now? Where have the Barrigans gone? When did the Church become the Pentagon's Moral Storm Troopers?

And then of course, as I've noted before (http://thecrockettreport.blogspot.com/2006/12/excommunicatin-infidels-in-nebraska.html), the priest sex abuse scandal did not mark any occasion for great protest at any of the great Catholic Universities; no major Catholic prelate was the subject of overnight protest vigils such as those currently in progress at Notre Dame.

No, Church authorities handled such problems administratively by simply reassigning the offending clergy to new uninformed, unsuspecting parishioners without so much as a forewarning.

And as I written elsewhere on this blog, the few Bishops who condemned Democratic Party Presidential candidates because of gay issues, and the abortion issues, is nothing short of scandalous. Those Bishops seem incapable of seeing the really big moral questions. . .not the least of which is war and genocide in this world we live in. Ah, but when it comes to Presidential politics they’re real pros.

To cut to the quick here, the "Church" has not been able to differentiate between the righteous and the self-righteous. . . .on an ongoing basis the self-righteous has been inflicted upon us with a hubris heretofore unknown in the church.

If ever there was need to separate religion and politics now is the time. As Christ said to the Pharisee as he held up the coin, "Render under Caesar what is Caesar's and unto the Lord that which is the Lords."

Ever on the watch for ya,

Davy Crockett

The New Socialist/Fascists, Or Our One-Dimensional Stupidity

2009-04-27T12:41:00.011-05:00

It is difficult to understand the arcane world that is Wall Street; indeed, it boggles the mind to think that those neo-robber barons (the pseudo capitalists) are once again sucking huge "salaries" from the financial system they so recently bought down with their unregulated excesses. But, make no mistake about it, that's the news coming out of Wall Street these days. The big salaries are back! Are we destined to suffer interminably? Are we incapable of learning?

The answers to these and similar questions are disturbing to say the least. Many of us on the Left have heard and continue to hear commentaries extolling the virtues of the capitalist system and how all the recent talk of government regulation threatens the dawn of a socialist state. Never mind that a free enterprise capitalist system of the type lionized by the Ron Pauls of this world has never existed. No, the Robber Barons have had there hand in the public cash register from the beginning. They've helped our government constructed an economic system that socializes corporate losses and conversely privatizes profits.

And having done that, that is socialize their losses by placing them on the public tab, they also managed to convince the lunch box Joes of this world that his poor neighbor down the street, welfare Molly, is spending her checks on Corvets from GM and living the good life. All of which was used as a pretext to slash welfare spending and to put those lazy bastards to work.

Now it should go without saying, but maybe not, so I’ll say it. . .all this talk about the new socialism that’s about to dawn on the horizon, coupled with talk from the same people about the neo-fascist nature of the Obama Administration completely eludes me, as, I trust it does most thinking people. In scholarly circles Communism and Fascism are considered, in simple, terms as opposite ends of the political continuum. Not so in this new Republican/Right Wing calculus; they’re right there together as identical twins and evil little bastards at that–you know, bad seed types.

We need a new photographer; there's something radically wrong with this picture. I’m inclined to agree with views Nobel Prize Economist Paul Krugman expressed in his NY Times column today:

“[T]here’s no longer any reason to believe that the wizards of Wall Street actually contribute anything positive to society, let alone enough to justify those humongous paychecks.

Remember that the gilded Wall Street of 2007 was a fairly new phenomenon. From the 1930s until around 1980 banking was a staid, rather boring business that paid no better, on average, than other industries, yet kept the economy’s wheels turning.”

Importantly Krugman notes, “Wall Street is no longer, in any real sense, part of the private sector. It’s a ward of the state, every bit as dependent on government aid as recipients of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, a k a welfare.”

I also agree whole heartedly with Krugman’s conclusion; he wrote, “. . . given all that taxpayer money on the line, financial firms should be acting like public utilities, not returning to the practices and paychecks of 2007.”

Perhaps Herbert Marcuse was right, our one-dimensional nature condemns us to stupidity. . . .the great masses end up supporting programs and policies inimical to their own best interests; policies that so clearly favor the people on top of the social order. Let us not forget that the great communicator, President Reagan, the guy who sold the bogus notion that government is the problem not the solution, cruised into office on waves of support from those very unionized factory workers whose interests he so clearly opposed. The current government/economic turmoil is a direct legacy of the Great Bull Shiter's ability to turn incredibly complex issues into mind numbing idiocy.

Update: New York Times, 14 July 2009, Bob Herbert

These malefactors of great wealth (thank you, Teddy) developed hideously destructive credit policies and took insane risks that hurt millions of American families and nearly wrecked the economy. Then they were bailed out with hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, money that came from the very people victimized by the industry’s outlandish practices.

Now the industry is fighting against creation of an agency that would protect taxpayers and ordinary consumers from a similarly devastating onslaught in the future. And at the same time they are scrambling to raise credit card interest rates and all manner of exploitive fees to build a brand new superstructure of questionable profits on the backs of the taxpayers who came to their rescue.

Ever on the watch,

Davy Crockett

Update: Sarah Palin Ain't No Hilary Clinton! But She's a Scoundrel

2009-04-17T10:35:00.001-05:00

This is a Palin update: We know that little Miss Sarah is experiencing difficulties both within her immediate family and within the larger GOP family. OK, so who's immune to a little family feuding? No big deal, right!

However it would be a serious mistake to judge Miss Sarah's problems too lightly. As my original post indicates, Palin cut ethical corners at every turn and did so with a sense of impunity that would have given most mere morals real pause to stop and reflect, but not Miss Sarah. Nope! Her behavior is not bounded by the ethical conventions that rope the rest of us in.

Now we're told that the Alaskan legislature (heavily dominated by her fellow Republicans) has rejected her nominee for the States Attorney General. Why? Because among other things he's an avowed racist and that's compounded by the fact that he thinks, men ought to be able to "rape" their wives. What a SOB! The following paragraph is from today's NY Times:

Her controversial nominee for state attorney general, Wayne Ross, was rejected Thursday in a 35-23 vote by the Republican-controlled state legislature after a week of damaging confirmation hearings that revealed a string of past controversial comments. Ross came under fire for his past defense of a Ku Klux Klan statue and a 1991 quote that said: "If a guy can’t rape his wife… who’s he gonna rape?"

Palin said in a statement that she was “surprised” by Ross's rejection. “Mr. Ross is a fine Alaskan,” she said. “He is held in high esteem by many Alaskans. I appreciate his willingness to serve the public.”

The legislature also made clear this week that it will rebuff the governor's effort to reject more than $400 million in federal stimulus funds and instead will accept all the money.

Palin was skewered by her Alaska rivals for leaving the state during the last week of a contentious legislative session to come to Indiana.

Governor Palin Ain’t No Hillary Clinton!

2008-09-11T16:08:00.011-05:00

"When they were vetting her for this job, like three seconds ago, she said, quote, I'm not making this up, 'What is it exactly that the VP does every day?' Let me field that for you, Sarah. They start wars, they enrich their friends, they subvert the Constitution, and they shoot people in the face. That's what the vice president does." –Bill Maher

"Today President Bush called Gov. Palin and congratulated her. Bush told Palin the job of vice president is very important because as vice president, you get to tell the president what to do." –Jay Leno

"John McCain's VP pick is the governor of Alaska, a unknown hockey mom named Sarah Palin that no one ever heard of. The only other job she had in politics was the mayor of a small town known as Wasilla, Alaska, and now she has the opportunity to be on a ticket opposite of Barack Obama, the first black man she's ever seen." –Bill Maher

Recently Gloria Steinem wrote an Op-ed piece for the LA Times pointing out, among other things, that the only thing Sarah Palin has in common with Hillary is the female chromosome; that otherwise she's an unmitigated political boob who shouldn't even be mentioned in the same sentence with Hillary. To be sure, that's my characterization of Ms. Steinem's essay. Be that as it may, I received a sharply critical essay taking Gloria to task for ostensibly doing to little Miss Palin what had been done so unmercifully to Hillary. . .i.e., subjecting her to harsh, perhaps even unfair criticism.

It does seem to me that such criticism of Ms. Steinem represents a gross distortion of reality. First, it ignores the fact that Ms. Steinem was and continues to be a strong Hillary supporter, and she wrote a number of strong endorsements of the Clinton campaign during the battle when it counted. However, the important points, that seem to get lost in this discussion, has to do with the issues basic to the process. As Hillary, herself so clearly noted, this campaign has not been about me; there are basic, fundamental social issues involved; issues that will help determine what quality of life our citizens will enjoy as we march ahead.

To even suggest that Gov. Palin be given a free pass, or even our support, because she shares with Hillary WOMANHOOD, is so patently ridiculous it hardly deserves mention. Let us not forget the tremendous value differences between these candidates.

It is also true that Governor Palin has over the course of her political career been quick to harshly criticize those who disagree with her. Some of that nastiness lay just beneath the surface of her acceptance speech in St. Paul, and some of it played front and center.

Nastiness aside, much in the fashion of the "Old Politics", certainly not in a manner that could classify her as a maverick, the mendacious Ms. Palin misrepresented (I'm being kind, she repeatedly lied) herself at the recent Republican Convention in St. Paul. She made a big point of letting us know that the bridge boondoggle engineered by Sen. Stevens--the 300 million dollar bridge to nowhere--was rejected at her request. She made it ever so clear, that like Sen. McCain, she opposed "ear mark spending." Yes, Gov. Palin left the clear impression that she had saved the American taxpayers from that foolish, profligate spending; she failed to mention that the money was NOT returned to the US Treasury but was spent on other Alaska projects.

Yes! In Alaska! Alaska, the number one recipient of earmark funds in the nation, and yes, Governor Palin has led the ravenous pack in requesting and receiving such funds. Ironically, while Alaska has been receiving "earmark" largess from US Taxpayer funds, the government of Alaska itself is sending each Alaska taxpayer a $3,600.00 oil royalties check each year. Yeah, there's really a need up there for our US taxpayer "earmark money."

Oh yes, should we overlook this family values advocates own family foe paws, as we did Ronald Regan's? The political/religious Right takes every opportunity to slam the sex education programs in our public schools as opening the door to licentious, profligate behavior (Pahlin's voice has been a part of that chorus) and yet . . . . .well. . . . by now you know the rest of that story.

But in any event, you did hear the good Alaska Governor tout her success with the Alaska pipe line. . .one of her great successes stories during the convention speech, a real management, executive coup d' etat. Well, it turns out that was so much bull too.

Serge F. Kovaleski and Mike McIntire reported in the New York Times today, (11 September 2008) “The pipeline exists only on paper. The first section has yet to be laid, federal approvals are years away and the pipeline will not be completed for at least a decade. In fact, although it is the centerpiece of Ms. Palin’s relatively brief record as governor, the pipeline might never be built, and under a worst-case scenario, the state could lose up to $500 million it committed to defray regulatory and other costs.”

Kovaleski and McIntrie concluded, “Contributing to the project’s uncertainty is Ms. Palin’s antagonistic relationship with the major oil companies that control Alaska’s untapped gas reserves.” So much for Governor Palin’s big Alaska smoke and mirrors pipeline project.

During her acceptance speech the good governor emphasized her prudent handling of the people’s business by being thrifty. She pointedly noted for example that she put the governor’s plane up for sale on Ebay and that she dispensed with the services of a chef and did the cooking herself. Sounded good!

However, yesterday it was widely reported that while serving as Alaska's governor Ms. Palin was taking advantage of every expense voucher she could claim against the state treasury. The following headline from The Washington Post along with the first paragraph from the story shed considereable light upon Gov. Palin’s personal, self-aggrandizing approach to thrift.

Ms. Palin received a “per diem” expense allowance for 312 nights she spent at her home in Wasilla
The Washington Post-- Tuesday, 9 September

The $60-a-day allowance is available for state employees when traveling on official state business to cover meals and other sundry expenses. Ms. Palin’s per diems, which included some charges for partial days, totaled $17,059, from Dec. 4, 2006, when she took office, through June 30, 2008, the most recent data available, according to Sharon Leighow, a spokeswoman for the governor’s office."

Clearly Senator McCain either didn’t properly vet Governor Palin, or he’s playing us for a bunch of fools. Governor Palin needs to make herself available to members of the journalistic community so that we can really find who the governor of Alaska really is.

Ever on the watch,

Davy Crockett

Sen. McCain, Gov. Palin: Birds of a Feather or Two Peas in a Pod?

2008-09-02T15:44:00.010-05:00

ST. PAUL — A series of disclosures about Gov. Sarah Palin, Senator John McCain’s choice as running mate, called into question on Monday how thoroughly Mr. McCain had examined her background before putting her on the Republican presidential ticket.

On Monday morning, Ms. Palin and her husband, Todd, issued a statement saying that their 17-year-old unmarried daughter, Bristol, was five months pregnant and that she intended to marry the father.

Among other less attention-grabbing news of the day: it was learned that Ms. Palin now has a private lawyer in a legislative ethics investigation in Alaska into whether she abused her power in dismissing the state’s public safety commissioner; that she was a member for two years in the 1990s of the Alaska Independence Party, which has at times sought a vote on whether the state should secede; and that Mr. Palin was arrested 22 years ago on a drunken-driving charge.

--ELISABETH BUMILLER, New York Times 2 Sept. 2008

Ok, it's time for a little "straight talk" here. . .mind you now, this is not coming from any express .. . I'll leave the "fast" shoot from the hip stuff to OLD John McCain . . .you know, when he's on the big "straight talk" bus feelin' the push of his big patriotic ego.

Oh, before I write another word here, an apology is due. Those who read my random thoughts from time to time know that I've commonly placed Sen. McCain at the bottom of his Naval Academy class at number 850. Well Sorry! I've since been told that I should get my facts straight before issuing such a potentially damaging piece of information. He was ( and I didn't do a fact check on this; I'll accept it as true) number 849. So, I was wrong; he didn't hit the barrel bottom.

It is true, as I've written before, that he fell out of high school with an academic/behavioral record that might have qualified him for reform school but certainly not college or any other kind of school for that matter. But, when your grandfather and your father are distinguished four star admirals in the US Navy, well, you are eligible for a legacy admission at the United States Naval Academy. Just because cadet McCain spent more time on detention with more demerits than anyone in Naval Academy history is no reason to think they would give him the boot either....No, legacy candidates continue to have the pull and influence of their benefactors behind them. .. in McCain's case, as I've noted, two, not one, but two decorated four star admirals--Daddy and Granddaddy. Kinda like Bush's legacy admission at the Ivy League schools.

Well, the Navy exercised the only option available, under the circumstances, the bottom of the graduating class, or at barrel's end.

Now that we've established the fact that the good Senator is not an intellectual shining star, it's a little easier to understand his V P. pick--the baked Alaska. To be sure there were more than a few confused looks on the faces of TV''s talking heads after Ms. Palin's name was announced. First expressions from the pundits almost all embodied some element of disbelief. Disbelief quickly followed by the Mary Matlin Republican Party types who smilingly told us that Alaska's Ms. Palin was far more accomplished and experienced than the Democrat's Brock Obama. After all she'd been a runner up in a beauty contest, served a couple years as mayor of a small, isolated, Alaska town, (I guess they're all isolated in Alaska) and was a year and a half into the governorship of a state with more Moose than people--the least populated state in the nation. And, it turns out, she spends so much time in church, or someplace, that she can't be at home to supervise her then sixteen year old daughter who was playing house in the bedroom, and you know how rabid those fundamentalists are about sex ed. . . .gotta do the educating at home; can't let the public schools corrupt family life. Nope, that just won't do it. Well, that daughter, educated or not was doin' her boyfriend at home.

Just you never mind that Obama graduated from two of the most distinguished universities in the country if not in the world; served as editor of the Harvard Law School Review, an honor bestowed upon people of unique intellectual power and performance, served eight years in the Illinois State Senate, was elected to the United States Senate and spent 18 months on the campaign trail verbally sparing with some of the most accomplished politicians in the country. Obama’s smart. . .but I guess we can't have that kinda uppity crap in the good old US of A.

Sen. McCain insured that he wouldn't fall victim to the pitfalls of the vice presidential selection process that so clearly tripped Obama up; he'd have no green horn like Joe Bidden on his ticket. No sir! McCain picked from the pool of the great unknown for his VP running mate. . .that's right. Not only did she limp through a third tier college with a degree in how to be a beauty queen at Potato State in Idaho; in the 1990's she joined the Independent party; a political party in Alaska bent on taking Alaska out of the union. Yep, this is the same gal who audaciously asked, "What does the Vice President do? I 'm the kind a person that likes to do things,” she said, “ I don't wanta spend my time going to state funerals and things like that."

But not to get too far off the trail here. . .Why did McCain pick an Idaho potato translated into a baked Alaska as his VP running mate? It's as simple as understanding the basic laws of attraction or association . . .maybe it's both of 'em, I'll figure that out later, but the principles are easy. When you step out in to the garden, grab a pea pod off the vine and squeeze it open, you see a neat little row of peas, all lined up, no beans, no raisins, just little green peas that all look and taste alike. Damn you say, "Now ain't that just down right pretty."

You glance up at the wild blue, just to say a little thank you to the big guy who organizes all this stuff, and as you're lookin' up sayin' your thanks, you notice several eagles flying high over head. . .no turkeys in their midst. . .just eagles; it’s ‘cause of that association business I was alluding to a moment ago.

Wow! I don't know what other people think when they see things like the peas in the pod and the eagles flying high overhead without any turkeys in their midst; but me, it reminds me of an old drunk who used to speak words of wisdom to me every time he heard I'd gotten' kicked outa school for fighten' or doing something equally stupid. He'd always say, "Davy, if you want to soar with the eagles you're going to have ta quit acting like a God damned turkey. (By the way, he's the reason I cuss once in a great while.)

But back to McCain, he picked a dimwit because he is a dimwit.

You may think my analysis is way off the mark, but be prudent, don’t bet against me. Just after recording these thoughts for the ages, I happened to read the conservative New York Times Columnist David Brooks. Though he casts his explanation of McCain’s VP pick in a different frame than I did–he’s trying to rationalize the stupidity of a fellow conservative-- the fact is that in its essentials he agrees with what I’ve written. He notes, for example, that, “John McCain is not a normal conservative. . . . .”

“When McCain met Sarah Palin last February,” Brooks wrote, “ he was meeting the rarest of creatures, an American politician who sees the world as he does. Like McCain, Palin does not seem to have an explicit governing philosophy. Her background is socially conservative, but she has not pushed that as governor of Alaska. She seems to find it easier to work with liberal Democrats than the mandarins in her own party.”

. . . . . .

Brooks concludes, “Many people are conditioned by their life experiences to see this choice of a running mate through the prism of identity politics, but that’s the wrong frame. Sarah Barracuda was picked because she lit up every pattern in McCain’s brain, because she seems so much like himself” (David Brooks, New York Times Opinion Column, 2 September 2008).

See! What'd I tell ya? It's the basic laws of attraction or association at work in the McCain selection.

Now, if you think McCain is the only stupid bastard out there who thinks Ms. Palin’s well qualified to be VP, well you need to read a little American History. Don't forget, the biggest rap on Adlai Stevenson was the size of his brain; he was just to damned smart. . .an egg head. Richard Hofstadter's Pulitzer Prize winning book Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963) contains many examples of bias against intellectuals in American History from the very beginnings of our nationhood right down to the time of his death, and as a people I'm not aware that there has been any big transformation of the basic American character. I haven’t heard anybody singing where have all the dummies gone? Nope, it was the flowers that took a powder. The dummies are still with us; we know where they've gone! Yep, they're congregating over there in St. Paul as I write.

Ever on the watch for ya,
Davy Crockett

Tomatoes, Peppers and the Reagan/Bush Plutocracy

2008-08-19T09:46:00.013-05:00

The right-wing, anti-government nature of Republican politics during the last 25 or 30 years has had a massive negative impact on the very fabric of our American democracy. You know, the idea embedded in Ronnie’s oft repeated little ditty, “Government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem.” Well that’s the sort of sophisticated thinking that’s got us hurtin’ today. Indeed, I've been longing for the emergence of a Theodore Roosevelt who will pull us back from the precipice and, as he so valiantly did earlier in the last century, restore this democracy. But no, there are no white knights off on the horizon, none in sight.

During the Reagan years financial deregulation of the savings and loan industry brought us a devastating financial crisis that exceeded in costs all of the American wars form the Revolutionary War through the war in Viet Nam. And of course, we're currently engaged in a costly boondoggle in Iraq that will make that last financial black hole seem small. All the while our infrastructure here at home continues to crumble. Parenthetically it does seem to me that if we keep creating these economic black holes, we’re going to have to add a course or two in astronomy to our economics curriculum just so that we can keep up with these buzzards.

We are also reminded on a daily basis that the unfettered, under regulated banking industry, headed by the new Robber Barons, just as greedy as ever, are marching this nation's economy towards the cliff's edge. Given the historical record etched in time, none of these disasters represents anything new. No, we've OD on so much Enron type news of malfeasance and miss management and gross incompetence; we've become inured to the financial news of the day. (I'm being kind, of course, who can admit the stupid factor as the cause of public inaction, as the reason we keep electing the Reagan/Bush boobs rather than booting their greedy assess out the door).

The anti-government attitudes influencing the right-wing Bush plutocrats running things in Washington, are not just being reflected in matters related to banking and/or the savings and loan industry. No. Just a few weeks ago a Congressional Investigation establish what Monica Goodling had already told us when she offered testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. While she was in charge of hiring at Alberto Gonzales’ Justice Department, she only hired right-wing party hacks. So, it certainly came as no big surprise when that conclusion came out of a recently released Congressional investigation. The Reagan/Bush sycophants heading our government agencies don't seem to know that they are in fact working for the American people; that it really wasn’t Alberto’s Justice Department but ours, it belongs to the American people and should be serving their interests.

But let’s not get side tracked with a painful detail from Alberto’s past tenure at “Justice.” During the Christmas shoppin’ season this past year, numerous stories appeared in the news, almost daily, about the lead tainted toys being brought into our big discount stores from China by the nations biggest retailers, the Wal-Mart types. The sorry response given by those retail spokesman brave enough to face the cameras in each instance was, "We do the best we can under the circumstance."

What were those circumstances? Our government protective agencies were and are so understaffed they can't begin to keep with the business of enforcing our consumer product safety laws. And during the height of the controversy the head of the US Consumer Product Safety Commission appeared on Capital Hill to offer testimony against legislation that would have added the money and resources necessary for the Consumer Product Safety Commission to do its job. Why did she do that? Because, though Bush appointed her to head the Consumer Product Safety Commission , she didn't agree with the Commission's basic mission. She came from the private sector; the sector that had been under the jurisdiction of the Consumer Regulatory agency she now heads.

Time and again the Reagan/Bush anti-government strategy has involved putting someone diametrically opposed to a regulatory agencies function in charge of that agency. We've seen that at the Environmental Protection Agency, OSHA, the Food and Drug Administration, The Federal Aviation Agency (Remember all those uninspected South West and American Planes that got grounded because inspectors but their ass on the line and blew the whistle?).

And of course, we are all aware that the safety of our food supply SUCKS! For several weeks we’ve been inundated by stories of salmonella tainted tomatoes on our supermarket shelves from no one knew quite where. Ah, but have no fear, the super sleuths from the FDA were on the job, about to break the case. In the meantime we were advised not to eat those red garden beauties as they might just kill us.

Well, several weeks passed, people were still being taken to hospitals (close to 1500 in all) and still the Sherlocks from the FDA couldn’t provide any answers with certitude. Heck, they said, maybe it wasn’t the tomatoes after all, might just be onions from Florida, or cucumbers from Oregon. Hell, who knows, might even be a rotten sardine or two from Alaska. Apparently the FDA Sherlocks didn’t have their Dr. Watson to keep them focused..

Anyway somebody at the FDA either woke up, or came in off vacation, and pointed the finger at the rotten peppers coming across our southern border from Mexico. Yesterday, 18 August 2008, Garance Burke from the Associated Press wrote:

“Mexican peppers posed problem long before outbreak. Federal inspectors at U.S. border crossings repeatedly turned back filthy, disease-ridden shipments of peppers from Mexico in the months before a salmonella outbreak that sickened 1,400 people was finally traced to Mexican chilies.

Yet no larger action was taken. Food and Drug Administration officials insisted as recently as last week that they were surprised by the outbreak because Mexican peppers had not been spotted as a problem before.

But an Associated Press analysis of FDA records found that peppers and chilies were consistently the top Mexican crop rejected by border inspectors for the last year.

Since January alone, 88 shipments of fresh and dried chilies were turned away. Ten percent were contaminated with salmonella. In the last year, 8 percent of the 158 intercepted shipments of fresh and dried chilies had salmonella.”

With truth revealed, peppers identified as the salmonella carrier, did the officials at the FDA breathe a sigh of relief and issue appropriate announcements? Hell No! Instead, in typical fashion, it was cover your ass time. As the AP’s Burke wrote:

“On Friday, Dr. David Acheson, the FDA's food safety chief, told reporters peppers were not a cause for concern before they were implicated in the salmonella outbreak.

‘We have not typically seen problems with peppers," Acheson said. "Our import sampling is typically focused on areas where we know we've got problems or we've seen problems in the past, which is why we're now increasing our sampling for peppers.’ “

Theodore Roosevelt’s dead! We can’t depend on a savior to come riding across the North Dakota plains headed to Washington to fix our floundering democracy. We’re going to have to roll up our sleeves and do the heavy lifting ourselves. As a starter it would be well to expect our political candidates to honestly address the pressing issues of the day. In a 21 Century complex world, simple minded notions propounded by the Right won’t get the job done. Government can be the answer if we put wise, intelligent people in its service. Enough with the Reagan/Bush morons and their tomato scams!

Hey, while were at it, would somebody tell candidates McCain and Obama to stay away from the Mega Churches. . .those 17th and 18th Century issues, decided so clearly by the Enlightenment thinkers, should not be dominating a 21st Century political campaign. And as far as I'm concerned, Pastor Rick can take his mega church along with his bag of conservative theological bugaboo and take a hike. Jesus hit the nail on the head when he held up a coin and said to the Pharisees, "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto the Lord what is the Lord's." The Bushies, for obvious political reasons, have so blurred the issues evolving around Church/State separation that it has become increasingly difficult to tell the difference between politicians and preachers; essentially it has become a distinction without a difference.

Still tryin' to figure things out for ya,

Davy Crockett

Thesis/Antithesis Politics and The Obama/Clinton Campaign

2008-05-11T20:51:00.009-05:00

The attitudes reflected in many of the political columns today, i.e., The Washington Post’s David Border, the NYTime's Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd etc., are exactly the attitudes that rib the Obama campaign from top to bottom. Today, for example, many of the Black C-span Obama supporters (they have a listener call in show every morning that nicely reflects the visceral side of American politics) made it clear that the White people who don't like Obama had better shut up or learn to live with the "new" reality. The message, in a nut shell, Hillary should fold up shop and shut up.

May 8th, on CNN, Donna Brazile brazenly expressed the essence of the new visceral style in a discussion with Paul Bugala. "We don't need to just rely on white-bule-collar voters," she said, "and all those Hispanics. We have to get beyond those people." Her implication was not hard to read. . .they're just a bunch of racists jerks; we don't need 'em.

Not nearly so sure Bugala responded, " We cannot win with egg heads. We cannot win with egg heads and African-Americans. OK, that is the Dukakis Coalition, which carried ten states and gave us four years of the first George Bush."

Interestingly enough, one rather educated sounding C-span caller even suggested that Obama will probably "bridge" the divide by appointing Colin Powell as his VP running mate. I'm not too sure what divide would be bridged by such a move, but in this new Obama political calculus, if you're White, you apparently don't have to bother about such details. The Black and White proponents of feel good politics have got it all worked out, with the aforementioned columnists help of course.

A good old White boy from some place in Pa. called the C-span line to say in very direct terms that he'd had it. . ."the Democratic party and the Obama people have trashed the Clintons," he said as he concluded, "I'll never forget it."

That sorta thinking is scary. Given the way the campaign is shaping up, I'm beginning to wonder if we have any kind of a chance at a Washington change that would, in fact, be different from the politics of greed, religious zealotry, and corruption that has characterized the last seven years of the Bush reign.

It does seem clear that the Bleeding heart liberals, the Maueen Dowds, The Frank Richs and the David Broders, the egg heads and the insensitive Donna Brazile--spokeswoman for the newly arrived Obama Blacks, whose time has arrived-- have pushed so hard with their own uniquely visceral political views, they’ve been blind to the "thesis/antithesis" response they've engendered from the lunch box Joes of this world. The Joe's are being translated into McCain Democrats. The voting results in Pa, Ohio, Indiana, West Virginia and the south as a whole reflect that transmutation.

Given the though going way racial/gender concerns have hijacked the Democratic Party primary campaign, the question legitimately arises: Can anyone expect movement on the great issues that make life in this country good or bad: universal medical care, real social security reform, a transportation system that works, saving our rapidly deteriorating environment, ending that atrocity in Iraq. . .the list of such problems is endless.

The historical record is replete with examples of good intentions vanquished by the arousal of basic visceral instincts. . . politicians have always sought to aroused the viscera with red meat issues, red herrings, or wedge issues; this list is long too; indeed its length suggests its dastardly efficacy.

In sum, people need to back off and let Hillary do her thing. Anybody who thinks that the Wonder Boy from Illinois is going to sweep Georgia, North Carolina, Alabama, South Carolina, Mississippi etc. in November as happened in the primaries is smokin’ too much of the weed. The White vote in November is not going to be split between as many competing forces as was the case during the primaries, and the Black vote doesn’t look nearly as imposing when measured against the unified white block. LBJ's comments, made when he signed the Civil Rights Bill, haven't been nullified. . ."The Democratic Party has just lost the South for 100 years," he said; that hundred's not up yet.

Let’s face it, the Black/White visceral color of this Democratic primary campaign is potentially far more costly than Hillary’s continued presence on the campaign trail. If the major political issues mean anything at all, issues of race and gender are not the decisive factors. That is, IF the issues basic to the campaign are those that genuinely relate to the welfare of the people without respect to gender and racial identity; those racial/ gender equity interests will be satisfied, as they should be, in the total scheme of things.

The time is now to stop campaigning to put a Black or a woman in the White House; putting a Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court didn’t translate him into a Thurgood Marshal; having an Alberto Gonzales in the AG Office didn’t make him a civil rights lovin’ Bobby Kennedy; disappointment lists such as this are long too. It’s not gender or skin color that stamp the character of those who should serve our interests in the White House over the next few years. It’s time we stop focusing on racial/gender concerns and refocus upon the big issues of the day. We don’t need John McCain’s promised hundred years war in Iraq, or more tax holidays for the super wealthy.

Ever on the watch for ya,
Davy Crockett

Socialism, Bear Stearns (Robber Barons), Adam Smith, Rousseau and You!

2008-03-21T12:49:00.009-05:00

Skull & crossbones, Exclusive Brethren.
You people have no Idea who runs America.
Democracy?...Ha HA HA HA HA HA HA HA...........
Americans are Fat Lazy cowards each and every one of them, easily led and easily fooled by false patriotism or smart ad's or punch lines. They have no stomach for the "Truth" and no education to work out the consequences of their actions.
Bush/Cheney Plan all going smoothly thank you very much.
Call always call in Peatraus to put down any discontent on American streets?.....you signed the Patriot Act didn't you ?, allowing the president to sieze control during a time of "National Emergency" as decided by the "Decider".
Its not your money it's their money and they will destroy you to keep it.
Give onto Caesar that which is Caesar's.....

— dunnyart, Woomera Prohibited Area South Australia NY Times Comments Post 21 March 2008

Lest you think otherwise, we're in for one hell of a rough economic ride. As Yogi used to say, this is deja vu all over again. We lived though the idiocy of Reagan’s foolish adherence to unregulated supply side economics, and we paid with the massive costs of the S & L crisis, not to mention the recession that doomed the first Bush presidency. George Junior, upon assuming the presidential throne, promptly returned the economic focus back to unfettered capitalism with a supply side flavor. . .lower or no taxes etc. Old Adam Smith became God again, and probably because his cataract covered eyes couldn’t see, he was still pushin’ that blind guiding hand shit that so endeared him to the Robber Barons the first time this financial merry-go-round went round. We're now reaping that whirl wind--YET AGAIN! Batten down the hatches! This baby is going to blow for a while.

Of the people I read regularly, no one has been better at forecasting our economic situation than the Princeton University, New York Times columnist, Paul Krugman. The socialism basic to this Bear Stearns bailout is certainly not something that comes as a surprise. Surprise or not, couple things seem pretty obvious: as a nation we, the voters don’t seem to have immunized ourselves from the foolish choices we make when we enter the voting booth; and, the Right slanted minions don’t seem able cry socialism in response to government corporate bailout actions. It’s only social programs destined to help the struggling lower class who can’t afford doctors and dentists and medical care generally that energizes the Right. It’s pretty clear that it’s greed and not humanitarian concerns that pump up their lungs with protest cries of “socialism, socialism.”

Because they’re only concerned with self-interest and not public interest, the Right ignores and, indeed, often attempts to hide, the stupidity and greed behind the seemingly endless series of corporate miss steps and outright debacles. We’re all supposed to keep our blinders on and let old Adam Smith keep his arthritic hand on the tiller. See it or not, like it or not, the ship of state keeps right on hittin’ the rocks.

Frankly, the repeating loop that keeps bringing this story back won’t end with a final note until someone realizes that this complex social system does require the guiding hand of an involved government, a government that is motivated to regulate and control financial excess, a government that realizes that public good is paramount, takes priority over individual aggrandizement. Certainly proper government function requires more than maintaining police departments and prisons to protect the wealthy or an aggressive army to steal somebody else’s oil. It was not current law that drove the Fed to initiate the Bear Stearns bailout; they didn’t serve a legal requirement in initiating the bailout action; the laws simply didn’t exist. Let’s be kind for a moment and put the Fed’s action in the best possible light; they did it to server a greater public good; let us give them the benefit of the doubt and hope so anyway. With that in mind, laws broken or not, I’d close my eyes if they decided to throw a few of those greedy bastards from Bear Stearns in jail and returned what money they have left to the public check book. Enough with the Robber Barons!

Now before we close this chapter, it is well to remember that the very individuals who will most directly benefit from the Bear Stearns bailout; that is, to put it in no uncertain terms, whose asses are being saved, are the very people who oppose bailouts when the discussion involves the social security system or any other social system that serves the interests and welfare of the masses the great unwashed, the hoi polloi. No, when it’s social security, public schools, universal medical care or any of the other great social programs, they’re busy circulating private memos arguing the importance of “starving the beast,” and writing high minded essays in The National Review and The Washington Standard extolling the virtues of “rugged individualism;” you know the “up from the boot straps” crap. The Cato Institute, The Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute won’t be sending out their talking heads to appear on the weekly news shows decrying the dangers of creeping socialism. No, they'll all stand aside, silently mute, hoping that we don't notice the robbery in progress. In sum, we desperately need to put primitive old Adam Smith and his invisible guiding hand back in the coffin and bring back Rousseau and his talk of the The Social Contract.

Keep ‘en an eye on these buzzards for ya,

Davy Crockett

Update 14 July 2009 New York Times, Bob Herbert

These malefactors of great wealth (thank you, Teddy) developed hideously destructive credit policies and took insane risks that hurt millions of American families and nearly wrecked the economy. Then they were bailed out with hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, money that came from the very people victimized by the industry’s outlandish practices.

Now the industry is fighting against creation of an agency that would protect taxpayers and ordinary consumers from a similarly devastating onslaught in the future. And at the same time they are scrambling to raise credit card interest rates and all manner of exploitive fees to build a brand new superstructure of questionable profits on the backs of the taxpayers who came to their rescue.

Iraq, Democracy, the Media, Refugees and Bullshit

2007-01-02T21:09:00.000-06:00

BAGHDAD, Jan. 1 — With thousands of Iraqis desperately fleeing this country every day, advocates for refugees, and even some American officials, say there is an urgent need to allow more Iraqi refugees into the United States.

--SABRINA TAVERNISE and ROBERT WORTH New York Times

The President has been telling us for some years now we’re winning the war in Iraq, that post Saddam Iraq is a better place and that the world is also a beneficiary of Saddam’s rather clumsy exit from the Iraqi Presidency . Indeed, after all that bull about WMD's got brushed aside, as the irrelevancy that it was, the Prez started to regularly talk about bringing those poor folks a little badly needed democracy, and, according to him, we've done that. Of course, we're still havin' a little trouble with those folks who hate democracy, but were makin' progress and it's important to remember that this makin' democracy business is hard work; it takes lots a time too; it's complicated stuff. The rule of the Sunni strong man has been replaced by the Shiite death squads who’re busy with their ethnic cleansing operation, and given the body count posted each day they’re gettin’ the job done.

Well anyway, I know all about the makin' democracy stuff; I've been listening to the Prez. Fact is, as old Rummy ( remember him) used to say, the press concentrates on the negative; they don't tell about all the good things we've done over there. No, according to Rummy, the mainstream media just focus on the actions of a few thugs. If you have trouble with that just you remember that VP Cheney told us basically the same thing. Then too we had the same good news from Paul Wolfwitz.

And damn, who can forget Condi's spacey toothed grin, as she proudly sat there in front of the NBC Meet The Press cameras telling the world about all those Iraqi citizens takin' to the streets to flash their purple thumbs, announcing to the world, as they did so, that they were finally livin' in a USA bona fide democracy. Yup, that was the message; I heard it enough times to finally get it.

But, make no mistake about it, you have to just be careful whose crap you listen to, or you’ll get snookered. Right now ( December 26, 2006) Eleanor Clift of Newsweek is writing that, “The administration had the media snookered much of the time. Stories that were under reported largely because they ran counter to administration spin include: [among several others]
# A study that shows the death toll among Iraqis has reached as high as 655,000. Extensively researched by teams of doctors commissioned by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Md., the study—and the controversy over its sampling methodology—was given scant attention by the media because it was so far out of line from the administration’s projection of perhaps 50,000 civilian deaths."

Like I said, you just can’t trust the damned leftist mainstream media. So what if a few hundred thousand Iraqis got knock off; as I said earlier, this democracy business is hard work and nothin’ good comes cheap. The point is, as the Prez told a reporter Oct 25, 2006, when he was ask weather or not we are winning the war, “Absolutely, we’re winning.” Now it is true that a few days later when asked the same question he replied, “Well, we’re not winning, but we’re not losing either.” To be sure this democracy stuff is complicated and a little hard to sort out, but I guess that’s why the Prez was honest enough to say right up front that being Prez is damn hard work. Mind you now he didn’t say “damn;” that was just a little of me seepin’ in. Old George, as I’m sure you know, is a deeply religious man.

Anyway, democracy's work is not over! There's still some rough sledin' ahead, and we need to remain steadfast in our resolve to help those people. BUT, and this is the kicker, there are people out there, mostly the mainstream press, who are now starting to spread the rumor that the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who've fled their battle torn country for refuge in Jordan and Syria want to resettle here in the good old USA as political refugees. Yup! That’s the rumor, Acording to that leftist Big Apple Times, “Some critics say the Bush administration has been reluctant to create a significant refugee program because to do so would be tantamount to conceding failure in Iraq. “ Don't you dare support such non sense! That’s just more of the cut and run, defeatist crap we hearfrom the effete, pusillanimous, snivlin', lilly livered leftists in the Democrat controlled Congress. Damned bunch of defeatocrats they are!

Iraq is now a democracy controlled by it's purple thumbed people. They don't want to come to the US. Don’t buy that refugee crap. It's all a do gooder's plot being hatched by left-wingers in Washington and being pushed by a hostile press.

In sum, if you really want to know what's happening in Iraq give old Rush a listen. He'll tell ya the truth. If you can't find Rush on the dial, or if he’s off on an Oxy high, try that good lookin' Laura Ingraham, a right wing bitch with a brainless bark, but she's got a pipe line to truth, so you might want to listen to her pontificate on the present state of affairs in Iraq; she puts out some truly edifyin' stuff.

Keepin’ an eagle eye on things for ya,

Davy Crockett

Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Live Friday Night At Milwaukee’s Shank Hall: A Review

2006-12-17T22:46:00.001-06:00

I first became aware of Jimmie Dale’s music ten or maybe even fifteen years ago on the PBS program Austin City Limits. At that time, probably in his mid 40's, Gilmore looked tall and lean, skinny even, with sharp, clearly defined facial features, and he wore a three quarter length black coat, white shirt and a black string tie. My first impression of him called to mind the 60's and 70's country singer Sonny James, the Southern Gentleman, who always dressed in black and wore a three-quarter length coat along with the white shirt and string tie. In sharp contrast though, the Southern Gentlemen’s black, wavy hair style and river boat gambler’s demeanor, was not the Jimmie Dale Gilmore persona.

No, not with Jimmie’s Indian looking straight, dark, shoulder length hair and plain spoken relaxed manner. He did, however, look rather distinctive, if not distinguished. But beyond the fashion notes, Jimmie Dale’s beautiful tenor voice and artfully crafted songs, songs that defy easy classification, combined country, folk , rhythm and blues sounds; sounds produced by electrified acoustic guitars. I quickly became a fan.

As a concert venue, Shank Hall was new to me. Located on Milwaukee’s Northeast side on Farwell Street, Shank Hall appears as a rather ordinary looking tavern or small club. There is a small parking lot across the street not far to the north, and there is some on street parking in the neighborhood. The Shank Hall web site indicates a capacity of 300 hundred, but I would have guessed, wrongly apparently, that the actual capacity was closer to 30 than the three hundred. As we entered the Hall, we could see a performance stage at one end of the room and a bar at the other, with a large sound, light, mixing board near the bar end of the room. The hall itself, filled with small cocktail size tabes and chairs, provided what turned out to be a very intimate environment that afforded the audiences an exceptional view of the performance area. The walls on each side of the room featured 8x11 photos of performs who’d graced the Shank hall stage over the years. Jimmie Dale Gilmore seemed right at home in photo company that included artists ranging from the likes of Leo Kotke to the Violent Fems.

In this non smoking atmosphere, to my surprise, the house rules did permit concert goers to come with food from home, even pizzas if you were so inclined, and from start to finish, waitresses were conveniently available with drinks from the bar.

This Shank Hall concert did feature an opening act performer about whom little will be said. If you can imagine Leonard Cohen, with an extremely bad case of laryngitis, singing dark, morose song lyrics from which some mean soul had ripped out all the poetry; well, then you know what we suffered though to get to Jimmie Dale Gilmore. Judging from the non-reaction from the audience, they were polite, I don’t know that this cat’s picture will hang on the Shank’s walls anytime soon.

After ten or fifteen minutes of casually watching a couple roadies make a few transitional changes on the stage-- placing a couple acoustic guitars on stands, positioning mikes and running a sound check-- there stood Jimmie Dale Gilmore in the flesh. “Hi,” he said, in a relaxed, easy manner, a manner that seemed to characterize his demeanor throughout the concert. In some ways he appeared to me as kind of a San Francisco hippy version of Fred Rogers from PBS’s, “Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood.,” complete with the same innocent, genuine smile and unassuming personal style, with a certain gentle deferential quality about it; the Mr. Rogers quality. An auspicious start I thought, Mr. Rogers has long been one of the two or three heros of my life.

This latter day Jimmie Dale, still wore what looked like a three-quarter length charcoal-grey black coat but one with kinda faded looking grey one inch pin stripes. And the white shirt, well, it was gone along with the black string tie, and in its place hung a leather string necklace with a stone amulet of some kind bordered in silver attached. There he stood, complete with his acoustic guitar and the cowboy boots you’d expect to see on someone reared in Lubbock, Tx. Still lanky and lean looking with the sharp, pointed facial features, the marks of passing time were very much in evidence and the once straight dark shoulder length hair is now grey with only the slightest suggestion that it might have once reflected color. And though his manner and style still suggest some of the naivety or exuberance of the young, he looks closer to seventy than the sixty-one he is.

Then I noticed one of the roadies still on stage as he plucked the other acoustic guitar from it’s stand, strap it on and stand, just off to one side, intently watching Jimmie Dale. Nameless at this point, he looked like someone from out of my youthful days back in the hill country of northeastern Montana, a guy from one of the neighboring farms or ranches who just happened to stop in for a little neighborly socializing. Attired in worn blue jeans, a plain flannel shirt with the tails hanging out and the sleeves none too stylistically rolled about midway up on his forearms. His hair, if he had time to run a comb through it, certainly hadn’t been treated with any of the modern spray nets to keep it neatly in place. About 50, or there abouts, there was no attempt at a social facade here.

Without much further ado Jimmie kicked of with one of his signature songs,”One Endless Night.” It was immediately apparent that, though his body reflects passing time, his beautiful tenor voice remains as clear and pure as that which came from the much younger singer I’d see years before on Austin City Limits. Indeed, in the intimacy of Shank Hall, the sounds were beyond anything I’ve head on the numerous Gilmore Cd’s in my collection. The Shank Hall sound system beautifully balances the vocal and instrument levels providing a sound mix that clearly highlights the voice. And the farm boy guitar player accompanying Jimmie on the other guitar, well, he may not have been up on the latest social facades and all the practiced manners, but oh how he could play that guitar. During the next two hours or so he would occasionally alternate between the acoustic and an electrified dobro displaying mastery of each.

After a three or four selections, Jimmie Dale paused briefly and, almost as an after thought, kinda introduced his nameless guitar playin’ sidekick, noting as he did so, that there was a story attached to their relationship that he’d get to later. For the time being, we now knew that we were listening to the incredible guitar artistry of one Robi Gjersoe. By whatever name, any thoughts I’d had of this artists lack of social sophistication had been pushed aside by his obvious musical virtuosity. Damn, I thought! If A. Einstein could run around the campus at Princeton, sockless, in batter old shoes, I guess R. Gjersoe can play guitars at the Shank dressed any damned why he pleases, and I’ll bet nobody’d notice.

Indeed, if I may digress for a moment, whether it’s Jimmie Dale Gilmore with Robi Gjersoe, Leonard Cohen, Townes Van Zandt, Mickey Newbury, or any of the peripatetic artists traveling entertainments back roads, there is a commonality that threads them together–the music is the thing; it’s not the business of music that’s caught their attention. There is none of that slurpy, syrpy plastic overlay that makes so much homogenized, over produced, contemporary music so imminently forgettable.

The fact that these musical vagabonds reflect an artistic commitment to interests larger than self interest driven cupidity is evident in their music and in the way they live their lives. Leonard Cohen spent several years, living and studying in a Bundist monastery. Similarly, Jimmie Dale, a philosophy student, spent much of the 80's studying with a guru in Denver and the late Mickey Newbury, one of the truly great influences in modern music, famously avoided the commercial side of music, at times not performing or even recording for extended time periods.

Any account of a Jimmie Dale Gilmore concert wouldn’t be complete without at least some mention of his penchant for philosophical musings, digressions, ranging from leftist political sentiments that would make the Dixie Chicks tepid disavowal of Bush seem conservative, to meditations on the meaning and mysteries of life. As Jimmie Dale noted in one way or another, he never encountered a digression he could avoid, not that he wanted to. The Butch Hancock song that Gilmore claims as his own and sings with knowing conviction, “My Mind’s Got A Mind Of It’s Own,” represents in concise form a kind of autobiographical snapshot of Gilmore.

Near the end of the concert Jimmie Dale paused and announced that he wanted us to meet a friend of his. “Paul ,” he said, looking down at a big, burley, Burl Ives sized man seated just a couple seats in front of our table, “come on up here.” The big man, his faded brown hair drawn back in a pony tail, quickly moved to the stage and stood beside Jimmie Dale looking a little disheveled in a pair of baggy nondescript grey slacks. His bearded face made it a bit difficult to read his expression, but he seemed rather shy and didn’t speak. Gilmore continued, “This is Paul Cebar of ‘Paul Cebar and the Milwaukeans.’” He then proceeded to tell us, with some invited help from Robi Gjersoe, that it was Paul Cebar who advised him that Robi was the guitar player that Gilmore needed. At that time Gjersoe was a member of Cebar’s “Milwaukeans.”

Up to this point Paul has stood essential mute, listening to Gjersoe and Gilmore reminisce about Gjersoe’s move from the “Milwaukeans” to Austin, Texas. Kinda seemed like he might have been thinking, “What in the hell am I doing up here.” Then, Jimmie Dale turned to Paul and said, “I’d love to have you do a number for us, would ya?” With a few whispered words between Gjersoe and Cebar, Paul strapped on the acoustic guitar and, with Gilmore and Gjersoe playing behind him, Paul started to play. I could feel my neck start to tingle as I listened to one of the most beautiful barbitone voices I have ever heard. He sang a song I’d heard many times before, the old Johnny Cash tune, “I Still Miss Someone,” but oh did he make it uniquely his own with phrasing and vocal nuances that clearly conveyed his deep understanding of the ideas embed in the song.

The concert at an end, the audience enthusiastically called Jimmie Dale back a couple times for encore numbers. As I later drove those hundred miles back north, I did so knowing that I’d had a memorable, uplifting experience that enriches life as only the arts can. Swank Hall and I’ll not be strangers anymore.

Listen' to tunes for ya,

Davy Crockett

Excommunicatin’ The Infidels In Nebraska

2006-12-11T23:46:00.000-06:00

As you are probably aware, over the course of the last five years or so, there has been an almost steady stream of news stories detailing the nightmarish tale of sexual abuse within the US Catholic Church. Marauding, philandering, pedophile priests have made virtual careers outa’ preying on unsuspecting cherubic lookin’ alter boys; boys who became sacrificial sex objects in the hands of carnal priests.

This is serious stuff, and because it is, I’ve wondered why the Vatican didn’t take action to bring it to a halt. Beyond a few tepid comments from official church spokesman, who felt compelled to comment with each new revelation, virtually all punitive actions came from secular agencies or individuals; i.e., private law firms or state and local prosecutors with pedofile priests in their cross hairs.

Well, now I can stop wonderin’. I know why the church leaders remained as mute as brass monkeys; they’ve been too busy excommunicatin’ the infidels in Nebraska! If ever there was a place in danger of being taken over by wild eyed, bra burning fema Nazis pushing abortion, along with a cadre of their fellow travelers-- the preverts,--you know, the gay-homo types, the sexual kooks of this world. Well, if there is such a savage, sexual jungle out there, it’s surely in Nebraska.

Now don’t be surprised at that revelation. Nebraska is one strange place with a stealthy past that includes some of the worlds largest elephants, rhinos and even massive herds of camels galloping over the plain. To be sure, I’m talkin’ geologic time that dates so damned far back there, I’d need a fancy calculator to figure it all out, but it’s true. Nebraska was (and, apparently, still is) the home of some pretty damn strange creatures. Now, if you doubt the authenticity of the elephant, rhino, camel history in old Nebraska, you just stop at the University and visit the state natural history museum; they’ve got’em on display.

In terms of Nebraska’s current critters, the priestly preverts, well I guess you could stop at the Diocesan Headquarters in Lincoln and feast your eyes on Bishop Bruskewitz. Now be careful, I’m not suggesting that the good Bishop is a pervert, though he may be, but I am saying that he suffers from a bad case of moral macular degeneration; because of the blind spots, he can’t see much of the sin and suffering that goes on in this world. He could well have some degenerate priests in his priestly army and is just not able to see them. . .you know the classic blind spots blot it all out.

Bishop Law in Boston certainly had that problem. And then there was Arch Bishop Weakland in Milwaukee, but then I guess I shouldn't count the Milwaukee Arch Bishop because, as it turns out, he could see. Poor old Arch Bishop Weakland looked at his boyfriend one day, decided he (the boyfriend) was ugly and told him to get lost–that little parting cost about three or four hundred thousand dollars in blackmail money, and then damn, wouldn’t you know the people of Milwaukee didn’t have a sense of humor about it; they actually wanted him to resign. But, back to my notion that you might just be able to see a prevert if ya just spend a little time where they all seem to hang out. You know, the cathedral and places like that are pretty good places to look; those do seem to be hangouts.

Make no mistake about it, they haven't been notic'in the wild priests because they've been too busy excommunicatin’ the infidels, matter of priorities, I guess. Just the other day (Friday 8 December 2006) Josh Funk, writing for the Associated Press, wrote that, “A Vatican official has upheld the 1996 mass excommunication of perhaps hundreds of people in the Lincoln Diocese affiliated with a church reform group and 10 other organizations the diocese considers anti-Catholic.” Lest there be any confusion about where this Lincoln is located, we’re talking about the capital of the great state of Nebraska.

If you’re at all like me, you are wondering what was going on in 1996 to cause the Church to take such drastic action. “In 1996, [Bishop] Bruskewitz ruled that membership in Call To Action and 10 other organizations was ‘perilous to the Catholic faith and most often is totally incompatible with the Catholic faith.’ The other groups cited include the abortion-rights groups Planned Parenthood and Catholics for a Free Choice, the Hemlock Society, which supports physician-assisted suicide, and several Masonic organizations” (AP Friday 8 Dec. 2006). So, that brings the whole matter into focus. Those Nebraska folks were takin' up with the radical, fringe element I mentioned, the fema Nazis and such.

We do know that whatever those folks did to get kicked outa’ the church, the Vatican didn’t act precipitously. No sir, they’ve been deliberation over there in Rome for a good ten years now.

Hell, who knows, maybe we’ve all been a little too harsh in thinkin’ that maybe somebody really official and all-- you know somebody from the Vatican or maybe even a fancy dressed Bishop-- should have said something about the sexual carnival the priests were runnin' in the churches. Guess they needed time to deliberate, and given the long silence, I guess they're still locked up in thought.

Whatever the case with the long deliberatin' or Rip Van Winkle sleep state those folks are in, I do have an important warning for ya. The next time you start to even think about joinin’ up with some free thinkin’ group, or hell, even a thinkin’ group, you better think twice before you go puttin’ your John Hancock on the dotted line. Fact is the Pope might just be lookin’ over your shoulder with his knee in a cocked position ready, in the blink of an eye, to kick your sweet little ass right outta the Catholic church–excommunicated you’d be! Your shot at heaven down the drain with just that one big kick, and if that’s not what you call a real kick in the ass, I don’t know what is.

Think about it now, the consequences are pretty damned serious, and I do mean damned. Josh Funk the AP writer who presented the story said, “Under excommunication, Catholics cannot receive Holy Communion. They cannot be married or buried in the church. Excommunicated Catholics may be forgiven through the sacrament of confession or may be absolved in their dying hour by a priest.”

Sounds pretty damned serious to me. No marriage rights. . .those excommunicated folks get dumped right into a second class group of citizens who can’t get married . . .you know like the wild-eyed gays who’ve been out their agitating to get hitched up in a marriage of some kind or other. . .seems hard to figure when you think about it.

We’ve got all those damned philandering heterosexuals who are busy bustin’ their sweet little assess tryin’ to figure out how to get outa their marital commitments, and then of course the gays want to get into those commitments, and while this is goin’ on the good Bishop Bruskewitz is bustin asses outta the church. Meaning that if you aren’t married, you can’t get married and, in addition, you’ve just lost your chance at heaven. . .yup!

You get kicked by Bursky, and you’ve lost your burial rights! Seriously! That is one of the consequences of gettin’ tossed. Yup, you’re goin’ to be joining some pretty classic company. . . your old dead, withered bod’s going to be left out there lying on the deserted plain just like Antigone’s fallen brother Polynices who was denied burial rights by King Creon. Polynices was left unburied to be picked apart by the buzzards. Pretty serious. indeed! As Antigone said when she defied her Uncle Creon's order, " I gotta do this, Unk, 'cause B’n dead’s a lot longer than be’n alive, " and she proceded to imperil her own life by placing dirt over her fallen brother's body.

Make no mistake about it Bishop Bruskewitz suffers from the same Orwellian, twisted, upside down morality that ribs Bush White House rhetoric. The war is peace rhetoric we’ve been subjected to over these last six years. Try as I did, I could not find the Bishop’s voice among those condemning the marauding, philandering, pedophile priests, nor could I find any condemnation of Bishop Law and others like him who systematically shuffled pedophile priests from assignment to assignment with no warnings or notifications to law enforcement agencies. And with news reports carrying daily stories of the carnage of war, the Bishop only has time to make public comments about people joining subversive groups like Planned Parenthood. When he did make the national news, it was to courageously declared that he would deny the communion host to the likes of Presidential candidate John Kerry. President Bush’s precipitous rush to start an immoral war at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives and untallied human suffering didn’t make Bishop Bruskewitz moral screen, escaped his notice completely, but he did and does have time for Planned Parenthood and pronouncements about alter boys. So, I guess all is not lost.

It turns out that Lincoln is the only Diocese in the United States that does not allow girls to serve on the alter in place of boys. Why do you suppose there is such a strict preference for cherubic lookin’ alter boys? The Bishops preference for boys is undoubtedly based upon strict theological interpretations. . .unique though those interpretations may be.

I do think it’s necessary to put these matters into some sort of a workable perspective so that it is possible to function in this difficult world, to get on with the day to day odds and ends that is life. With that in mind, I’ve concluded that if you’re a pedophile or some other kind of a sexual prevert, you’d better avoid some professions. Education, you know teaching, is definitely a no, no. Those folks are tough, they’ll kick your ass outa’ the teaching ranks in the blinkin’ of an eye if you’re caught inappropriately touching some kid or even wearing the wrong kinda looks, but don’t worry there is a safe haven for ya, the United States Congress, that seems pretty safe, and then of course there’s the Catholic Church; they seem to have an unlimited tolerance for aberrant sexual behavior. Yup, everybody's gota place in this good old USA.

“Local and national Call To Action leaders said Friday they would appeal the endorsement of [Bishop] Bruskewitz's order to the Signatura, which acts as a sort of supreme tribunal for the Vatican” (AP Josh Funk).

But does it really matter? Given the speed with which they’ve been addressing these matters, many of us won’t be around to know what they finally decide.

Ever on the watch for ya,
Davy Crockett

November 7 Predictions From The Oracle

2006-11-03T19:48:00.000-06:00

Let Karl know that you think this is a critical election, because you know as a citizen that if the Bush team can behave with the level of deadly incompetence it has exhibited in Iraq — and then get away with it by holding on to the House and the Senate — it means our country has become a banana republic. It means our democracy is in tatters because it is so gerrymandered, so polluted by money, and so divided by professional political hacks that we can no longer hold the ruling party to account.

Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times, 3 November 2006

OK, so you think maybe I don't know quiet everything there is to know. Well, you might be right but don't bet on it. I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I just might be too! So, don't risk gettin' your finger sliced up by being careless. What's the point of this IQ self analysis? I'm not really sure, but I'm working on it; in the meantime don't worry about it. I'll let you know if something turns up. Now that the disclaimers have been satisfied, on to something significant, something you might want to memorize for future reference.

As I noted in a recent blog posting reflecting my thoughts on polls and the November elections, I'm not sanguine about the outcome of the coming election. Essentially, the gerrymandering process coupled with the wedge issues used by Republicans to divert attention from real issues has built a very high protective wall around Republican politicians, who would otherwise be very vulnerable; indeed, they would be defeated.

In this group I would include an asshole like J.D. Hayworth, the big baboon from Az's 5th Congressional District, who's in trouble but who will probably make it through the election because of the protective wall.

Tom Reynolds from New York, is another I would put in that same category. Reynolds is one of the members of the House Leadership who, along with Speaker Hastert, protected Reprsentative Foley, the sex predator from Florida, rather than act in the best interest of those young Congressional Pages.

To be perfectly honest, there are quiet a few in the protected category; that is, bastards who should and would be defeated if all things were equal, but alas they aren't.

Oh, one side light, in addition to the gerrymandering and wedge issues providing the protective wall, there is the fact that the George Bush Sr./Lee Atwater/Karl Rove/ George Bush Jr. negative, trash can, lying political campaign tactics badly confuse people who otherwise don't know what in the hell goes on in Washington.

Well, all the above cant aside, let's take a look at the bottom line: my 7 November election predictions. In spite of the difficulties I've noted here, the Democrats will take control of both houses. . .the Senate with 8 new additions and the House with 25 additions.

Were it not for the protective wall the numbers would be big!

So, don't go off thinking that Rasmussen, Cook, Rauthenberg, or any of the other of those national pollsters know it all, they don't, and unlike those charlatans, I don't charge.

Ever on the watch for ya,
Davy Crockett

Scrawny Broads On The World's Fashion Catwalks

2006-10-22T22:33:00.000-05:00

“What becomes alarming is when you see bones and start counting ribs.”
Linda Wells, Editor Allure a beauty magazine

Frankly, I don't understand why it's taken so long, but the fashion folks in Spain, and hopefully now in Brittan, have finally noticed that there ain't a hell of lot a meat on some of those gaunt babes strutt'in down the fashion catwalks in the world's big cities. With that in mind, the Spanish fashion organization, the Pasarela Cibeles, decided to ban those with a BMI (body mass index) of less than 18 from competition. In brief, “ Organizers of the Spanish event said they wanted models to project ‘an image of beauty and health’ and shun a gaunt, emaciated look” (AP news, 16 September 2006).

Spurred into action by the Spanish example, the British Culture Secretary, Tessa Jowell, asked the British fashion world to follow the Spanish example. Damn, it actually looked like reason might just win the day, but no! Spurred on, I’m sure, by monetary considerations, the British elected not to do so. The bony babes were everywhere in evidence at the English “fashion walk.” (New York Times, 21 September 006)

To be honest about it, I don't make a regular habit outta watchin' those pretty spectacles; but when I have taken notice, I couldn't really tell if the distorted sashin' and swayin' they did as they traversed the fashion runway was some perverted scarecrow like attempt at a sexy walk; or if in fact, they were on the verge of passin' out and about to fall, bony ass over tea kettle, into the crowd of fashion onlookers--who didn't always look a hell of a lot healthier either, the onlookers that is.

Gotta be somethin' wrong with people who sit and oooh and ahhh over that kinda stuff. The psychedelic people, the shrinks, probably got some fancy name for it, but I'll be damned if I know what it is. In terms of the factors motivating the fashion world, I don’t think we have to wonder, and I do have a word for it; it’s greed, not altruism driving their decisions.

Now if you think my concern about one or more of them passin’ out is a little over the top, just you remember that skinny little babe who did pass out after being crowned pretty miss whatever at one of your major international beauty pageants a little less than a couple months ago. When that newly crowned beauty dropped over--fainted right there on international prime time TV--some timid souls from the journalistic community wondered if maybe she hadn’t been getting enough to eat, but she promptly assured everybody that she had; she said it was just the excitement of the moment that knocked her over. Ya, sure it was! The anorexic little shit probably hadn’t had a decent Big Mac in a month of Sundays. Fact is she’d probably been loadin’ up on carrot juice and celery sticks dipped in ice water, and there just isn’t enough octane in that stuff to keep a body goin.’

Only a society with a badly distorted, warped set of values holds up an unhealthy standard of female beauty for all to admire; and, in the case of highly impressionable young girls, a standard they foolishly try to emulate. Many of them sacrificing their health, as they get caught up in the destructive grip of anorexia nervosa. The concern briefly reelected in the Madrid/London fashion news has dissipated like an early morning haze. The scrawny, bony, broads continue to flounce up and down those fashion catwalks and to hell with the rib counters.

What the hell, chill out! If you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em. Porked up Americans will continue to put their big and getting bigger fat assess on the old couch; fire up that talking plasma HDTV wall; all the while grabbing ever bigger fists full of chips & brats to be washed down with cold beer sucked right outta the can. Heaven!

Reflections on Polls and The November Election

2006-10-14T00:18:00.000-05:00

A spate of recent national opinion polls and several political pundits are suggesting ever more confidently that the Democrats are about to acquire power once again in Washington. Some are talking about the restoration of our hallowed system of checks and balances and holding out hope that Congress will once again exercise it’s historic oversight function. I’m not so sanguine. In spite of good poll numbers this election’s outcome is not a done deal, and there is reason to be concerned in spite of the polls that consistently reflect a resurgence of the Democratic party.

Generally, I don't think most people realize how grossly skewed the US political system really is; the system distortions are real and explain why, of the 435 seats up for election, there are only 20 to 35 competitive races; that’s true even though virtually all polls show a clear and consistent preference for a change. On a generic ballot, Democrats currently lead by a comfortable margin.

The reality is that there are structural and political distortions in the system that militate against change. From one election cycle to the next the overwhelming majority of congressional seats are never really in play. The distortions that insulate members of congress from competitive races are related to the basic character of the electoral system itself, the proportional system of representation mandated by the Constitution for the House of Representatives, and the guarantee that each state regardless of size, shall have two senators. Because of constitutional limits upon the size of the House of Representatives, i.e., 435 members, it is necessary to reapportion the representation in that body as the population grows. With the progression of time, most of the members of the House represent an ever growing number of people. The representatives from the Western states represent an exception; their constituencies get ever smaller.

It is a little noticed fact in the nation as a whole the western states are losing people; they are emptying out. Yet, they are guaranteed at least one representative no matter how low their population numbers drop; this represents the cause of one of the system distortions mentioned earlier, a distortion that dilutes the democratic character of our government. The people in North Dakota with two US Senators and one member of the House, on a per capita basis, have far great representation, and therefore political influence, than do the people of virtually any other state in the nation. The western states have, over the last 50 to 75 years, been declining in numbers relative to what’s happening in the rest of the country. North Dakota’s population peaked way back in the early 1930's and has been in a steady decline every since.

Consider the disparity; the 37 million people living in California are represented by two US Senators as are the less than one million people living in North Dakota, Wyoming, or any of several of those Western empties. It is because of problems of this nature that a presidential candidate, Al Gore for example, can win the popular vote and not win the election. Though this has happened several times in US history, it is destined to happen more often in the future given the population trends in the West and the reality of the electoral system we are stuck with. Given the conservative nature of the Western red state voters, conservative politics has power and influence far beyond what the population numbers would justify.

Make no mistake about it; the political reality of this situation makes the one man one vote concept irrelevant or merely illusory. The important point is not the fact the there is an historic population shift going on, the emptying out of the Western states; there is, but rather the process of redistricting is a political process that is designed to protect incumbent from one party or the other. In essence, Congressional seats are not unlike Federal Judgeships, lifetime appointments, though technically through an election process and not by appointment as are judgeships. The long history of gerrymandering in American politics has left us with a legacy of Congressional representation that is fundamentally not representative of the people as a whole.

Paul Krugman wrote a piece recently that illustrates this point: “The key point is that African-Americans, who overwhelmingly vote Democratic, are highly concentrated in a few districts. This means that in close elections many Democratic votes are, as political analysts say, wasted — they simply add to huge majorities in a small number of districts, while the more widely spread Republican vote allows the G.O.P. to win by narrower margins in a larger number of districts.”

Krugman correctly concluded: “No wonder, then, that until a few months ago many political analysts argued that the Republicans would control the House for the foreseeable future, because only a perfect political storm could overcome the G.O.P. structural advantage” (New York Times 13 October 2006).

Under normal circumstances reapportionment of the US House of Representative takes place at ten year intervals keeping in sync with the 10 year US census data collected. Political considerations, gerrymandering, have always influenced the redistricting process; Tom DeLay did not invent that bit of institutionalized, structural corruption, but he did use that process in an unprecedented., brazen power grab in the US House by encouraging the newly elected Republican legislature in Texas to ignore the 10 year redistricting cycle and to redraw the recently redrawn congressional districts for the avowed purpose of sending more Republican Congressmen to Washington and thereby increasing his power.

Without question the lines were gerrymandered in Texas to insure that Republicans would replace Democrats in the US Congress, and they did. To be sure, DeLay stands charged with numerous legal violations in connection with these actions, but the fact remains, when the Texas redistricting case was taken before the US Supreme Court, the Court upheld the idea that Congressional boundaries could be redrawn more frequently than allowed by the historic ten year census cycle.

The Supreme Court has in essence institutionalized a process that undermines the notion of one man, one vote. There is now clear legal precedent for politicians from whatever party to further corrupt the representative character of our government by redistricting every time political power shifts in a state legislature.

Historically, people with money, usually wealthy conservatives, have done everything imaginable, including means legal and extralegal, to keep the “hoi polloi” away from the ballot box, the recent election irregularities in Florida and later in Ohio come immediately to mind. Couple that effort with the fact that many, perhaps most, working people of whatever class are generally so caught up in the business of living, of surviving; they just don’t have time to deal with the myriad complexities that underlie most political issues. In modern America, the whole democratic notion of government by the people, for the people and of the people is largely a fiction passed along by naive high school civics teachers. The Swift Boat attach campaigns associated with the Lee Atwater/Karl Rove school of politics represent where politics is at in America. Given the complexity of the issues confronting voters and the many wedge issues introduced to divide and further confuse who knows where how this election will turn out. I’m not too hopeful.

Ever on the watch for ya,
Davy Crockett

Fair Wisconsin: Hope Is Alive

2006-10-01T01:12:00.000-05:00

In the US, the gay marriage issue has not done very well on election day. Indeed, the score currently reads 20-0. Beyond the 20 victories, it is fundamentally true that the victories were overwhelmingly lopsided. With little thought and absolutely no evidence, people seem to feel that the gays are engaged in an effort to destroy the institution of marriage.

To be sure, there are no states where gays have ever waged well supported campaigns to promote gay life styles or even gay marriage; they have merely ask for the equal treatment they deserve as citizens, as human beings. The facts clearly indicate that in those states with laws more sympathetic to civil unions, which include unions involving gays, the actual divorce rate among heterosexuals is lower than it is in those red states associated with religious-conservative, redneck politics such as Oklahoma. So, if there is a relationship between what gays do and heterosexual marriage, it is positive. However, I rather suspect that the differences between the divorce rates in the red vs. the blue states are due to factors other than what gays do or do not do.

In general the comparison between blue state/red state divorce rates, reveals that the rates are actually lower in blue states. For example, liberal old Massachuset, whose state supreme court legalize gay marriages, has a lower divorce rate than self-righteous Oklahoma, but then they have Senator Inhofe too–the last surviving Neanderthal. (Side note: Sen. Inhofe spoke on the Senate floor for 45 minutes last week denying the scientific communities claim that we have a global climate problem. According to Inhofe, the world is actually getting colder. . .so there! Senator Inhofe Chairs the Senate Environment Committee.)

Not withstanding the self-righteous rhetoric associated with the red state moralizers, that divorce rates are higher in the red states should not come as a surprise. Studies of televison viewing behavior have indicated time and again that what those self-righteous folks say in their big churches doesn’t square with what they’re actually doing in their homes. Programs like Sex and the City had a bigger per capita audience in the red states than is the case in the morally corrupt Big Apple. Shame, Shame,. Shame! Again, the evidence also demonstrates that the pornography industry thrives in those states. Frank Rich of the New York Times has written several articles detailing the anomalous contradictions between the rhetoric and the reality of the self-righteous, red state moralizers.

Conservative politicians along with the right-wing preachers publicly profess self-righteous moral convictions that they would zealously fit like a psychiatric straight jacket on the public generally. We must be ever viggilant for they consistently reduce the political process to no more that a shell game designed to deceive. The concept that this is a government of the people, by the people and for the people is alien to their very being.

Make no mistake about it, the gay marriage issue pops up during national and state elections, as it has in 20 states already, because conservative politicians realize that it’s a real red meat issue, that it will crowd out any discussion of issues that really would make a difference in the average persons life: health care, education, the war in Iraq, our growing prison population. We don’t need the fraud, the sham, the hoax basic to the move to amend our state constitution.

I've been supporting Fair Wisconsin, a group working against the amendment, by knocking on doors and the like, hoping to play some small part in turning back this right-wing nonsense. The following excerpt from an Associated Press piece presents a good brief summary of what's happening in several states come the November elections:

"Eight states will vote on ban-gay-marriage amendments in November, following 20 that previously approved such measures. Passage is considered certain in Idaho, South Carolina, South Dakota and Tennessee, but gay-rights strategists believe their side is at least competitive in Arizona, Colorado, Virginia and Wisconsin.
"Supporters of banning gay marriage remain confident of victory, but optimism also is high in the ranks of Fair Wisconsin, a coalition fighting the proposed amendment since it surfaced in the Legislature in 2004. Large labor unions, many religious leaders, and top Democratic officials — including Gov. Jim Doyle — have spoken out against the measure.
"This could be the state where we beat this thing," said Fair Wisconsin campaign chief Mike Tate. "I'm not saying it's easy, but we've got the right ingredients on the table."
--David Crary, Associated Press 30 September 2006

I heard on WPR news Friday 29 September, that Wisconsin is the only Big Ten school that does not extend full employee benefits to significant others of whatever type. Indeed, as reported in the same news cast, virtually all major corporations extend benefits to couples without regard to gender. To my surprise, the additional cost is considered modest, incidental. Beyond the question of basic fairness is the fact that many highly qualified, extremely talented people will not want to come here to work and live, not when they can do better elsewhere--as they can. There is a reason so many major corporations provide ALL employees with spousal benefits, and it is not because corporations are by nature altruistic! It just makes good business sense to higher the best people without regard to race, creed, gender or sexual preference.

However, this is fundamentally not an economic issue; it's a question of basic human rights. I personally don't want to sit and watch as a whole group of people is systematically persecuted by the dominate culture; the Bill of Rights became an important part of the US Constitution specifically to protect minorities from subjugation by an abusive majority. On election day in November, Wisconsin citizens must make sure that our state constitution does not permit majority tyranny in this state.

If you do nothing else, vote against the proposed constitutional amendment; it's a repugnant provision that is totally alien to any idea of democracy that protects minority rights.

People who don't like the idea that gays want to link up in a state of marriage should be made aware that in Wisconsin, under current statutes, gay marriage is illegal. I think that's unfortunate, but it's true.
In the entire history of this state, there has never been an occasion when we, the citizens of the state, have repealed a constitutional amendment. . .once it's there, it's there forever. Lest we make a terrible mistake, caution is in order.

I've never been able to predict the future, but I do know that one day one of my family members may be involved in a gay relationship. I shudder to think that, because of decisions being made today, they and thousands like them will be forever relegated to 2nd class citizenship.

I clearly recollect Vice President Cheney's remarks on the subject during his Vice Presidential debate with Sen. Joe Lieberman. Though Cheney is not one of my heroes, he has been humbled by the fact that his daughter is involved in a gay relationship. To my knowledge, the good Lord doesn't tell anyone in advance whether he or she's going to be this or that in a sexual sense. We all take the cards we're played, and I am very uncomfortable with the thought that we might just be stacking the deck against those, who by the luck of the draw, just happen to be gay!

It is my hope that on election day we will honor our historic tradition of progressive politics in this state and vote down this attempt to institutionalize the discrimination this amendment represents. Let's celebrate our diversity as one of our strengths; this is not a time to be humbled by right-wing religious/political nonsense.

Ever on the watch for ya,
Davy Crockett

Castro, The Miami Cubans and The Media: Sound Bite Journalism

2006-08-15T00:11:00.000-05:00

US intrusions into Cuban affairs started in the 18th Century and have not stopped. The infamous Platt Amendment to the Cuban constitution, among other interventionist rights , "gave" us the right to establish a naval base at Guantanamo. Today the base and its ghastly political prison serve as a sad reminder of that jingoistic history.

Current news and political commentary of Cuban developments ignores the historical context surrounding and preceding the events being reported. On the bases of contemporary accounts it would be difficult not to conclude that Castro’s ascension to power in 1959 came at the expense of a thriving democracy, and that the dispossessed Miami Cubans are all freedom loving refugees who came to the US shores to enjoy the fruits of democracy. Typical of such coverage former Senator Majority Leader George Mitchel said in a recent CNN interview, "It looks like the people of Cuba might finally be free of the scourge of Castro's fifty year dictatorship."

Hugh Thomas’s definitive history entitled, Cuba: In Pursuit of Freedom chronicles a far different story, the story of a country exploited by American corporations and a few wealthy Cuban families. The Cuban population as a whole neither owned the country they called home nor did they share in its economic largess. Thomas's writing is not unique; virtually all scholarship detailing Cuban history tells the same wretched story.

In 1959 the Cuban’s illiteracy rate hovered at about 98%, health care for the masses didn’t exist, chronic unemployment was among the highest in the entire hemisphere, and as a Rand Corp. study penned by Leland Johnson indicated the Cuban economy was but an appendage of our own with something like 85% of it owned by American corp. interests.

To get a glimpse of American interests and intentions in Cuba during the revolution and shortly after Castro’s ascension to power, one needs only read the chapter in Nixon’s autobiographical Six Crises. Nixon describes in explicit terms American intentions. . . .i.e., the need to overthrow Castro. Earl E.T. Smith, our Ambassador in Cuba during the critical period leading up to Castro’s eventual victory, similarly wrote a very explicitly self incriminating book entitled, The Forth Floor about US involvement in protecting American business interests at the expense of the welfare of the Cuban masses. In Bush like terms, he writes about his refusal to meet with Castro during the period leading up to Batista’s ouster; on the other hand, he tells about his daily meeting with members of the American business community.

American’s have never understood the misery that was the daily lot in the life of the average Cuban during the period preceding the 1959 revolution. In the early 50's, Castro’s political involvement with Edwardo Chibas’s reform oriented Othodox Party, running for a seat in the Cuban parliament, reflect his political concerns. Lest we forget, it was the dictator Batista who cancelled the democratic elections that started Castro on his revolutionary journey. But beyond the historical details, certainly the Elian Gonzalez case during the Clinton presidency should have indicated that there are two sides to the Cuban story; the mainstream media focus includes the Miami Cuban point of view to the exclusion of the others.

Like the Iraqi expatriates (Mr. Chalibi and friends) who fed the Bush Administration garbage intelligence leading up to the Iraqi war, the Miami Cubans helped to engineer the Bay of Pigs fiasco; a plan premised upon erroneous notions about what Cuban people wanted and what they would do once the invasion started. Contrary to the plan used to shape and direct the assault, the Cuban people did not join the invasion force at the Bay of Pigs as planned; indeed, they opposed it helping the newly installed Castro government easily repel the invasion force.

To be sure the greedy interests of expatriates whether they come from Cuba or Iraq do not serve as a substitute for good, that is reliable, intelligence. During the preparation for the Bay of Pigs Invasion, just as during the shoddy preparation for the current Iraqi war, hard intelligence from reputable intelligence agencies-- the CIA, The State Department and the military agencies-- was brushed aside in favor of tainted information provided by expatriates whose greedy interest in retaking the homeland and reacquiring lost family influence and wealth shaped their "intelligence reports." One doesn’t have listen to very much commentary from the Miami Cubans to hear such motives being explicitly revealed in their current discussions of Castro and Cuba.

The evidence indicates that the Bush Administration did everything they could to shape intelligence reports about Iraqi intentions. The John Bolton hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee demonstrated that he attempted to undermine State Department intelligence specialists who did not see the world as he wanted them to. At least one of them refused to be bullied and sacrificed his career to early retirement rather than lie. Indeed, Bolton currently serves as our Ambassador to the United Nations on a recess appointment because the Senate Foreign Relations Committee would not send his nomination to the Senate floor for a vote because of this incident and others like it.

Can we learn from our mistakes? Journalists need to get beyond the sound bites and put this unfolding story into a meaningful historical context, a context that involves far more that the selfish interests of the Miami Cubans. Where are the reports indicating what the literacy rate is in Cuba today? What is the state of Cuban health care? Is it in fact true that Cuba exports doctors and medical supplies to Third World countries? Why did Castro's Cuba offer to send doctors and medical supplies to the victims of hurricane Katrina? The American people deserve the complete story and it's not being reported.

Ever on the watch for ya,

Davy Crockett

Morality and War: Israeli Strikes Cross The Line!

2006-07-30T14:14:00.000-05:00

All weapons kill and maim, but some are especially insidious — like cluster munitions, miniature explosives packed into a bomb, rocket or artillery shell and designed to scatter over a wide area................................................................................
Israel makes its own cluster munitions as well as buying more advanced models from the United States. It used cluster weapons extensively in its latest campaign in Lebanon, and the majority of the unexploded bomblets that United Nations teams have found there so far have been American-made.
Editorial New York Times 26 August 2006

After marching his Union soldiers through Georgia, burning, blowing up and intentionally destroying everything in sight, General Sherman characterized the essence of war in three immortal words, “War is hell.” Perhaps it was a conscience burned with memories of those dreadful events that motivated his now famous disavowal of a presidential nomination: “If nominated, I will not run; if elected, I will not serve.”

We know that German attacks on London and its environs, during World War II, immorally subjected millions of civilians to the horrors of unmoderated all out warfare. We are also painfully aware of the German attempt to eliminate the Jewish population in the concentration campus spread all over Western Europe; some six or seven million of them did perish. As a young GI, I spent three years at Dachau after the war and know of the holocaust horrors.

The events associated with war bring forward moral dilemmas that can remain to haunt us for decades. In our response to these crises, we bump up against the question that embraces our basic humanity. As Shakespeare put it, “To Be or Not to Be, That Is The Question.”

The Reverend Daniel Berrigan wrote about this same idea in his small but important book, No Bars To Manhood. The good Father wrote words to the effect that during times of normalcy we don’t really know who we are in a moral sense; we are not challenged to find out. But as he noted, when normalcy fades and moral crises confront us, there are no bars to manhood. If we have courage and a good moral compass, we'll answer humanities call to manhood.

Sadly enough, when other nations have performed dastardly deeds in violation of all known moral codes, we are inclined to view these transgressions clearly and responded appropriately–with a sense of righteous outrage. However, when we find ourselves, or one of our close allies, functioning in the transgressors role, we’re hit with sudden onset moral blindness, too often we stand mute. The prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and the current Israeli air campaign come immediately to mind.

Remember the Bush Administration's strong self-righteous outcry when Newsweek dared to publish a one sentence mention of the Koran being flushed down the toilet at Guantanamo? Or, how about the abuse heaped upon Illinois Senator Dick Durbin by an endless stream of Republican Senators who couldn't get to the microphone fast enough to express self-righteous outrage. Sen. Durbin you may recall had merely read from an FBI agent's diary entry, the agent’s first hand account of prisoner abuse at our military prison. At the conclusion of his reading, Sen. Durbin noted that, "If I didn't know where this entry came from, I might have easily concluded that it was an account of Nazi poisoner abuse during World War II." Senator Durbin was forced by political circumstances to issue an apology.

Oh how morally sensitive our Senators seem to be, but unfortunately it’s a selective morality and highly partisan. With daily reports in the news of hundreds of innocent women and children being killed, there are no Senators rushing to the microphones.

I suppose now that God has joined the Republican Party these moral question have taken on a right-wing partisan political flavor. There are no Senators expressing righteous outrage as innocent women and children are being slaughtered by the ferocious Israeli war machine.

To be sure the on-going war in the Middle East brings daily reminders that the sorts of moral crises common to past wars are still with us and demand a moral response. Sabrina Tavernise writes in today’s New York Times:

QANA, Lebanon, July 30 — A series of Israeli air strikes in this small mountain town were the deadliest single attack in the war here so far.
[At least 56 people were killed, most of them children, The Associated Press reported.]

Innocent civilians are being pulverized by the current Israeli assault on Lebanon. The numbers of fatalities and casualties being reported reflect the gross imbalance of the cost being paid. CNN news reports of Beirut neighborhoods show massive destruction of apartment complexes having little if any military significance, and despite contrary claims the evidence of underground bunkers in these civilian areas is scant. The assault on the airport, municipal water plants, power generation facilities and the like are exacting a toll most substantially directed at the civilian population, not military targets.

In terms of the moral arguments being presented by the Israeli government and the Bush Administration to justify the carnage being inflicted on the innocent women and children, the current line is moral garbage. The fact that two Israeli soldiers were captured by a band of war crazed fighters does not justify subjecting the entire Lebanese civilian population to the ravages of war. The fact that Hizbollah fighters conceal themselves among innocent civilians similarly does not justify the Israeli translation of either those innocent victims or their neighborhoods into military targets.

Nobody would argue, for example, that local police, in hot pursuit of a bank robber, would be justified in blowing up an entire building complex where the robber had sought refuge, just to get that one potentially guilty robber. . .and Oh, by the way . . . . to hell with the innocent building occupants. That’s just the price you gotta pay to fight crime in the city. Yeah sure!

Similarly many cities in the United States have prohibited high speed police pursuit by squad cars within municipal boundaries because the practice has victimized far too many innocent civilians.

The current Israeli military assault against the Lebanese, and historically against the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, says, in no uncertain terms, that Arab lives don’t count when there’s a rub between Arab and Israeli factions. The targeting of the UN outpost in Beirut reflects the same Israeli calculation. The evidence is clear that the occupants of that UN post and others in the UN chain of command had clearly communicated their concerns to the Israeli military; and in spite of their repeated warnings, they where blown away. It is important to note that the UN outpost had been a fixture on maps known to all. . .certainly known to Israeli intelligence.

In short, the cost of membership in the community of civilized nations requires a higher standard of behavior than that which currently guides Israeli military decisions. Justifying immoral behavior by using the lowest common denominator as a guide doesn’t fly. It is well to remember that Hizbollah as a political-military entity didn’t exist until after the disastrous Israeli military incursion into Lebanon in the early 80's. It was a newly born Hizbollah that blew up the Marine Barracks killing 240 some odd young American soldiers. Hate breeds hate! The picture in the NYTimes (July 30) of young Arab militants rioting in the streets of Beirut this morning indicates that rather than solving problems, more are being created. The ranks of young Arabs willing to literally put their young lives on the line grows larger with each passing day.

As a starter, political and military policy makers need to get beyond the Bush/Rice tired democracy bromides and actually try to understand what it is that’s producing the hatred fueling the current Middle East Crisis. Surprisingly enough, given the incredible stumbling and bungling that characterizes current policy, the underlying forces driving this crises don’t seem all that elusive. The Arabs have actually written essays loudly declaring the reasons for their hatred. However, until US and Israeli policy makers can get beyond the simple minded notion that terrorism is an ideology or a religion, it is doubtful that there will be any progress.

So, with that in mind, a little lesson in the ABC’s of terrorism seems to be in order here: Terrorism is a tactical choice one makes when there seem to be no other viable alternatives. In the case of the Arab radicals, cheap rockets and suicide bombers and terrorist tactics serve as a substitute for Abrams tanks, F 15's; F 16's; attack helicopters; drone spy planes; bull dozers etc. It’s seems pretty clear that most folks would choose the technological instruments of war if they were afforded that choice, but that doesn’t seem to be an option for the Hizbollah Army. Indeed, the US, the major Israeli weapons supplier, has frequently criticized the Iranians and the Syrians for supplying weaponry to the Hizbollah forces (Is that hypocrisy?). But to get back to the ABC’s here, the tactical choices; i.e., the Hizbollah fighters decision to use terrorists tactics, their decision represents a decision of a military nature, battle planning as it were. In the simplest terms they made that choice because they didn’t have a sugar daddy with a bag full of planes and tanks. Terrorism is a tactic of the poor and dispossessed but is nevertheless a tactical calculation. You could talk about terrorism endlessly and never shed light upon the reasons that made someone think they had to initiate hostilities. Let’s demand more from our politicians than meaningless platitudes.

Ever on the watch for ya!

Davy Crockett

"Act in such a way that you treat humanity, both in your own person and in the person of others, never as a means only but always equally as an end."
--Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

The Immigration Problem, The November Elections and Representative F. James Senseless

2006-06-05T21:10:00.000-05:00

“James Sensenbrenner, the leading House Republican voice on immigration policy, likened those who employ illegal immigrants to "the 19th-century slave masters" that "we had to fight a civil war to get rid of." For that historical analogy to add up, you'd have to believe that Africans voluntarily sought to immigrate to America to be slaves. Whether Mr. Sensenbrenner is out to insult African-Americans or is merely a fool is a distinction without a difference in this volatile political climate.

-- Frank Rich, New York Times

Damn, things are gettin' tough on the illegal immigration scene! Clearly, it’s time for wedge issue politics. So, bring on the illegals. The Republican’s are worried about the midterm elections; their poll numbers are either at rock bottom or so damned close it’s not worth arguing about. And, although they made a desperate attempted to beat up on the gays in the Senate recently, the political polls indicate that they haven’t made much headway. Indeed, after a two day effort to float the gay marriage issue in Senate debates, the measures fell far short of the votes need for passage. So, in this election year, it looks like the Mexicans who have come and continue to come across that southern border are going to have a political target on their back.

If the current gubernatorial race in Arizona serves as any kind of a barometer, the campaign leading to the November elections will be rough. Jennifer Talhelm, an AP writer, has recently reported that former Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater’s nephew, Don Goldwater, a candidate for governor, has essentially called for concentration camps to house illegal aliens. He stated at an anti-immigration rally in April, “‘Build us that wall — now!’. . . referring to a proposal to add 700 miles of fences along the U.S.-Mexico border. He promised then that if elected, he would put illegal immigrants in a tent city on the border and use their labor to build the wall” (Associated Press, June 23, 2006). Although a couple more main stream Republicans have rebuked Goldwater’s tactics, calling on Arizona voters to reject him as unfit for office, the fact is his April remarks have been a staple of his continuing campaign.

Don’t start worrying just yet; over in the House, Congressman F. James Sensenbrenner, the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, seems to have a pretty good handle on the immigration issue. He’ll straighten things out. Rep. F. James Senseless, is the House member from Wisconsin who wrote that Draconian House immigration bill that would class illegals as felons destined for deportation, all 11 to 12 million of ‘em. And, be aware, any of you bleed’n hearts out there who just might be disposed to lend a helping hand to some poor hapless soul in need, be careful! Under the terms of the House Bill old Senseless wrote, you give aid and comfort to an illegal, and you’ve just translated yourself into a felon. Yep, a felon! I guess that’s why the Catholic Bishops have strongly opposed the House Bill; the spirit of the Good Samaritan is not entirely dead, just close to it.

Yeah, but don’t worry. . .this good old USA is a nation of laws and is not governed by some muddle headed, Good Samaritans’ Christian impulse to be a law breakin’ do gooder. Nope! Old Senseless is not about to be deterred by a bunch of effete, sniveling, bleeding hearts! He appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press this past Sunday (21 May) and made it quite clear that he didn’t intend to let anybody turn his simplistic black and white world view into something complicated; we can’t allow ourselves to be confused by mere facts. You just can't make do with that Valentines Day kinda lovey, dovey crap. Old Senseless’s bifocal vision comprehends black and white and that’s it. And he doesn’t care what any old body says; it’s just the gross illegality of the invasion from the south that’s got him worried, and don't you know, some of 'em might just be terrorists!

Nebraska’s Senator Hagel appeared on the same program with Senseless and did make an effort to add a little color to the immigration picture Senseless sketched. Sen. Hagel noted, for example, that over half of the private firefighters based in the Pacific Northwest and contracted by state and federal governments to fight forest fires are immigrants, mostly from Mexico. And an untold number of them (most of them) are working here illegally. In fact, the inspector general for the US Forest Service presented those findings in a report issued last week. Sen. Hagel also stated, what is obvious to all but the mentally impaired, that at the present time many large sectors of the US economy, agriculture, forestry, building construction, road construction, meat packing, apparel just to name a few, are heavily dependent upon the immigrant work force. And finally, Senator Hagel noted what most people don’t know and therefore don’t think about: a large chunk of the Social Security Trust Fund Reserves ( more than 400 billion dollars, according to the figure Rep. Senseless himself used during his Meet the Press appearance) has been paid in by illegals who use fraudulent numbers and will therefore never collect a penny in return. But as Senseless put it, “that 400 Billion is ours; they were working illegally when that 400 billion was deducted from their pay checks. We get to keep it.”

Old F. James is one tough SOB.. He didn’t give an inch. “This is a nation of laws,” he snarled repeatedly. “They are all law breakers. They have no right to that money.” Just keep in mind, this is the same sensitive soul who voted against every penney spent to help the poor folks in New Orleans after Katrina's devastation; I guess he figured the Nation wouldn't be able to afford such a move, what with all the rich guy tax cuts he'd voted for and has voted for since Katrina struck. Mind you now, F. James knows the value of money; he’s the heir to millions from the Kimberly Clark Corp. It’s a little unfair to expect Senseless to understand the problems and concerns of poor people be they illegal or otherwise.

Well anyway, with F. James Senseless on the job, I don't think we're going to have to worry; he's in an ass kickin' mood and intends to take care of all the illegal crap comin' across our southern border. We must secure that southern border, and remember, as he so often says, this is a nation of laws and the illegals are all law breakers.
Interestingly enough Rep. Senseless takes great exception to the language in the rather punitive provisions of the Senate bill, including stiff fines, that, when satisfied, would put all illegals who’ve been in this country for more than four years on track to become citizens. In Rep. Senseless’s world the law grants them an amnesty, and we’re not going to grant these law breakers an amnesty. Now, it does strike me as rather odd that one would have to pay some rather stiff fines and suffer the indignities of a few other punitive measures in the Senate bill before receiving the “pardon” or amnesty that Senseless opposes. However, it does not strike me as odd that one would offer an amnesty (or pardon) to an illegal. . .I frankly can’t think of any non transgressor who would need or even want an amnesty.

But on this matter of language purity--the need to call a spade a spade, and amnesty an amnesty-- old Senseless himself plays loosely with the language. For example, he goes to great lengths to make the point that he’s not against immigration or immigrants per se, no! He’s simply against illegals, that is, the illegality behind their deeds; they should be required to immigrate legally; they should not be jumped to the head of the immigration line, ahead of all those folks who have followed the letter of the law. What Rep. Senseless doesn’t tell you, until he’s pushed to come clean, is that the line of legals waiting patiently is from 16 to 20 years long. Actually, the system simply does not work; twenty year patience is a hard commodity to find. White Europeans come and go from this country freely, without visas; brown skinned South Americans don’t get Green Cards and getting a visa is a crap shoot. For Latin Americans the system simply does not work. The best hope Latinos have is marriage to a US Citizen or taking a chance in the immigration lottery and praying; about 55,000 immigrants from all over the world receive an odds-based entry each year.

Unfortunately Rep. Senseless and many of his like minded supporters purposefully use linguistic code words like “illegal” and “legal” to conceal basic racist sentiments. As sociologist Gonzalo Santos of California State University At Bakersfield has said, “People talk about immigration as if race doesn’t matter, saying ‘No, I don’t have anything against immigrants or Mexicans, it’s just the illegal part of it I don’t like’” (Erin Texeira, Associated Press 5 June 2006). And as Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has tracked hate crimes for decades said of hate groups, they “consistently try and exploit any public discussion that has some kind of racial angle, and immigration has worked for hate groups in America better than any issue in years.” (Erin Texeira, Associated Press 5 June 2006).

Rep. Senseless has never raised his voice in opposition to the outsourcing of jobs by the thousands to India, China, Mexico, all points foreign, not even a sound. There are 45 to 50 million people living in this country without health insurance, have you ever heard Rep. Senseless raise his voice to champion their cause?

But, I’ll tell you what, if ever one of those Arab terrorists ever gets it into his head that he (or she) can survive the 125 degree heat down along that long southern border, and slip into this country; well, I guess I’ll just have to be the first to give old Rep. Senseless a little credit for being prescient. In the mean time, don’t you think we should be a little more concerned about securing our northern border. Everyday thousands of uninspected trucks roll into this country. And hey, in case you haven’t noticed, there are a few terrorist sympathizers up there in Canada, and they have made efforts to get into this country. Oh yes, there's also the ports issue; well, when the politicians get done salutin’ the flag, bashin' the gays and kickin' up the immigration dust maybe we get on to something that does matter.

Ever on the watch for polecats,

Davy Crockett
"Act in such a way that you treat humanity, both in your own person and in the person of others, never as a means only but always equally as an end."
--Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

Laid Off and Left Out

2006-05-25T20:34:00.000-05:00

“You don't hear much from the American worker anymore. Like battered soldiers at the end of a lost war, ordinary workers seem resigned to their diminished status.
The grim terms imposed on them include wage stagnation, the widespread confiscation of benefits (including pensions they once believed were guaranteed), and a permanent state of employment insecurity.
For an unnecessarily large number of Americans, the workplace has become a hub of anxiety and fear, an essential but capricious environment in which you might be shown the door at any moment.
In his new book, "The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences," Louis Uchitelle tells us that since 1984, when the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics started monitoring "worker displacement," at least 30 million full-time workers have been "permanently separated from their jobs and their paychecks against their wishes."

– – Bob Herbert, New York Times

With retirement musings looming large in my thoughts lately, concerns about being laid off or left out don't really represent a threat to my workplace life and times, but oh how future generations must worry! The revolution that started with Reagan and later continued with Gingrich would not have been possible without the blind, stupid loyalty of the "lunch box Joes" of this world. Yep, Joe bought all that crap dressed up in the super charged rhetoric of patriotism.

Ya, they appealed to all his biases and prejudices, convinced him that the gays were about to transform his loving wife into a wild eyed lesbo who was about to kick his ass out of his marriage in favor of the woman next door; turn his son into a "broke back mountain" wanna be; and, convinced him that all those "wet backs" comin' outta Mexico were steeling his job on the assembly line at GM.

In the mean time, Joe didn't seem to notice that protective labor laws were being dismantled, that jobs by the thousands were being shipped overseas and that he couldn't afford the finest medical care in the world. Nope, Joe decided it was better to die untended by the health care establishment than to translate the medical care programs into pinko, commie, socialize medical systems like those enjoyed by all the Western European economies.

Yep, that's Joe for ya. Those damned Europeans may live longer, and their kids don't die during infancy nearly as often as Joe's kids do, but what the hell, you just can’t have it all. .. and Joe's FREE! Never mind those nasty little details like the rendition program. . .people just seem to disappear, grabbed right off the streets in Any Town, USA and salted away in some far away prison where they can be tortured and beaten into submission or to death.

Details! Joe's a freedom lovin' sob, and you'd better believe it; his anthem is clear: America, Love it or get the hell out!

Ever on the watch for ya,
Davy Crockett

Monica, Where Are Ya When We Need Ya? Or, Let's Get Bush a Hooker!

2006-05-06T21:14:00.000-05:00

As my previous postings here clearly indicate, I’ve spent a fair amount of time trying to get a fix on our president, and I think it would be fair to say that I’ve ranked him with the lowest of he low for job performance. Indeed, President Harding’s incompetence seemed like a pretty good measuring stick; so, I did see them as competitors for the bottom slot with Bush finally edging Harding for the spot at the very bottom. It didn’t occur to me at the time that Harding’s moral turpitude might just have been a positive, an advantage that kept him from getting into more trouble than was actually the case. That is, time spent fooling around with wild women, strong whiskey and poker with derelict friends didn’t leave him with much time for trying to rule the world, or to send out the army to force a democratic lesson upon some unsuspecting foe.

Well, history does teach a lesson or two; and, ever now and again, I’m perceptive enough to pick up on 'em. I’ve decided, after considerable thought, that we'd all be better off if George W. could get up close and personal with a hooker. .. you know connect with a buxom babe someplace in the White House. . .one of those little used storage rooms off in the back reaches someplace. . .kinda like old Bill did with Monica.

It's entirely possible that, just like President Harding during an earlier period, Bill's preoccupation with that chubby little sex crazed kid might just have saved us from more wars of the type we now endure. Yup, Monica just might be a candidate for a medal of freedom or something along those lines. Who could have guessed what real service she was actually performing for Bill and ultimately the nation. We’re lucky!

I think if we generated enough money, we might even be able to find some greedy street lady to occupy Cheney. . . Now I'll admit, that's a tough one. Could we, in fact, find a street walkin' lady with the right combination of greed and lust to take on such a nasty job; she'd have to be one tough bitch. . .kinda like Lynn?

Now all this might sound preposterous, but think about it. . .these right-wing kooks seem to go for poker, kinky sex and the like. . .remember the Jimmys (Reverends Baker and Swaggert) Oh, and there have been others. It’s gotten so damn bad with the political preachers on the right, that as Mark Twain once said, “If Christ were here today, the last thing he’d be is a Christian.” I guess that was kinda the idea behind John Denver and George Burns movie, Oh God!

Hey, I think even Rummy could be tempted. Maybe we could talk Maureen Down into doing a service for the nation. . .she seems to like him. Think of the money and lives we could save.

Now damn, don't ya go worrin' about the cost of the cute babes with the big perky boobs . .I think we could probably slip a marker or two into one of those multi-billion dollar defense bills, or maybe we could even cancel one of those Alaskan bridges to nowhere. . . with a little creativity there's lots a possibilities.

Ever thinkin’ about how to make it better for ya,

Davy Crockett

Democratic Principles, Russ Feingold and John Kerry

2006-04-24T21:55:00.000-05:00

Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold has attracted national media attention and incurred the wrath of the political right for launching an internet campaign directed at the Bush assault on the most fundamental of our basic political rights. Unfortunately Feingold's campaign is not getting the attention it deserves; people don't seem to care about basic constitutional principles unless, or until, their individual interests are immediately involved.

The American Civil Liberties Union has historically wrestled with this problem, attracting negative attention for defending unpopular causes in their campaign to protect and defend everybody's constitutional rights. Oh how people complained when the ACLU defended the American Nazi Party’s right to march through the streets of Skokie, Ill. in the early sixties (Skokie is an American Jewish community where many victims of the holocaust live or lived--most of them are now dead.) The good citizens of Skokie had refused to grant them a parade permit thereby restricting the Nazi right to protest and demonstrate. The long and short of it, led by two Jewish lawyers, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a suit that ultimately was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in favor of the Bill of Rights; the Court recognized the American Nazi Party’s constitutional right to march in Skokie, and they did.

To be sure, the ACLU didn't respect or endorse the Nazi Party principles; however, they did strongly endorse their right to speak and demonstrate without unreasonable government prohibitions against such actions. The ACLU actions in sum represented support for everyone's right to voice a divergent point of view.

In looking at the ACLU actions over the years, it is clear that the cases they defend, if they can be grouped as a class, represent unpopular, minority expressions of dissent. Indeed, the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution, exist specifically to protect minority political rights against the actions of majority tyranny. Senator Feingold’s actions serve as a necessary reminder that this nation was conceived by people who so cherished the right to engage in political dissent, that the basic right to do so is enshrined in our Constitution as the Bill of Rights.

Senator Feingold, as the ACLU has, is struggling to ensure that the government struggle against terrorism doesn’t come at the cost of our basic freedoms; those freedoms so clearly articulated in the Bill of Rights, and we do have cause for concern. For, as Bob Hebert wrote Thursday, April 20, in the New York Times, “In past years, stories about torture and ‘the disappeared’ have been associated with sinister regimes in South and Central America. The attitude in the United States was that we were above such dirty business, that it was immoral and uncivilized, and we were better than that. . . .Now people are disappearing at the hands of the U.S. government.” Indeed, Herbert noted that Amnesty International has just released a report, “. . .on the reprehensible practice of extraordinary rendition, a highly classified American program in which individuals are seized–abducted–without any semblance of due process and sent off to be interrogated by regimes that are known to engage in torture. Some of the individuals swept up by rendition simply vanish.”

Clearly Senator Feingold’s concern is legitimate; we need to reflect that same concern. The America wrought by George Bush and Dick Cheney is not the America envisioned by our Founding Fathers.

Saturday, April 15th at historic old Faneuil Hall in Boston, the very cradle of liberty, Senator John Kerry sounded warnings very similar to Feingold’s during a powerful speech based upon bedrock American political values. He said, “I come here today to affirm that it is both a right and an obligation for Americans to disagree with a president who is wrong, a policy that is wrong and a war in Iraq that weakens the nation.” Senator Kerry squarely challenged the Bush-Cheney anti-American, anti-democratic positions, stating, “The most dangerous defeatists, the most dispiriting pessimists, are those who invoke September 11th to argue that our traditional values are a luxury we can no longer afford.” Senator Kerry’s career is that of a man who speaks courageously, not out of base self-interest, but rather from humane instincts; at important times in our history his voice has served to reminded us of the nobility that should mark our direction in world affairs. This is the same John Kerry who spoke before a Senate committee 35 years ago in opposition to the Viet Nam War, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” he said then.

Not withstanding the nasty commentary put forward by the Swift Boat veterans in the last presidential campaign, the soundness of Senator Kerry’s judgement on the Viet Nam War has been absolved by history. I’m in complete agreement with the views he expressed more recently in Faneuil Hall, “I believed,” he said, “just as I believe now, that the best way to support the troops is to oppose a course that squanders their lives, dishonors their sacrifice and dissevers our people and our principles,” so spoke Senator Kerry.

The entire Bush dialogue about democracy is alien to any, even the most fanciful notions about democracy imaginable. This is a president who gave a state of the union address promising to support democracy all over the globe but who, in practice, doesn’t support it anywhere. Lest we forget, after a military coup in Venezuela overthrew the newly, democratically, elected Hugo Chavas government, President Bush immediately recognized the legitimacy of the generals. Unexpected by the Bush Administration, mass street protests of over one million Venezuelans opposing the military coup erupted in the streets bringing an end to the less than week old military dictatorship and left the Bush Administration with egg on its face. However brief the military coup, the message sent around the world was clear; the Bush administration doesn’t really care about democracy or democratic principles. No, this is an administration that will fight for the Patriot Act, the right to spy into private lives, all on the pretext that they’re fighting terrorism; but, when they in fact have had chances to actually fight terrorism, they fail miserably. After five long years, Bin Ladden is still sending us video commentaries. As Senator Kerry noted, “Who are we to run around the world saying protect the Falun Gong or somebody else’s right to speak out, and then we’re willing to take people without knowledge. . .and throw them into torture situations.” Make no mistake about it; we are grabbing people off the streets. . .they just vanish into think air; and lest we forget, President Bush did give the Chinese President a lecture about the Chinese need to liberalize their society. . .to respect religious and political freedom... during the Chinese President’s recent White House visit.

Bush Administration democratic talk to the contrary, information, the oxygen of a democratic government, is being shut off by the Bush-Cheney thugs. The assault on our basic democratic values continues unabated with daily denunciations of the press: The New York Times, The Washington Post, LA Times and the Wall Street Journal have all become right-wing political targets. The notion that the American government is a government of the people, by the people and for the people is clearly at odds with Bush Administration practices, practices that deny freedom in the most pernicious manner imaginable. You can’t talk or even think about something you don’t know about.

The Bush policies are designed specifically to deny citizens access to information, if and when one or more of the mainstream messengers arrives with leaked information, the modus operandi is clear: Kill the Messenger! The Bush people have even gone to the extreme of pushing the National Archives to reclassify information that has been a part of the public record for almost fifty years. John Dean was right, this is worse than Watergate. The Imperial Presidency that Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. worried about with the publication of his book of that title in 1973 has arrived. In 1973 Schlesinger made a good case that democracy and secrecy are inimical, fundamentally at odds one with the other.

A free press builds the foundation stones upon which free people stand, think and speak freely. At the moment, we’re being led about like a herd of blind sheep.

Ever on the watch for ya, Davy Crockett

Mystic River

2006-03-11T22:17:00.000-06:00

" . . .ordinary thriller about murder and vigilanteism."

Hollywood Reporter

I'm slow to be sure; however, I am getting at some of the movie DVDs that I've heard so much about over the last two or three years. I just finished Mystic River.

The action begins with three young boys, probably between 6 and 8 years old, playing in the street of a nondescript big city neighborhood The fact that they are scratching their names into freshly poured sidewalk cement gives some momentary credibility to a passing plain clothes police officer taking notice of their boyish vandalism. . .we see handcuffs dangling from his belt. After a gruff, profanity laced lecture by the officer, one of the boys, Dave, is ushered into the back of the unmarked car and taken away. . .apparently for the sexual gratification of an older man we briefly get a glimpse of as the car speeds away.

Without warning other than the obvious change in car models, there’s a time jump forward of some 35 or 40 years. One of the boys we’d seen playing in the street in the opening scene Sean, is now a homicide detective played by Kevin Bacon who is paired with a partner played by Laurence Fishburne. Another Jimmy, an ex-con played by Sean Penn, runs a small neighborhood store; and the third Dave, the young boy who’d been whisk away in the car and ostensibly abused, is played by Tim Robbins, who is all these years later a rather morose soul, a handyman, who we encounter as he’s coming home late at night with stab wounds to his abdominal area and a bleeding, cut hand. In short, we’re lead to believe that Dave has killed Jimmy’s 19 year old daughter Katie; a crime being investigated conveniently enough by the third of the three young boys we’d seen all those years ago playing in the street.

Contrived! The story line pushed credibility far beyond my ability to stay with it. . .too much heavy handed manipulation. . .in a couple words: simple minded. Compounding the manipulation is an attempt to give this turkey an under current of psychological complexity, intrigue: Dave's meaningless babble about vampires and Sean's voiceless phone calls from a wife we never meet. This Dr. Phil style pretentious psycho-babble doesn't deliver. Even the potentially rich personality dynamics between the homicide detective and his brash, no nonsense buddy, played by Laurence Fishbourne, ultimately falls flat.

Oh, lest I be misunderstood, I don't quarrel with the idea that past experience particularly of a traumatic kind early in life influences an individuals subsequent behavior; that I think, is axiomatic. One needs only recollect in this connection the literally thousands of news accounts detailing the nefarious sexual behavior of preying priest during the last five to ten years. We've heard the accounts of literally thousands of innocent young victims translated into adult suffers who come forward to bare wounds inflicted 15, 20, 30 and even 40 years ago.

That said, the sad reality of such influences doesn't rise to the level of film art with the sort of plot gimmickry basic to this film. With any less distinguished group of actors, this one wouldn't have made it out of the processing room. Given the trite plot gymnastics so evident in this film, the otherwise superb cast hardly matters.

I shall lay my head down tonight hoping that the boxing babes Eastwood used in Million Dollar Baby redeems him after this one. Maybe we can even hope for Dirty Harry's return; make my day!

One last thought, or after thought; if Mystic River won any of those little gold statues, just remember this: I didn't give 'em out! Nope, not even a mention for this turkey.

Keepin' an eye on the Big Screen for ya,

Davy Crockett

Brokeback Mountain: A Remembrance of Things Past

2006-02-21T08:01:00.000-06:00

I have not seen the much talked about movie Brokeback Mountain; however, I did recently read the Annie Proulx short story upon which it is based, and I just finished reading Roger Ebert's film review. For me reading Ebert's review of the film was like reading a review of the short story I'd just finished. Apparently the film very closely follows the story line, catching as it does the tenor and tone of this sad tale.

The story relates the saga of two cowboy sheep herders, Jack and Ennis, who fall in love. Related from Ennis perspective, we are privy to Jack's views only when he's engaged in a direct exchange with Ennis but otherwise, it's Ennis's thoughts and views that color the story. We never know what Jack's thinking except when he actually says something. For example, we find out that he experiences real difficulty having such a brief encounters with Ennis. . .he wanted more; he wanted to be with Ennis. Even the very first physical encounter is told from Ennis perspective.

There are, to be sure, many artistic expressions that offer commentary on the difficulties associated with the whole business of loving and being loved by another human being. Those expressions range from the sad wailing of Hank William's songs, his Lovesick Blues and Cold, Cold Hearts to the more sophisticated chronicle of lovers woe reflected in Maugham's, Of Human Bondage; the list of such works, sadly enough, is nearly endless. I guess there's a commentary in the mere quantity of such offerings. Be that as it may, Brokeback Mountain comes along as a sad reminder that the struggles associated with making it in a gay relationship also carry the additional burdens imposed by a sometimes harsh, intolerant social climate. Wow! Imagine being in a relationship, having to deal with all the nuances and in addition being plagued with the thought that if ". . . thing gets hold of us at the wrong time and wrong place and we're dead."

The story has a haunting quality about it, and I felt sympathy for Ennis's situation. . .that is, his not being able to be true to himself. One of the sad aspects of Jack and Ennis’s situation was the absence of opportunities to develop much of a relationship. I think educated people have a far easier time in gay relationships than do the Jacks and Ennis' of this world, and even educated people have had a rough go of it.

Finished with the story, I couldn't escape thoughts of that young college kid, who several years ago, was left hanging on a Wyoming sheep fence, beat to a pulp, dead; or, of the recent rage in a Boston area bar. I also found myself reflecting back on my days as a member of the faculty at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana.

I had a friend at Wabash who had just divorced his wife the summer before I arrived at the college. They had a small three year old daughter and the split was very amicable; however, there was much pain. One summer Chuck (he was a French processor) and I spent a lot of nights in the pottery shop at Wabash throwing pots and shootin' the bull. We were both supposed to be working on our Ph. d. dissertations. .. . didn't happen. In any case, Chuck had had a difficult time discovering his sexual self, and it came at the cost of his marriage and family. When he left Wabash, he moved to Chicago and did some fast livin' ostensibly to make up for lost time; it cost him his life. . .he was an early aids victim.

Now I do think the blue collar types like Jack and Ennis, experience double difficulties. . .they not only have to deal with their own journey to self realization, made so difficult by social intolerance and repressiveness, they have to deal with the homophobics out their who want to kill them.

Chuck's friendship meant a lot to me; he was the first gay who I really knew well; the association helped me to understand what should have been obvious. . .he was a human being. We never talked about things sexual. He was an extremely bright, articulate soul who was clearly aware that life is far more than just a walk across the field. We did have some great times shootin' the bull.

During that same time I became very good friends with Father Maupin, the priest at the Newman Center. . .I was on the Newman Center Board at the time. Ron knew that I didn’t share his deep religious convictions, but it did really matter; he helped me though one of the more difficult periods in my life because that’s just the kind of loving person he was; he was later stabbed in the back in Napa, California where he was working as the hospital Chaplin.

Sadly enough, just prior to my first trip to Mexico City, Ron called and invited me to come to Napa for a visit. The long and short of it, I went to Mexico City instead; Ron was killed a month or so later by some jerk who shoved a knife in his back, a guy he'd befriended in a bar.

There are times when life is difficult. I've thought at times it must be some kinda nice to be brain dead, i.e., just plain stupid, to slip through life like a marble sliding down a greased tube. .. no bumps, no bruises.. . .bliss! You know, like bein' a Packer Backer, a real beer guzzlin' cheese head: brain dead.

For a very perceptive review of the film see Roger Ebert's review:

http://tinyurl.com/7ca7f

Judith Miller: A Profile In Deception (A Wily, Mendacious, Dilettante!)

2005-10-26T13:13:00.000-05:00

Some time ago, I must now shamefully admit, I histrionically wrote about New York Times reporter Judy Miller's "heroic" refusal to comply with special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's request for information about her sources. Yup, I had her on my short list of candidates for a profile in courage medal; or better yet, an addendum chapter to the old John Kennedy book detailing all those heroic profiles from the past.

At the time Fitzgerald seemed overly zealous in pursing a mandate aimed at finding out who, if anybody, outed the covert CIA agent. Though it did seem rather odd, indeed incomprehensible, that he would be legally harassing an innocent reporter who hadn't even written a story about the Wison-Plame matter while seemingly ignoring the reporter who did. Why, I'd written, hadn't the special prosecutor hauled Robert Novak's ass before the grand jury. After all, he was the slim ball columnist who wrote the original story revealing CIA agent Plame's identity to the world. Poor Judy, wedded to high, time honored, journalistic principles would rather rot in jail than debase her lofty profession; toward that end, she spent the next 85 days in jail; that's how it looked at the time.

Well, now we know the rest of the story, or at least a good bit of it. With her release from prison, the Times, with some grudging help from Judy, has filled in a few more details. So what do we know now that we didn't know before Judy's painful 85 day sojourn in prison?

We know that prior to her encounter with prosecutor Fitzgerald, she'd long since compromised her journalistic integrity by schmoozing with the Iraqi expatriates, most notably Ahmad Chalabi and those expatriates he brought forward to support the rush to war. Make no mistake about it, Ahmad Chalabi had designs on Iraq and saw a chance to use the neocons in that effort. Using fabricated information from the Iraqi expatriates, Judy Miller also became an unwitting participant writing stories about the nonexistent Weapons of Mass Destruction.

It is now quite clear that the riff between the Bush White House and the CIA relates to the basic conflict between their intelligence and what the Bush people wanted to believe. Bush and the neocons clearly shunted the CIA aside in favor of Mr. Chalabi and his sycophants. (Former White House Advisor Richard Clark details these problems in his book.) It's also clear that during her appearances before the Fitzgerald Grand Jury she was at best a reluctant witness. She omitted any mention of an earlier meeting she'd had with Cheney's chief of staff, Scooter Libby, until informed that his appointments log gave evidence of such a meeting; she had testified about some later meetings. It is not hard to believe that Ms. Miller's purpose in not revealing Mr. Libby's name as a principal source of information was due to her desire to protect him.

Whatever her motives might have been, the fact remains that Ms. Miller became a conduit for Mr. Chalabi and neocons fabrications about the nonexistent WMD's. Not willing to defend the indefensible, Ms. Miller has candidly acknowledged that her stories were completely off the mark–there were no WMDs. "If your sources are wrong," she blithely stated, "you are wrong." Are we to conclude that she was merely a recorder? She didn't need to worry about source credibility?

It is not so easy to evade responsibility in such matters. As others have noted, a reporter is more than a mere stenographer who records and passes along information. Her personal involvement in the issue is also reflected in her reaction to journalists who criticized Ahmad Chalabi in print. Maureen Dowd, after writing a piece critical of Chalabi, received an e-mail message from Miller in April of this past year, 2004, defending him. . .a message written at a time when it was clear to everyone that Mr Chalabi’s had waged a misinformation campaign; there were no WMDs. Ms. Miller was not defending high journalistic principles, No! She was defending a friend whose political crap she’d swallowed hook, line and sinker; the hokum that she’d uncritically accepted as true and presented as fact in series of New York Times articles.

We do know that Ms. Miller's boss, Times Executive Editor Bill Keller, in the summer of 2003, prohibited her from further coverage of Iraq and the WMD issues; however, we also know that she willing ignored that probation and continued to collude with Libby and company.

One does have to wonder, given her continued meetings with Libby, why she didn't write a story about the covert CIA Agent Valiery Plame. She has written that she failed to write such a story because the Times Washington based bureau chief , Jill Abramson, wouldn't let her. Ms. Abramson denies that, stating that Judy had never asked for such permission.

Based upon the evidence, I think it's fair to surmise that Ms. Miller didn't write about the covert CIA agent because she was ideologically involved in the issues, and her reasons had nothing to do with her role as a New York Times journalist.

In good drama a writer reveals character, personality and the like on the stage by placing characters in situations that force interactions designed to help us understand who they are, what their values are, whether the individuals are kind or mean, arrogant or humble etc. Such revelatory situations work dramatically because they mirror life; we find out about the people that inhabit our world in much the same way; we watch, evaluate and make character assessments, but in life, unlike the theater, the minutia of our daily existence often surrounds revelatory behavior making it difficult to get it in a focus sharp enough for all but the most discerning eyes. However, at times, there are exceptions, times when we see individual behavior unobscured by social noise, life's minutia. In a recent column, Maureen Dowd offers us such a revelator glimpse of Judy Miller:

“Once when I was covering the first Bush White House,” wrote Dowd, “ I was in The Times’s seat in the crowded White House press room, listening to an administration official’s background briefing. Judy had moved on from her tempestuous tenure as a Washington editor to be a reporter based in New York, but she showed up at this national security affairs briefing.

At first she leaned against the wall near where I was sitting, but I noticed that she seemed agitated about something. Midway through the briefing, she came over and whispered to me. ‘I think I should be sitting in the Times seat.’ It was,” concluded Dowd, “such an outrageous move, I could only laugh. I got up and stood in the back of the room, while Judy claimed what she felt was her rightful power perch.”
(New York Times, October 22, 2005)

Yes, I was wrong about Judy Miller. She’s apparently as vain as the above suggests. Now that the dust has settled a bit, we know a lot more about her, and the additional exposure is of an indecent journalist not likely to win any awards; there’s apparently good reason why so many of her colleagues at the Times uniformly disliked her.

As always, ever on the watch for ya,

Davy Crockett
--
Act in such a way that you treat humanity, both in your own person and in the person of others, never as a means only but always equally as an end.

--Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

President Harding Revisited ( Updated 13 October)

2005-10-02T21:33:00.000-05:00

With the Senate Majority Leader, Bill Frist and the Leader of the House, Tom DeLay both under investigation for impropriety, coupled with the resignation and subsequent arrest of the director Bush put in charge of government procurement, the Bush Administration is looking more like a vintage reincarnation of Warren Harding’s Administration than I suspected. History, some wag once said, is the yardstick we have to measure the influence the past has on the present. And though I think one must be very cautious in attempting to see historical patterns from the past in the present, I do think there are some patterns from the Harding years that fit current circumstances with little, if any, distortion and may help illuminate the path we seem to be taking toward the cliff.

I’m of course aided by a number of standard history texts, most notably John M. Blum et. al.’s National Experience, 4th edition; John M. Blum wrote the material consulted. In sketching the backdrop Blum writes, “Warren Harding brought to government the qualities of his own weak person. . . .he was an ignorant, naive, confused man whose loose standards made him particularly vulnerable to his intellectual deficiencies and to the corrupt character of the hail-fellows with whom he instinctively surrounded himself.” Now, it is hardly a stretch to see “W” in Blum's character sketch. Remember, during the first campaign, the stories about Bush’s directionless life, the booze and drug parties, the DWI charges, all of which Bush refused to talk about; the failed business ventures that Daddy or one of Daddy's friends bailed him out of; the AWOL Air Force fighter pilot who didn’t report for duty? Who couldn’t name a friend who’d served with him in the Alabama guard unit he claimed to have served in? There was no John Kerry like band of combat brothers following “W” around on the campaign trail. No! Not one! He couldn’t even name one.

But back to Bush’s historical mentor, Warren Harding. Harding’s appointees, the Secretary of the Interior, the Attorney General, just to name a couple, were falling like flies, some ending up in jail. The stress and the strain were clearly wearing on the President. Blum writes that “. . .The President unburdened himself to William Allen White: “My God, this is a hell of a job. I have no trouble with my enemies. . . .But my damned friends, my god-damned friends. . . .they’re the ones that keep me walking the floor nights!” Now at this point I must confess the comparison between the Bush and Harding Administration may be invidious, I don’t think Bush feels the moral pressure; he’s not, I think, walking the floor at night.

Blum’s narrative contains a few more gems. For example he writes, “Vulgarity and scandal were the sordid fruits . . .of a government that sought all the advantages of power but none of the responsibilities of organized self-interest that sought special favors in bonuses, bounties, lower taxes, and higher tariffs. Pressure groups had gained advantages for big business. . .those interests dominated the federal government as they had not since the 1890s.” To be sure, one doesn’t have to distort the historical pattern to see it in the current administrations machinations.

Let me conclude with Harding’s self-description from William Allen White’s, Masks in a Pageant, 1928:
“I can’t make a damn thing out of this tax problem. I listen to one side and they seem right, and then- -God!–I talk to the other side and they seem just as right. . . .I know somewhere there is a book that will give me the truth, but, hell, I couldn’t read the book. I know somewhere there is an economist who knows the truth, but I don’t know where to find him and haven’t the sense to know him and trust him when I find him. God! What a job.”

Again, one has to be careful attempting to see patterns from the past in the present. I don’t think Bush , as I’ve noted, agonizes over these difficulties as Harding obviously did. Beyond those clear differences, Harding did do a few things that revisionist historians are now putting in a far more favorable light. The passage of time does help clear the historical perspective. Harding did stop the wholesale civil rights abuses that characterized the Wilson years, and he did pardon one of my historical heros Eugene V. Debs.

The cupidity, the base self-serving behavior, that one thinks about in connection with the Harding scandals have been visited upon the Bush Administration in spades. The one party government in Washington, protects the modern day scoundrels from the Congressional scrutiny they so richly deserve. Instead what do we get? Pseudo Republican investigators perpetrating an investigative fraud, sham and a hoax all in one package. There was Mike Brown, supposedly fired from his position as director of FEMA testifying as a $150,000.00 a year FEMA consultant before a committee of Republicans who want to sweep this whole mess under the rug before the looming off year Congressional elections. . .just 13 months away. Yes, they fired him and then quietly put him back on the payroll as a $150,000.00 a year advisor. And then there was mild mannered Sen. Frist, telling us that he didn’t sell his family owned corporate stock the day before the price fell to make a profit; he did it to avoid the appearance of impropriety. Yeah, this is the same Senator Frist who said when ask about this specific investment two years ago, “I don’t know what my holding are, they’re all in a blind trust.” The day that trust lost its blinders and Frist started managing it is the day when the conflict of interest became more real than apparent.

NOTE: from the Washington Post, 13 October, page 1

"Frist held a substantial amount of his family's hospital stock outside of blind trusts between 1998 and 2002 -- a time when he asserted he did not know how much of the stock he owned.

The Associated Press reported on Tuesday that Frist earned tens of thousands of dollars from HCA stock in a partnership controlled by his brother, outside of the blind trusts he created to avoid a conflict of interest.

"It seems that for years, Frist may have misled his constituents and the American people about his health care industry stock holdings and the conflict of interest they created as he drafted our nation's health care policy," said Democratic National Committee Communications Director Karen Finney. "This deal raises even more questions about the Republican culture of corruption in Washington, D.C."

During his decade in the Senate, Frist has been active in shaping health care policy, including creation of a Medicare prescription drug benefit."

The Harding Scandals are with us again.

Ever on the Watch for ya,

Davy Crockett

Deja Vu All Over Again!

2005-09-27T08:23:00.000-05:00

Bothered by the chaos in Iraq, or in Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas? Relax! Bush is taking charge; things will be alright. For those of you who worried that perhaps Katrina and Rita problems might slow the Bush people down, there's NO evidence of that. They continue to put the screws to the working stiffs who deserve better. The wage protection laws have been suspended; contractors (Bush cronies all) can now legally exploit workers, environmental laws have been placed on the shelf while the cleanup, rebuild contractors who are permitted to exploit the workers by, among other things, paying below min. wage scales, can assault the environment free from impunity, and they're doing their nasty little deeds with no bid-cost plus contracts.

Oh but not all Republicans are bad, our dear senior Congressman Sensenbrenner (he may be suffering from dementia) who has voted for every dollar being spent to rebuild Iraq, says no to the gulf region. . . NOPE, he wouldn't vote for even one slim dollar in aid to help those poor folks deal with devastation of Biblical proportions; we've got to rebuild Iraq first.

Now don't worry, Sen. Frist, the Senate Majority leader, will come to our rescue, that is, after he clears himself of the Martha Stewart like stock trading he's been doing with securities that were placed in his blind trust. . .maybe Sen. Frist uses a seeing eye dog. Well, we have House Leader Tom Delay to help us. . .he’s connected! Remember, he’s the one with strong ties to the high powered lobbyist who stripped millions from the Indian tribes he supposedly represented. Don’t be too hash on the lobbyists now. How was Jack Abramoff going to pay for Delay’s Scottish golf outings with his family without money.

Yogi was right, it's deja vu all over again. The Harding administration is back with all the scandals, cronyism and the like. It's a form of political reincarnation.

Keepin' an eye on things for ya,
Davy Crockett

President Bush Is Number One!

2005-09-22T18:38:00.000-05:00

I’ve long believed that our 15th president, James Buchanan was beyond question the most inept of our presidents. To be sure there have been some close competitors, names that would certainly include Franklin Pierce and maybe Warren Harding among others; I’m not certain about Harding. John Dean’s recent kind biography does highlight a few positives on the Harding scale. However, I am mindful of the fact that John Dean grew up just down the street from the Harding home in Ohio and walked by it every day on his journey to and from school and, therefore, may feel a certain home town loyalty. But damn, I just never thought that anyone could possibly dislodge Buchanan from the ignoble top spot on the list of incompetent boobs who’ve been elected to the top office. Well, I was wrong! Beyond even a shadow of doubt Bush, W,” deserves the top spot. He’s inept, self centered, lacks compassion, and like his father has no concept of the vision thing. And I would add to the ineptness factor, the sad fact that Bush’s actions as president belie a basic belief in the democratic principles he so fondly and so often mentions in his speeches; the principles he promised to up hold when he took the oath of office.

Consider the leadership example Bush gives us, keeping in mind as Bob Herbert reminds us in today’s Times, “. . . there was already a war going on when Katrina came to call. I've always believed that war is a serious matter. But the president was on vacation. Dick Cheney was on vacation. And Condi Rice was here in New York taking in the sights and shopping for shoes. That Americans were fighting and dying on foreign soil was not enough to demand their full attention. They were busy having fun.” Herbert sadly, but correctly concludes, “ So it's no wonder it took a good long while before they noticed that a whole section of America had been wiped out in a calamity of biblical proportions,” (New York Times, September 22).

As I’ve noted before (See my post Bubba, Education, and the Global Village), this anti-government, anti-people crowd sense no obligation to the people they were elected to serve. The unfolding tragedy in the gulf region highlights the utter incompetence of many high ranking Bush buddies in positions of tremendous responsibility. Though the republicans were willing to keep Wild Bill Clinton in a state of perpetual investigation, costing us tens of millions, covering a broad range of venial sins, they refuse to appoint an investigative body to look into any of the major disasters orchestrated by Bush and company. No, instead they give us a Supreme Court nominee who’s instructed not to answer questions, and then in a manner made standard practice during the Iraqi debacle, they address the aftermath of the Katrina hit with no bid cost plus contracts to a few select Bush approved contractors. To put salt in the festering wounds they suspend labor laws designed to insure worker safety and basic fairness. In essence, these companies can now legally exploit workers and collect excess profits. And oh yes, the environmental plans these companies would normally have to submit for approval are also suspended. But don’t worry, this president is strongly opposed to gay marriages and will do everything he can do to eliminate a woman’s right to chose. And yes, if it’s possible, he’s going to turn our public schools into something like churches, where principles of science will finally take a back seat to Jerry Falwell’s twisted interpretation of the Holy Bible. Save us Jerry! Now I know that Jerry and Pat think that 9/11 and some of these other national calamities are the direct result of the immoral behavior of wild eyed radical women and some of those over sexed gays. And maybe that’s why Bush is pushin’ the fundamentalist religious crap at us, I’m not sure. Shit! Maybe all this mean spirited, greedy crap is due to Barbar's (W's ma ma) attack bitch spirit. Damn, never thought of that possibility. She seemed to know that Katrina was a blessing in some kinda disguise for all those poor folk huddled in the Astro Dome, least, that what she said.

But the fact is, we’re so damned far out in front of the rest of the nations that make up this global village of ours, we need to take a national break and give some of these countries a chance to catch up, especially China and India where their universities aren’t worrying about “intelligent design” they’re foolishly turning out math and science Ph.d.’s at an alarming rate. I’ll bet those scientific dummies wont know a hell of a lot about the Holy Bible. . .sad isn’t it; they’re all destined to end up in hell.

Ever on the watch for ya,

Davy Crockett

It's Time for A Change

2005-09-04T10:01:00.000-05:00

"When the president and vice president rashly shook off our allies and our respect for international law to pursue a war built on lies, when they sanctioned torture, they shook the faith of the world in American ideals.

When they were deaf for so long to the horrific misery and cries for help of the victims in New Orleans - most of them poor and black, like those stuck at the back of the evacuation line yesterday while 700 guests and employees of the Hyatt Hotel were bused out first - they shook the faith of all Americans in American ideals. And made us ashamed."

--Maureen Dowd--3 September 2005 NY Times

As the news on the national/international front turns from bad to worse, so does the President's ability to provide the nation with focus and direction. We are paying dearly for a right-wing Republican Congress that persists in cutting vital programs from the budget as they continue to serve the selfish interests of the wealthy. The current disaster in the gulf coast region serves to highlight our misplaced priorities. The New York Times correctly noted this morning that, “Publications from the local newspaper to National Geographic have fulminated about the bad state of flood protection in this beloved city, which is below sea level. Why were developers permitted to destroy wetlands and barrier islands that could have held back the hurricane's surge? Why was Congress, before it wandered off to vacation, engaged in slashing the budget for correcting some of the gaping holes in the area's flood protection?”

Current Congressional priorities are not consonant with middle American’s best interests. This month Congress will return from the summer vacation and make a concerted effort to eliminate the Estate Tax being paid by the wealthiest Americans. It is important to realize that, under current laws, anybody can pass up to about three million dollars on to heirs with little to no tax. If Congress does manage to pass legislation eliminating the estate tax, “millionaires will save close to $1 trillion dollars in the first ten years--that tax burden will shift to us and future generations.” Some of America’s wealthiest people oppose eliminating the estate tax because it is not in the national interest. For example, Bill Gates’ father heads a lobbying effort opposed to eliminating the inheritance tax. This may seem anomalous, since Gates, one of the world’s wealthiest men, would personally derive a tremendous benefit from such a change in the tax law; however, Gates and others like him, Warren Buffet for example, oppose the change.

Why do some of these altruistic billionaires oppose eliminating a tax that would so clearly favor their personal finances? In a nutshell, they realize that the long term best interests of this democracy do not lie in the direction of creating a landed, monied aristocracy. One only has to look to our south to see the implications of tax policies that concentrate national wealth in the hands of a tiny fraction of the total population. Most people, for instance, don’t realize that poor Mexico has more than its share of the world’s billionaires. It’s not hard to find countries to our south where 5 to 10 percent of the population controls or owns 95 percent of the wealth.

It is estimated that, “Eliminating the Estate Tax will personally benefit President Bush, VicebPresident Cheney and 11 other cabinet members up to $344 million - and we'll haveto pick up that tab!”

Beyond question the course set for the ship of state by the Bush Administration is headed into more turbulence. With the Iraqi situation bad beyond description, the President continues to grin and tell us how hard it is to make a democratic country, and he cites our national experience to prove his point. "They did write a constitution," he tells us; "things are looking up!" Then comes that stupid grin!

Nine hundred and fifty people dead yesterday in Bagdad! Hundreds wounded! When will the President’s Orwellian tale and our national nightmare end?

During times of crises a leader must lead, providing focus and direction, but as the NY Times wrote today, “George W. Bush gave one of the worst speeches of his life yesterday, especially given the level of national distress and the need for words of consolation and wisdom. In what seems to be a ritual in this administration, the president appeared a day later than he was needed. He then read an address of a quality more appropriate for an Arbor Day celebration: a long laundry list of pounds of ice, generators and blankets delivered to the stricken Gulf Coast. He advised the public that anybody who wanted to help should send cash, grinned, and promised that everything would work out in the end.”

Does the President ask us to make a sacrifice; does he inspire us to reach deep down within and find the courage needed to keep struggling? No! We get that damned, disturbing stupid grin, a trademark he uses to punctuate the inane pronouncements he persists in making.

In sum, in the words of Conservative columnist David Brooks, "On Sept. 11, Rudy Giuliani took control. The government response was quick and decisive. The rich and poor suffered alike. Americans had been hit, but felt united and strong. Public confidence in institutions surged.

Last week in New Orleans, by contrast, nobody took control. Authority was diffuse and action was ineffective. The rich escaped while the poor were abandoned. Leaders spun while looters rampaged. Partisans squabbled while the nation was ashamed" (New York Times 4 September 2005).

Let’s not stay the course. . .we need to be thinking about the next Congressional elections; we need to throw the bastards out.

Davy Crockett

In Chicago: Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre

2005-08-12T10:42:00.000-05:00

The annual end of summer show at the Art Institute in Chicago features the work of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec painted during the decade 1886-1896 and essentially focused upon the Parisian district known as Montmartre, the home of dance halls, brothels, cabarets, the circus, theaters and the haunt of many of the young artist/bohemians of the day. Born to aristocratic parents, who were, interestingly enough, first cousins, Lautrec suffered many chronic health problems that may in fact have had a genetic familial relationship. Though the biographic details don’t and shouldn’t overshadow his work, they do reflect in it; he undoubtedly experienced great difficulty with health concerns compounded by alcoholism and a stroke that ended his life at age 37.

Whatever the case, dwarfish little Lautrec felt some affinity for those not so well off common folk who inhabited the Parisian Montmartre district and his legacy in paint, in a variety of forms, is at the Art Institute for all to contemplate. Importantly, the exhibit also features paintings by artists whose work, though contemporaneous with Lautrec’s, are far more traditional in their use of color, line, and general composition techniques; the contrasting styles helps one to see the uniqueness of Lautrec’s artistic vision. In addition, the works of a few younger artists who knew and were influenced by Lautrec are also included in this show. Most notable in this group is the work of the very young Pablo Picasso who in this context is hardly recognizable as Picasso, but the Lautrec influence is unmistakable to the point of, in at least one instance, looking like it might have been painted by Lautrec himself.

Did I enjoy this show, would I recommend it? A qualified yes. Be warned, the masses turn out for the block buster shows; this exhibit featured the usual crowed galleries complete with the bumping and jostling; however, I can’t ever remember a time when so many groups of people, all wearing the docent inspired headsets, crowed about eight to ten feet in front of a work staring, not moving! Standing! Blocking the view! Initially, I admit to feeling some discomfort as I moved about the galleries moving in front of these stationary clusters of people to view Lautrec’s work. I don’t know (I didn’t rent a head set --I can’t stand the god damned things!) what the recorded commentary included. Perhaps it was on a the racy side. Maybe they included intimate, exotic Penthouse style details from the lives of the prostitutes Lautrec painted. I don’t know, but in fact most of them, the courtesans, wore looks ranging from sad or haggard to pretty damned bored as they sat waiting for the next trick to appear.

Ah but the significance of work itself really pushes the personal discomfort of crowds and the associated misery into the realm of the insignificant. One doesn’t have to be a sophisticated art lover to see Lautrec’s uniqueness in the development of art. The impact he has had on graphic art is so beautifully evident in the stylized posters that made him as well known, famous, as any of the people or places he depicted on those posters. Oddly enough, given the location of this exhibit, Lautrec’s bold use of primary colors in large flat spacial plains bounded by simple lines presaged the much later large, geometric spacial, color works by Ellsworth Kelly; six of Kelly’s works are in the permanent collect at the Art Institute hanging in the passage way leading to the Lautrec exhibit.

In subject matter and general interests, It’s easy to see Lautrec’s relationship to the Impressionists with whom he associated; indeed, the influence of his mentor Degas is ever present in his work both in terms of subject matter and theme; however, Lautrec strikes me as being more modern than his master, particularly in his use of the color blocks but also in the more stylize forms that approach caricatures, and though both Degas and Lautrec were influenced by Japanese prints, that influence is more pronounced in Lautrec’s work.

Incidently, for those of you who are interested in purchasing high end art, the refrigerator magnets for sale in the small gift shop offering associated Lautrec show items for sale are great. The show runs through 10 October 2005.

Davy Crockett

Bubba, Education and The Global Village

2005-08-05T00:04:00.000-05:00

As anyone associated with public education knows, the prevailing winds pushing public school funding are not very favorable; we’re heading towards the rocks, and there doesn’t seem to be any help in sight. In late June early July, 2005, the news from Wisconsin highlighted the plight of the folks up in Florence County, located in the extreme northern reaches of the state. For the third time, the voters refused to fund the county school system, forcing the school board decision in mid July to close the schools down and bus the 850* plus youngsters some 30 to 35 miles away to nearby schools.

Why did the voters reject the school referendums three times? Fortunately, we don’t have to guess; an area TV reported asked Bubba, a disheveled looking voter standing in front of one of the closed schools, that very question, and Bubba quite obligingly replied, “Heck, all ya gotta do is look at that place to know they’s wastin’ our money. Shoot, they can do a lot more with less. At’s the way I see it. I got to make it on what little I got. Got no choice! Hell, I ain’t seen no raise m’self in a month of Sundays. Them damned schools ain’t no different ‘en the rest of us, septin’ maybe, some of ‘em pointy headed folks thinks they’s just a little bit smarter ‘n the rest of us. Well, I guess you could say they found out they ain’t so special after all; we showed ‘em,” and with that pronouncement, he cut loose with a chuckle that seemed to come from deep down within. . . as he stood chuckling, enjoying the moment, the big fella’s belly shook like a bowl of jello.

The situation in Florence county highlights a problem facing school districts all over the state of Wisconsin and in fact in many other states as well. California, for example, once the epitome of educational excellence on just about any index of educational quality you wanted to look at, now sits at or near the bottom of the fifty state pile, a broken, bankrupt system, looking up at Mississippi and several other traditionally bottom rung states that have never invested in public sector institutions: schools, museums, the arts, public parks, and public libraries. You name it, they haven’t supported it.

The general malaise afflicting public school education, or even more broadly public institutions, is a bit more complicated than Bubba’s simple minded view that “schools can do more with less,” but it is associated with that view point. The implications of the general public’s myopic understanding of education, including Bubba’s, must be viewed in the context of the larger social picture that includes the global community of which we are inextricably involved. How we as a society value education does make a difference in our lives, and will play a role in determining what kind of a future we and our children will enjoy in this global village. In looking at the difficulties facing public institutes, notably education at every level, it’s important to note, what may be obvious, they did not emerge ex nihilo suddenly last night.

Becoming prominent with Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America and the ascendency of conservative politics in the mid Nineties, successful political candidates of almost every stripe have repeated the tax cutting mantra at the heart of Newt’s contract ad nauseam, and right there beside the tax mantra is it’s corollary: less government is better government. Certainly, that message became apparent in California with the Jarvis ballot measures that transformed public education into a bulls eye on election day, starting with proposition 13 in 1978. In any case, whether with the Jarvis proposition campaigns in California, or in any home town in any state in the USA, politicians with the simple minded bromides have spent the last 25 years routinely reducing the complexities of this world to simplistic distortions that the ill-informed Bubba’s could latched on to. “Got a problem, cut Taxes! “ And government, the politicians noted, taking a simplistic note from President Regan’s book, “It’s the problem not the solution.” To be sure, politicians are not engaged in self-delusion; they know Bubba’s a sucker for the superficial pablum they obligingly dish out. Public sector employees are not public servants in this world view, they’ve become people with targets on their backs feeding at the public trough; in sum, the public sector employee is painted as an unnecessary cancer that must be eliminated.

The public sector criticism comes with the concomitant notion that if private sector organizations operated as inefficiently, as their public sector counter parts, they couldn’t function. Notions of private sector efficiency and basic superiority, vis a vie the public sector, rib much campaign rhetoric in the form of expressions like, “I’ve had to meet a payroll, I know what it means to manage and run a business.” Both Bushes, dad and son, made similar claims on their road to the White House. The implication embedded in this rhetoric is clear; public sector institutions are populated by profligate spending dead beats who couldn’t make it in the private sector. Of course, to buy into the axiomatic superiority of private sector organizations, as many people have, is patently ludicrous; one has to ignore too much history to buy into such nonsense; i.e., the demise of: the rail system in America, the steel industry, the auto industry, the expensive, broken health care system a system that leaves the US population behind Canada and all of the western European democracies in terms of infant mortality, life expectancy etc. and at roughly twice the cost being paid by those Western democracies. That's right! We pay twice as much, as do the other Western Democracies, for far less health care. It is also important to keep in mind that the private sector screw ups didn’t start with the criminality associated with the corporate reprobates such as Enron, Arthur Andersen, WorldCom, Tyco or the savings and loan fiasco of the Regan years; sadly, the list is too long to mention in its entirety. Notwithstanding right-wing political claims to the contrary, one looks in vain for public sector mismanagement that looks anything like the private sector boondoggles. Just to put it into some perspective, the savings and loan bailout cost American tax payers more than every war this nation has fought from the Revolutionary War down through the war in Viet Nam. . .that calculation includes two world wars and Korea, not to mention numerous smaller belligerent entanglements.

The highly orchestrated reactionary attack on America’s public institutions, an attack that is reflected in the defeated school referendums and the tax cutting basic to the view that all units of government can do more with less; it’s a view that weakens America’s social fabric; it is not the product of mere chance circumstances. Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, a some time Gingerich sycophant, retired from his House Leadership position to help lead the charge. Armey currently Co- Chariman of Freedom Works an organization he helped found, works tirelessly around the country with some 360,000 members, who in Armey’s words, “Works for lower taxes, less government, and more freedom.” (Testimony before the House Budget Committee October 6, 2004). In fact Amey’s followers help state and local political action groups develop anti-tax initiatives. This, incidently, is the same Dick Armey who said on the House floor, “Yes, I am Dick Armey, and if there was a “dick army,” Barney Frank would want to join up.” To be sure the Congressman’s mother chose an apt name for her son, "dick!"

Parenthetically, the gross, crude remarks that come from many of these “moral,” “Christian” folks, including Vice President Cheney, is nothing short of scandalous, especially given the public manner in which they display their religious sentiments on a brightly lite Las Vegas style neon marquee; you’re never left wondering about how Christian they are; they’ll tell you, just be patient. To be sure these right-wing/Christians aren’t perfect; they just expect perfection in everybody else. I guess the knowledge that they’re “saved” is liberating in the sense that they are not bounded by moral strictures requiring basic integrity or personal honesty. In the contest between God and mammon, God’s on the losing side.

Indeed, the general tenor and moral tone of much of their political advocacy violates most common place notions of decency and honesty. The fictional “grass roots” organizations they create by the dozens to advocate for a position that is usually inimical to the position actually supported by the real grass roots groups is, yet, another case in point. Art Linkletter, and others like him, commonly functions as a shills for groups that have no relationship to the grass roots organizations their names suggest; no more, that is, than the Astro Truf in Houston’s Astro Dome has to real grass. For example, the pharmaceutical industry funded ads supporting President Bush’s prescription drug plan under the guise of an astro truf seniors group; the message presented by those ads was inimical to the interests of the genuine grass roots senior groups who actually opposed the plan. In sum, decency and honesty are not part of the slime ball Atwater-Rove-Bush school of politics, and that is reflected in current polls; the people think President Bush is dishonest (poll results available in all mainstream media 5 August 2005).

As noted earlier, how we as a society value education does make a difference in our lives, and will play role in determining what kind of a future we and our children will enjoy. The decisions the Bubba’s of this world make at the ballet box do have consequences. Importantly, due to pressure from Right-wing anti-tax groups, many states have modified school funding laws making it necessary for schools to put even the most basic operational needs before the voters on election day. Because only a relatively small percentage of those eligible to vote have children actively enrolled in school, each ballot measure faces a tough test on election day, and as the record shows, quite commonly go down in defeat. To be sure, not every school district has faced the plight of those folks in Wisconsin’s Florence county, but make no mistake about it, with each passing year buildings are going unrepaired, positions and programs are being eliminated, professional educators are struggling to keep their heads above the water being polluted by the anti-tax crowd, and poor old Bubba, well, the Wisconsin Education Association has been telling him now for several years now “that every kid needs a great school,” but he ain’t buyin’ it. That message is too remote, too abstract, too meaningless. Indeed, it even offends some of the Bubbas out there. As long as there’s a school, that’s good enough for Bubba even if it means a 35 mile bus ride twice a day.

These anti-tax campaigns do have broad consequences that extend far beyond the world of local school district referendums. Ironically, Virginia Senator George Allen unwittingly touched upon one consequence recently in a speech delivered before a New Hampshire Republican woman’s group (C-span broadcast 2005). Among other things, Senator Allen noted how pathetically few engineers, math and science types generally are being graduated by our American colleges and universities. In sharp contrast he noted, as others have, that the Chinese are graduating ten times as many engineers and ten times as many graduates in the basic sciences as US colleges and universities are. Senator Allen also stated that India is also cranking out engineers and scientists at a rate that dwarfs what’s happening in the USA. Keep in mind that China and India both represent developing economies, not nearly as developed as our own, but given the national priorities they’ve established, they will quickly become major players on the world stage.

At a time when those associated with tax lobbies are doing their level
best to hack public education to pieces (ostensibly for the purpose of making our economy, our society stronger, more vibrant,) tiny little Ireland has opened the financial flood gates for education. . . . ..it's free, and as a result they're reaping the benefits that accrues to a highly educated society.
As Thomas L. Friedman wrote recently (The New York Times June 29, 2005), “Ireland today is the richest country in the European Union after Luxembourg.” Most American think of poor little Ireland the home of the potato famine not as the home of one of Europe’s wealthiest, healthiest societies. How did they do it? They’ve provided national health care for their citizenry and have developed a first class, free educational system that includes the university system.

“The results,” notes Friedman, “ are phenomenal. Today, 9 out of 10 of the world's top pharmaceutical companies have operations here, as do 16 of the top 20 medical device companies and 7 out of the top 10 software designers. Last year, Ireland got more foreign direct investment from America than from China. And overall government tax receipts are way up.”

In an e-mail exchange with Friedman, Michael Dell, founder of Dell Computers stated, "We set up in Ireland in 1990, What attracted us? [A] well-educated work force -and good universities close by." Friedman concluded what seems rather apparent, “Make high school and university education free.”

The Irish example is but one recent example of the important role education plays in a nations economic order. Recently here in the US several Southern states were involved in competition with each other to attract another Toyota manufacturing plant. They reportedly offered Toyota 100's of millions of dollars in incentives of one kind or another but all for not; Toyota elected to build in Ontario, Canada instead. . Why? Toyota stated that the decision was made because of the high quality Canadian work force and the national health insurance system that supports that force (See Princeton Economist Paul Krugman’s July 25 piece in the NY Times for a more detailed discussion of the Toyota decision). Sadly enough, according to Paul Krugman, “the president of the Toronto-based Automotive Parts Manufacturers' Association. . . claimed that the educational level in the Southern United States was so low that trainers for Japanese plants in Alabama had to use "pictorials" to teach some illiterate workers how to use high-tech equipment.”

The narrow minded, myopic vision many votes reflect when they cast their ballots on election day does have consequences. “There's some bitter irony here for Alabama's governor, ” wrote Krugman, “ Just two years ago voters overwhelmingly rejected his plea for an increase in the state's rock-bottom taxes on the affluent, so that he could afford to improve the state's low-quality education system. Opponents of the tax hike convinced voters that it would cost the state jobs.”

In sum, those of us who really care about the future must be willing to engage the Bubba’s of this world in a dialog that relates his self-interest to the complexities of living in the dawning new world order. China, India, Europe, Japan, they are an important part of the emerging global village. The abstract, largely irrelevant “Every Kid Deserves a Great School” campaign funded by the Wisconsin Education Association just doesn’t get the job done. Bubba needs to know why great schools are important in his life even though statistically he probably does not have children enrolled in the schools. The people in Alabama who have listened to the anti-tax crowd are paying a big price. The politicians selling snake oil don’t have the answers.

* The news reports presenting the number of Florence County students effected by the school closing varried from a low of 650 to a high of 850.

Ever on the lookout for ya,

Davy Crockett

America , Come Home!

2005-07-17T23:54:00.000-05:00

Recently, New York Times Columnist Paul Krugman wrote about Karl Rove’s American (July 15, 2005}. Depressingly enough, it’s an America many of us have come to know; it’s an America where lies, and rank political ideology substitute for truth. Oh yes, I know, their talk is patriotic; we all heard Bush’s State of the Union Address; America stands as the beacon of freedom loving people; the words stand beyond reproach, but in the world according to Bush, the rhetoric of freedom and democracy are at war with reality. As a graduate of the late Lee Atwater’s school of slime politics, Karl Rove hasn’t been guided by any lofty democratic ideals in managing Bush’s drives for political office. As Frank Rich noted recently of Rove, “Trashing is in his nature. . . . . . . In the 2000 South Carolina primary, John McCain's wife, Cindy, was rumored to be a drug addict (and Senator McCain was rumored to be mentally unstable). In the 1994 Texas governor's race, Ann Richards found herself rumored to be a lesbian.” Karl Rove has a penchant for running sleezy campains against the opposition with a sick, distorted fixation on sexuality designed to cloud the real issues. Referencing a Joshua Green article published in the Atlantic Monthly last year, Frank Rich noted , in the NYTimes today, "a recurring feature of Mr. Rove's political campaigns throughout his career has been the questioning of an opponent's sexual orientation," (Ny Times 24 July 2005}.
Freedom? Democracy? Reasoned debate? Such notions are alien to the Rove-Bush modus operandi. Machiavelli is a far better model to use in understanding the machinations of the Bush-Rove White House than anything bequeathed by the Founding Fathers.

Basic to any meaningful understanding what it means to live and participate in a democratic society is the idea of a loyal opposition openly and freely subjecting the activities of government to scrutiny. Not in the Bush-Rove understanding of democracy.

Now we’re are told that the FBI has been investigating and collecting files on several domestic groups who’ve been highly critical of Bush policies. According to Eric Litchblau, “The F.B.I. has in its files 1,173 pages of internal documents on the American Civil Liberties Union, the leading critic of the Bush administration's antiterrorism policies, and 2,383 pages on Greenpeace, an environmental group that has led acts of civil disobedience in protest over the administration's policies,” ( NYTimes 18 July 2005}.

In the recent developments surrounding the outing of a covert CIA agent by columnist Robert Novak, it’s clear that both Karl Rove and Lewis Libby, Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff played a key role in suppling information to the media specifically for the purpose of destroying her husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson, an administration critic, even though White House Press Secretary Scott McCllen specifically issued a flat denial of such involvement and though he was willing to talk about the case then, his lips are sealed now.

Oh but, have no fear, this tawdry group is not without it’s defenders; the right-wing propaganda machine is working overtime: "The extreme left is once again attempting to define the modern Democratic Party by rabid partisan attacks, character assassination and endless negativity," said Rep. Tom Reynolds, R-N.Y., chairman of the GOP congressional committee. The Republican National Committee, virtually a political arm of the White House, urged GOP lawmakers to go public”( AP 14 July 2005). This comment from Rep. Reynolds is typical of the “talking points” recommended by the Republican Leadership in their effort to keep Karl Rove’s fat ass out of the political fire he has ignited.. Yes, son, this is the same Karl Rove who made one of the most highly charged partisan attaches imaginable against democrats at a recent Republican fund rising dinner in New York City.

Make no mistake about it; democracy as we have know it is under siege. CBS’s , 60 Minutes Two, ran a story recently (7/15/2005} focused upon the literally hundreds of people picked up either by US agents, or friendly governments here, there, everywhere and sent to Middle Eastern countries where they can be tortured free from the oversight of the American legal system or of the Press.

Wasn’t it Lord Acton who said, “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel”? Given the torrent of patriotic talk that spews forth from the Bush Administration, there are scoundrels enough to go around; we’re experiencing the reign of right-wing , ideology driven, extremism. The House for the third or fourth time, now, in the last ten years or so, has again overwhelmingly passed legislation making it a criminal offense to defile the flag. Never mind that the Supreme Court has held that the flag itself, Old Glory, isn’t freedom but rather is the symbol of freedom and all that freedom means in our society; it’s kind of a reminder. The high court ruled that people may exercise their freedom, even to the extent of defiling the symbol-- the flag itself. But oh, how the scoundrels, pedaling there patriotic candy, seek to shift attention to largely irrelevant issues while our young men and women die in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yes, these are the issues that play upon the lips of the patriotic scoundrels as they cut funding for veterans programs.

To be sure, there are other mean spirited, red meat issues at play in this cesspool game of politics being played. There are people in America who are utterly repulsed at the thought of gay marriages and whose understanding of religious obligations oppose extending marriage or family rights generally to members of the gay community. I understand that and think it’s simple minded, but I can accept it as a point of view. However, it’s powerfully clear that many politicians use the gay issue merely as a wedge issue in much the same way that anti-communism was used in the fifties and sixties; if the truth were known, they really don’t care about the gay issue one way or another. Remember former Congressman Bauman? He used to rail on the House floor against the gays. A first class gay basher he was. Well, the long and short of his story is sad; he was spending the evening cruising the gay bars in the Washington area. In a nutshell, involuntarily outed by his indiscretions, Congressman Bauman ended up leaving Congress and his family. Now, I’m not suggesting that all those who rail against gays are closet homosexuals, no; but, I am stating that many, most I suspect, are using the issue to divert attention away from the real issues that confront this nation. Oh, how they so zealously, so self-righteously wrap themselves in the flag and spew forth torrents of ideological bilge or rail against members of the gay community.

To be sure, there have been periods in recent American history marked by strife: the turbulent 60's and 70's came complete with the riots and protests in city streets all over American. At the time few people viewed such political expressions as a sign of America’s political health; however, I think they were wrong; there was a vitality, a vibrant life force at work in those obstreperous demonstrations. Democracy, as Jefferson envisioned it, got a wake up call from the people. Today, in Bush’s America, with the notable exception of a few lonely voices in the wilderness, the Bush minions in Congress and other nationally prominent leaders, march silently in lock-step to the sound of Christian-right-wing babble. Those moderate voices in the Republican party, who in the past, dependably looked beyond party ideology in working for the greater good of society have been largely muted.

The few prominent Republicans who refused to march in step are gone or altogether ignored: Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neil who wrote disbelievingly about the bungling in evidence at Cabinet meetings; Richard Clarke, the Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence, who wrote about his inability to get anybody in the Bush Administration interested in the terrorist theat before the 9/ll attack; Christi Todd Whitman, former New Jersey Governor and later head of the Environmental Protection Agency, who wrote a book about the difficulties faced by moderate Republicans in the new Bush right-wing theocracy; and then, there was former Senator, former United Nations Ambassador, former ordained Episcopal Minister John Danforth’s who wrote on the Op-Ed page of the NY Times about the hijacking of the Republican party by the Christian right. He noted, for example, that in all his years in the United States Senate, where he served as a rather conservative Republican (as a Senator, he sponsored Justice Clarence Thomas before the Senate Judiciary Committee at the confirmation hearings) that in all those senate years, and he emphasized this point, he had not spent as much as a minute worrying about what effect gay marriage might have on family life in America, not one minute. Senator Danforth emphasized the importance of maintaining some sense of perspective in our political life.

Because the Republican have a strangle hold on Congress, there are no committee investigations of the Bush transgressions. In sharp contrast poor old Bill Clinton, suffered the harassment of Republican controlled investigating committees for the duration of his presidency, and we, the taxpayers of America, spent 60 plus million dollars to find out that the Clinton’s 75,000 dollar investment in the White Water Land deal was legal. Oh, we did find out that Wild Bill was doing something with Monica; however, Bill’s indiscretions pale to insignificance when put in focus against the backdrop of Bush’s mendacity in leading this nation to an unnecessary war. If there’s to be dissent, it must come from the moderates in the Republican party who, to date, have remained mute. They must find the strength to write new profiles in courage, or the fate of this American democracy is bleak.

Davy Crockett

A Profile In Courage: Judith Miller

2005-07-06T23:39:00.000-05:00

"The freest and fairest societies are not only those with independent judiciaries,but those with an independent press that works every day to keep government accountable by publishing what the government might not want the public to know."

--Judith Miller addressing the judge who locked her up.

As I write, New York Times writer Judith Miller sits in jail, condemned to serve time because she refuses to divulge the names of her news sources. Never mind, now, that she didn’t out a CIA agent, didn’t in fact, write about the case; no, she’s paying a high price for being committed to ideals larger than her self-interest. Robert Novak, on the other hand, the scum ball conservative columnist for The Chicago-Sun times newspaper and television commentator, DID in fact identify the name of an undercover CIA agent in his newspaper column. He wrote, using information provided by what he said were two high ranking White House sources. Why hasn’t the special prosecutor hauled Novak’s slimy ass before the grand jury? He continues writing his column and appearing on the weekly talk shows unaffected by it all.

This doesn’t make sense. . .Novak’s the jerk who outed the undercover CIA agent using information provided to him (that’s what he wrote) by the White House. Why are this judge and this special prosecutor playing games with us. . .attempting to make us believe that they’re trying to find out where the information came from. . .what crap! Let’s get beyond these childhood pretend games, we don’t need a round of paddy cake to make us happy, Robert Novak knows who gave him the information. He said so in the column he wrote specially for the purpose of blowing an under cover CIA agent’s cover.

The Special Prosecutor was appointed to find out who leaked the information. Why are he and that screw ball judge chasing after Ms. Miller of the New York Times and Matt Cooper of Time Magazine, neither of whom outed anybody? This is beyond crazy! This is another diversionary tactic to keep our eyes off the ball. Novak should be hauled before that Grand Jury; he’s the jerk who talked to the unidentified sources in the White House and who violated federal law in revealing an undercover agents name and possibly endangering her life. It’s very clear in the story that Cooper did write in Time Magazine that the White House wanted a pound of flesh because that undercover CIA agent’s husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, had publicly criticized the President for misrepresenting the truth in his rush to war in Iraq. Make no mistake about it, this was more gutter politics from the White House.

There is a disturbing pattern in this nonsense. Think about it, during those days when journalists were trying to find out whether or not Bush served in the Alabama National Guard, whether they could actually find ANYBODY who remembered even seeing Bush, CBS became the issue. Now as an Army veteran myself, I can, after the passage of many years, vividly remember the names of most of the soldiers I served with; not only do I remember their names, I remember many of the details of their lives: where they came from, how they liked the Army etc. President Bush, on the other hand, couldn’t and didn’t give us any names; he couldn’t come up with one single, solitary name. Let's be honest about it, Bush was AWOL! The American people where too easily side tracked. . .by diversionary tactics. The Bush operatives drag a red herring across the trail, and the poor old blood hounds and the White House Press Corp don’t know whether to shit or go blind; they usually error and go bline.

When Newsweek published a sentence in the Periscope section recently detailing miss treatment of the Muslim Holy book, right-wing commentators, outside and inside the White House, made Newsweek responsible for much of the death and destruction in Iraq (See my earlier post on this subject). The reports from FBI agents, The International Red Cross and Amnesty International, all supported the Newsweek story, got lost in the shuffle along with numerous other reports.

And then even more recently, poor old Senator Durbin from Illinois dared to read an FBI agent's horror story, the account the agent wrote after watching interrogations at the Cuban prison. Again, never mind that other reputable sources, sources that the Administration frequently quoted when it suited their purposes, presented evidence totally in line with the comments made my Senator Durbin. Another red herring hit the tail and truth lost out.

It’s tough, no, close to impossible to get a handle on the morality of these Bush people. Hell, the Vice President can tell the Senior Democrat member of the Senate Judiciary Committee to go F ----himself and get away with it, as he did. The Vice President’s comment was so rank most newspapers of any note would not print his words. I actually heard some right-wingers chuckle about it; indeed, a couple of them were men of the cloth, ministers, at least they’re supposed to be. Even old self-righteous himself, Sen. Hatch smiled when asked about it.

Oh how selective our sense of civility and decorum become when we let our identity as human beings take on the shape of political ideology. Oh how willingly so may willingly sacrifice their humanity in the service of right-wing gutter politics.

The nobility of our purpose does matter as we make this journey in life! Though Ms. Miller may not have all the legalisms sorted out, she does show incredible courage in following convictions larger than self. It is not avarice, or any of the base motives that drives her; it's her belief in an important ideal. I’m reminded of Henry David Thoreau sitting in jail for refusing to obey an unjust law. When his dear friend Ralf Waldo Emerson asked him why he was sitting in jail, Thoreau pointedly replied, “Why are you standing out there?” Hopefully Ms. Miller's example will serve to excite others to fight for things noble, things larger than self. Our spirit has been starved too long by the mean spirited greed that seems to inform the Bush people.

Davy Crockett

Pat Boone, Scientology, Frankie Ford and Foot Tap'en Music

2005-07-06T22:19:00.000-05:00

Tom Cruise’s recent primate metamorphosis, on the Oprah show; that is, his strange declaration of love complete with the orangutan jumps (See my June posting), and then his subsequent confrontation on the Today Show with Matt Lauer about the psychotropic drugs Brooke Shield shouldn’t be taking, according to Tom that is, has all combined to really put his name in the news lately. Oh, and just incidently, he has a new blockbuster movie in the theaters just now. . .some coincidence huh? Now old Tom probably knows more about these things than we’ve ever suspected; I mean, after all, he is a self-avowed scientologist. I’m also aware, as one of my critics aptly noted in a commentary on my posting, that Tom can’t be too dumb or he wouldn’t have all that money. I suppose I’ll give in to the idea that something about this whole matter is pretty dumb and let it go at that. Anyway, these recent discussions involving Cruise, Scientology and the like reminded me of an experience I had which included, among other things, my first awareness of Scientology.

I was involved in a discussion with a friend who, in passing, mentioned some of the music of the fifties and sixties, noting how downright enjoyable it was, not at all like this rapper, crapper, sapper stuff that’s taken all the Grammy awards by storm.

Well, that recent reflection on music from the 50's and 60's pushed my own thoughts a bit, giving me just enough courage to mention one of my own favorites from that early period–Pat Boone; I recently acquired a copy of his supposed 16 greatest hits. Now I don’t publicly admit to liking his music and, in fact, have a little trouble admitting it to myself during my private moments, but the fact is I love the strong, rhythmic beat of his early music. If you’re a rocker, it’s hard to find better dance music. However, I can’t think of anyone, just off hand, who gives me a greater sense of nausea when I listen to them talk. In sum, I find Boone’s simple-minded religious views hard to take. I’m always left wondering, "Is he really that simple- minded?" My fear, of course, is that he is!

Then there’s Frankie Ford from down in Louisiana. .. .remember him? His one big hit "Sea Cruise?" is another of my favorites. One hot summer night several years ago, I came out of a Broadway theater having just seen Miss Saigon and was standing on the side walk watching people pass by. Suddenly, I could hear the sounds of live, rock music. I looked down the street and saw a London style double decker bus slowly moving through the post show theater traffic. The top of the bus had been removed creating a band stand on one end and a small dance floor on the other. Several musicians-- couple saxophones, a trombone, a trumpet or two and an electric bass guitar--were energetically performing Frankie Ford’s foot stompin’ "Sea Cruise."

The bus, momentarily tied up in a snarl of taxies, stopped just in front of me. For the first time I noticed large white signs with black hand scrawled messages extolling the virtues of Scientology, a religion I new by name only, taped to the sides of the bus. The band stopped playing and one of the performers with a microphone in hand invited those of us standing on the side walk to join them on the bus. An attractive young couple , who looked to be in their twenties, standing near me on the side walk did just that. As they ascended the spiral stair way to the top of the bus, the band stated to play again as the bus continued slowing down the street with the stylish young couple bopping to the sounds of Frankie Ford’s music.

Though it did not occur to me then, I’ve often thought that the young couple had been planted their waiting for the bus to come along, to encourage, by their example, others to join the scientology party on the bus; I don’t know. In any case, a couple years ago, reflecting on the events of that night, it occurred to me that I’d really liked the music. I searched for several days before I finally found what I was looking for. Initially I’d been looking under the title "Sea Breeze" which is also a legitimate song title but not the one I wanted. Well, I did ultimately find what I wanted and Frankie and I’ve been close ever since, and to hell with the Grammies and Scientology ploys of whatever intention.

Ever keepin’ track of the beat for ya!

Davy Crockett

Post Script: After putting some of the above reflections in words, I sent them on to a number of friends. One night several weeks later, I returned home after having spent a wild weekend in Chicago, and there, tucked between the storm door and the entrance door, I found a small UPS package containing an old beatup looking cassette tape along with the following note:

Dear Davy,

Well, if you liked Pat Boone you were probably
disappointed, as was I, in the Rolling Stone's recent
selection of the 5OO greatest songs of all time. Pat
Boone gets a mention for covering a couple of songs
but that's all. Bill Halley gets on the list only
once, for Rock Around the Clock. Frankie Ford is, of
course, nowhere to be found. Charlie Ryan and the
Timberline Riders don't make the list at all with
their Hot Rod Lincoln. The list does contain a lot of
other examples of goddamn dissonance and abuse of
innocent musical instruments. I played in a band in
the mid fifties—the transition period from swing to
early rock and roll (I got to be in the band, Bernie
Tucker's Off Beats, because I owned a drum set though
I was not a good drummer). My kind of rock and roll
was pretty much over with by 1959. At that point I
mainly listened to jazz, classical, and nostalgic
4O-50's stuff. Now, in my sixties, I have taken up
with "a young chick" (9 years my junior) and I wake up
every morning to Fox Radio's classic rock and roll
hits—many of which are on the Rolling Stone list—and
they piss me off. As a result, J often break in to a
chorus of "music from MY era," including Sea Cruise.
Otherwise, life is good so I guess I shouldn't
complain and Sandy likes to be sung to at 5:30 AM.
Re L Ron Hubbard and the Scientologists: several years
ago J heard that they were trying to get the first
edition of his book, Dianetics (sp?) removed from
libraries. So, naturally I got a copy of it and a copy
of his latest edition and shelved them side by side in
the NMC library. I didn't read either one so I never
found out which one was loopyer.
Anyway, several months ago Sandy and I were in the
Salvation Army store and I ran across a tape of songs
from 1959—including Sea Cruise—which you will find
enclosed. Listen to it in good health, and to hell with
the Rolling Stone.

Your friend Dan’l B.

Update: Brooke Shields Educates the Orangutan

2005-07-01T09:28:00.000-05:00

Frankly, I don't know much about Brooke Shields, and what I did know, I didn't like. . . always seemed to me that she was the product of a pushy old broad (her mother) who had no sense about how to be a loving, caring parent. Brooke always seemed, to me at least, to be one of those lost souls whose identity, as an individual, got mangled in her mother's mad rush to make her a celebrity of some sort.
Well, in my eyes she's redeemed herself. One, she's done much to help us all understand the trials faced by many young mothers who suffer after the birth of a child; and two, she's helped us understand what an idiot Tom Cruise really is. Too bad that his movie, War of The Worlds, seems to be ranking in the money at the box office this week, but I will take some comfort in the notion that not one penny of it came from my pocket. . . stay away from the theater. . .he's a religious zealot!
Beyond the zealotry, it amazes me that one would engage in a war of words, as Cruise has done, and come to the battle so totally unarmed. Stupid!
See Ms. Shields Op-Ed response to Tom Cruise in the NY Times July 1, 2005 edition; it's nothing short of excellent!

Ever on the watch,
Davy Crockett

Oprah, Orangutans and Tom Cruise

2005-06-25T18:32:00.000-05:00

Ok, I won’t argue with ya, as a cultural observer, well, I’m not out there on the cutting edge, there’s nothing fast track about my views; but damn, I do take a look now and again, tardy though it may be. This past Wednesday, for reasons that are not important here, I ended up in a stall in Chicago, waiting at my son Pablo’s place for a flight bound up in Miami by weather. The NBA championship game (I’m told that it was good) came & went, and there I was, tired, exhausted, sitting on the couch, suffering the ravages of a 90 degree plus summer heat wave in Chicago. I sat, my tired old eyes staring at the tv, hoping one of those good lookin’ news babes I’d seen earlier in the day on the Cta transit posters advertising channel 7's news team, would pop up on the screen, such was not the case.

Around midnight (Pablo and his wife Christina had long since retired for the night) I kinda noticed, or thought I did, a big brown couch on the tv screen, as I sat in a tired stupor staring at channel 7. Furniture ad I thought. Slowly, I realized it wasn’t a couch; it was Oprah! I could tell when she flashed a big smile revealing those pearly whites. Damn! I thought, should be a sin to have ivory white teeth like that; made my own grimy, yellowish complement look like sh. . . .well . . . . something of an embarrassment. Anyway, clasping her hands tightly together and bouncing a bit on a big over stuffed chair, Oprah gleefully announced what we’re supposed to perceive as one of the viewing highlights of the year. America’s heart throb, none other than Mr. Right Stuff himself, Tom Cruise, would be her special guest for the full hour; and, she teased, he just might have some thing special to say about somebody special. I don’t know about most folks but that little hook snared me.

Perked up, I actually sat up, rubbed a little of the sleep from my eyes and leaned toward the tv just a bit. Didn’t want to miss something so special. Wouldn’t you know, just at about the time I’m about to be overcome by pants wetting excitement, Oprah breaks for a Popalene ad. You know, one of those miracle diet pill kinda products that’s supposed to just blast the fat right off your ass, even better than Cortaslim, so the ad claimed. And, you can’t beat this, all the while the blastin’s goin’ on, you can keep sittin’ on it, right there in front of the TV, eatin’ your munchies, suckin’ on a cold beer, watchin’ Oprah. Market research would probably give ya a variety of reasons they run ads like that on the Oprah show.

But anyway back to Tom, after a gushy little intro, Tom emerges from the darkness at the back of the set to the sounds of a studio filled with screaming, jumping women. Sporting a modish uncombed hair style and dressed in black, a pull over shirt and jeans. Oprah wrapped her arms around his small frame in an embrace that momentarily hid him from view. She then backed away a tad and patted him on the head and then ruffled his uncombed hair much as you would in greeting a favorite dog. Mind you now, the studio women continued jumping and screaming, in what seemed to be a spontaneous outpouring of raw, savage emotion. Now I’ve got to admit that I’ve never really paid a lot of attention to Tom, but this visceral, screaming display of raw savagery gave me some pause. Was it sexual I wondered, looking him over more carefully than I ever had. It seemed to me that there really wasn’t much to him, in a manly sense that is. I mean he’s not a brawny, beefy muscular kinda guy. And then, his face strikes me as rather mouse like, or ratish in appearance. The nose protrudes a bit too far in front of the more receded chin and forehead. . .you know, rat like. But anyway, amid the tumult coming from these unsettled studio women, Tom suddenly, inexplicably, dropped to his knees right there in front of Oprah and started pounding the floor with a clinched fist. Caught by surprise, Oprah, clasp her hands over her open mouth and nervously laughed as Tom continued to pound on the floor. She then bent over kinda gathering him up, guiding him to a seat there beside her on an adjoining couch. Tom sat giggling kidishly, and then suddenly, inexplicably, he jumped nimbly atop the couch, standing on the cushion, legs spread apart, pumping his clinched fist into the air in a victory gesture of some sort. Just as suddenly he dropped back on to the sofa in a seated position. “Yeah!” he ejaculated pumping both fists into the air and extending his legs forward as he did so.

Seeming to have some sense of what this just might be about, Oprah said, with her hands still up near her disbelieving mouth, “You’re in love!”

“Yes! Yes! Yes!" Tom gushed, "I ‘ve never felt like this before in my life.!” At which point he again initiated a deft little jump, putting himself atop the cushion once more, this time in a kneeling position, extending his hands to the cushion just to his front for balance; he then preceded to jump up and down in the fashion of an orangutan putting on a show at the zoo. All the while Oprah sat nervously laughing with her hand variously covering her open mouth and then slapping his knee as she ejaculated, “Yes, Yes!”

At the risk of being considered a mendacious soul, because it so strains credulity, let it be noted for the record: Tom’s orangutan like jumping on the couch, alternating with stints of him on the floor pounding his clinched fist, continued for a good ten to fifteen minutes; at least until I’d finally had enough to rescue myself with the clicker. I never did quite figure out what brought out the primate side of Cruise, but I did hear a day or two later that it was just his strange way of declaring his love for some kid half his age. I also heard that he’d had another media encounter on NBC’s Today Show with Matt Lauer that featured Tom's attempts to disabuse people of their misconceptions about the value of psychiatry, particularly actress Brooke Shields who, according to Tom, has been takin’ drugs to cope with her postpartum blues. Now, as a self-avowed member of the church of Scientology, I guess old Tom’s a scientist. . .I don’t really know; I’m just not up on that crap, but I will say this, if you’ve got a friend who just happened to tape Tom on the Oprah Show, you might want to take a look at it.

Ever on the watch for ya,
Davy Crockett

Finally! Senate Passes Anti-Lynching Resolution. . .Sorta

2005-06-18T16:57:00.000-05:00

In an historic move last week the United States Senate finally passed a unanimous sense of the Senate resolution condemning lynching in America and in the process putting an exclamation mark behind one of the more shameful chapters in Senate history. Let us not forget that the same or similar resolutions failed some 200 or more times because of opposition led by Southern Senators. It is important to note that this “unanimous” consent resolution did not receive the support the label would suggest; some twenty or so cowardly souls refused to sign it. Indeed, Senator Frist led the fight to block a roll call vote that would have forced Senators to vote against it on the record, letting them instead remain hidden in the anonymity of a voice vote. Yes, this is the same Senate leader who spoke forcefully in favor of up and down recorded votes in the Senate just a week or so before in the contest over judicial nominees.

Massachusetts Senator John Kerry was right on the mark with the observation that, “It's a statement in itself that there aren't 100 co-sponsors, and as I’ve noted, he correctly observed , “It’s a statement in itself that there's not an up-or-down vote."

What is it they used to say, “with friends like that, who needs enemies?” I refer, of course, to the twenty or so Senators who, at this late date still refused to put their names on the line as supporters of the ant-lynching resolution. Gratuitous remarks aside, America needs to come to grips with the implications of it's racist past. This unanimous consent resolution represents a small step in the right direction. . .for decades our history books have glossed over the facts basic to our American holocaust. Too many of our national leaders do not want to even talk about racism, arguing that it's history, over, done, gone. The clear implication is that racism didn't have consequences. Until we understand something of those consequences we'll never begin to understand the difficulty blacks, as a race, have swimming in the mainstream today. Slavery and the racism that followed in myriad legal-cultural forms did and continues to have consequences. American history be it good or bad lives in us, in our spirit of who we are as people. It's not biology that explains why so many blacks fill our prisons, do poorly in school, etc.

Now, in terms of politics, look at the names of those Senators who did not sign or support the consent resolution if you can find their names listed. . .the voice vote didn’t put them on the record, and the cowardly mainstream media did not see fit to hold their feet to the fire of public opinion.

So, in some sense, the problems associated with centuries of racism and it’s ugliness continue; it’s something we don’t want to talk about and don’t. We’ve blotted the horror of lynching from our history books but we haven’t been able to blot out it’s consequences; to do that we must remove the darkness.

Fortunately, thanks to the bloggers, all is not lost; the names of those cowardly souls are as follows:

The Senate hall of shame !

Lamar Alexander (R-Tennessee)
Robert Bennett (R-Utah)
Jeff Bingaman (D-New Mexico)
Thad Cochran (R-Mississippi)
Kent Conrad (D-North Dakota)
John Cornyn (R-Texas)
Michael Crapo (R-Idaho)
Michael Enzi (R-Wyoming)
Charles Grassley (R-Iowa)
Judd Gregg (R-New Hampshire)
Orrin Hatch (R-Utah)
Kay Hutchison (R-Texas)
Jon Kyl (R-Arizona)
Trent Lott (R-Mississippi)
Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska)
Jack Reed (D-Rhode Island)
Richard Shelby (R-Alabama)
Gordon Smith (R-Oregon)
John Sununu (R-New Hampshire)
Craigh Thomas (R-Wyoming)
George Voinovich (R-Ohio)

Ever on the watch for ya,

Davy Crockett

Amnesty International and The Bush Administration

2005-06-05T11:37:00.000-05:00

In the interest of identifying my potential biases, I am, and have been for a number of years, a proud member of Amnesty International. To be sure the reports issued by Amnesty International receive world wide distribution and, except for those countries accused of abuses, their work is highly respected as accurate and objective, free from political bias. Indeed, until the recent report, members of the Bush Administration, including George himself, have frequently quoted from the Amnesty reports. As the record so clearly demonstrates, Amnesty International reports were used by Bush, Cheney, and Rummy to justify the rush to war against Iraq. The following article from the Washington Post nicely summarizes the Administrations hypocrisy in using or trashing Amnesty Reports depending upon political expediency.

The Bush people talk reverentially about the importance of democracy and freedom in the world; yet, do not hesitate to lock people away in prison, incommunicado, held without charges, denied access to the legal system. In some instances, those arrested have been shipped to friendly countries where they’ve subsequently been subjected to the worst kind of physical abuses, apparently at the behest of our government.

To vilify the Amnesty report because it is so highly critical of US abuses in the prisons used to house suspected terrorists is shameful. We are told that Defense Department self investigation indicates that they’ve behaved in an angelic fashion; therefore the Amnesty Reports aren’t true. What simple minded bull shit! I can understand the importance of self analysis on a psychiatric couch, but deference to the accused in criminal matters is like asking the fox to guard the hen house. Weren’t we advise in kindergarten against such folly?

We heard the Bush White House endlessly vilify Newsweek for reporting that military prison guards defiled the Koran. Never mind that the International Red Cross issued a report noting that the Newsweek report was consistent with their reports, reports that had been forwarded to the Defense Department on numerous occasions. And, of course, yesterday (4 June) the Defense Department released a report verifying the discovery of abuses of the type reported in Newsweek.

But, let the facts speak for themselves, i.e., read the Washington Post article by Dana Milbank.

Davy Crockett

From the Washington Post
An Administration's Amnesty Amnesia

By Dana Milbank
Post
Sunday, June 5, 2005; A04

The folks at Amnesty International are practically begging for a one-way ticket to Gitmo. After the human rights group issued a report late last month calling the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, "the gulag of our times," top officials raced to condemn Amnesty.

President Bush: "It's absurd. It's an absurd allegation."

Vice President Cheney: "I don't take them seriously. . . . Frankly, I was offended by it."

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld: "Reprehensible . . . cannot be excused."

Funny -- these officials had a different view of Amnesty when it was criticizing other countries.

Rumsfeld repeatedly cited Amnesty when he was making the case against Saddam Hussein, urging "a careful reading of Amnesty International" and saying that according to "Amnesty International's description of what they know has gone on, it's not a happy picture."

The White House often cited Amnesty to make the case for war in Iraq, using the group's allegations that Iraq executed dozens of women accused of prostitution, decapitated victims and displayed their heads, tortured political opponents and raped detainees' relatives, gouged out eyes, and used electric shocks.

Regarding Fidel Castro's Cuba, meanwhile, the White House joined Amnesty and other groups in condemning Castro's "callous disregard for due process."

And the State Department's most recent annual report on worldwide human rights abuses cites Amnesty's findings dozens of times.

"This administration eagerly cites Amnesty International research when we criticize Cuba and extensively quoted our criticism of the violations in Iraq under Saddam Hussein in the run-up to the war," protested William F. Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International USA.

But Schulz isn't protesting too much. In the past week, traffic on Amnesty's Web site has gone up sixfold, donations have quintupled and new memberships have doubled.

Patriots and Hypocrites: Bumper Sticker Rhetoric

2005-05-31T12:03:00.000-05:00

I know, you’ve got one of those cute little yellow decals affixed to the back of you new SUV; hey, it looks good, but more importantly, it broadcasts your patriotic sentiments to the world in no uncertain terms: You Support Our Troops! Wow! Such patriotism! What a courageous declaration. I’m sure your support goes beyond the mere display of a yellow ribbon sticker; you’ve undoubtedly written letters encouraging your congressional representatives to support our troops with adequate supplies and equipment.

Clearly, we don’t need the embarrassment of news stories telling about troops killed, maimed and injured in inadequately armored Humvees or of troops put in harms way without body armor. Frankly, it just doesn’t look good when some enlisted peon asks the visiting Secretary of Defense, at a PR staged news conference, why they are forced to pilfer junk yards looking for metal for fabricating vehicle armor; and, you are, of course, incensed by stories of commanders being forced into retirement because they dared to question politically driven Defense Department decisions. Oh, it also pisses you off to read about our troops being denied medical benefits when they return home injured. If that doesn’t quite make you want to relieve yourself, how about when VA hospitals and clinics are closed due to inadequate funding levels. If that still doesn’t quite do it, how about the efforts underway to sharply restrict long-term disability payments to the wounded veterans returning from Iraq. Hey, it all makes sense. Shoot, we’ve tried to make some of them pay transportation costs to and from medical centers too. Hell, what's a few bucks to those boys! Shit, they've laid their lives on the line; they know what it is to sacrifice. . .what's a few bucks to guys who've had to deal with life and death on a battle field. Well, gotta wrap it up here . . .I'm headed down to K'Mart. . .gonna get me a little yellow ribbon patriotism.

Ever on the watch,
Davy Crockett

Lookin' at Yer Sex In The City

2005-05-31T11:10:00.000-05:00

In varying stages of consciousness, I’ve now watched
between 6 and 8 episodes of Sex in the City. To my
considerable surprise, given the sexual nature of the
show, maintaining an alert state was not always easy;
more than once I lapsed into deep sleep. So, in
fairness, I did not count those missed opportunities
as part of the 6 to 8 I mentioned. If it wasn’t
pleasurable, why would I or anyone, for that matter,
voluntarily subject themselves to such torture? A
reasonable question.

After a seven or eight year run on HBO, the program
concluded this past year with a bang. Virtually every
media outlet of any consequence chronicled it’s
passing, as they earlier had Dallas, Mash, Sienfeld,
Friends. and a few other pop culture sensations.
Though I’d heard of the program and had certainly seen
numerous pictures of Sara Jessica Parker staring at me
from the tabloid racks at the supermarket checkout,
not having access to HBO, I’d never seen the show; my
education was not complete! To be sure, Sara
Jessica, from the vantage point of the tabloid
pictures I’d seen, impressed me as a strikingly
attractive woman, and that probably played some small
part in my finally wanting to fill this cultural void
in my life. That, coupled with the fact that, my
daughter came into possession of the 2nd season on
CD’s. I promptly borrowed them. Mind you now, I was
careful not to suggest anything bordering on a
prurient interest. This represented a quest for
cultural knowledge in the purest sense. Some may
delight in taking stock of shapely boobs and butts,
get excited at the sounds of groans coming from
couples grinding in the sack, or breath fast and
heavy at the sounds of rank, raw sexual talk between
semi-gorgeous babes seated close together around a
small coffee table sharing meat market commentary
about their latest romp in the sack, not me! Nope!
All I wanted to do was feed my incredible hunger for
knowledge of the pop culture; if somthin’ important
was bubblin’ in that domain I had an obligation to
know about it.

Sex and the City action is set in the Big Apple, has
a pronounced Mid Town flavor and features a cast of
four yuppy, thirtyish looking working women, and a
varying collection of their boyfriends; some of whom
seem to enjoy a little more permanence than others.
That is, they appeared in more than one episode. Now
I’d like to clarify one thing right up front, Sara
Jessica looks a lot better starin’ up at you from the
pages of those super market tabloids than she does on
the TV screen. To be sure, she’s not ugly, but then
she’s no raving beauty either, nor are the other
women of the cast. Indeed, that may in fact be part
the series’ appeal. Most guys can look at these
rather nondescript looking women and entertain the
thought that yes, she’s not beyond the range of the
possible; and by the same token, women can identify
with them too. In sum, these are the sorts of people
you would commonly meet in the supermarket, workplace
etc. But back to Sara Jessica for a minute. Judging
by her physical contrast with other characters, she
much smaller than I’d imagined, and rather, dare I
say, mousy looking. Interestingly enough, Ms.
Parker’s appearance noticeably changed with changes
in her attire or hair style, so much so that at times
I wondered if, in fact, I was seeing the same person.
Each episode features shots of one or another of
the women being pounded in the sack, showing virtually
everything but the insertion; and, about that, not too
much is left to the imagination; his size, or lack
thereof, and how it feels represent the dialogue. Now
if you’re not accustomed to hearing the word “f. . ..”
used in it’s varying grammatical forms, i.e., as an
adjective, a noun, and the like, brace yourself. It’s
used commonly enough in the dialogue here to make it
as inconspicuous as the articles a, an and the. But
then the word “f. . .” and it’s crudity are right at
home in dialogue that’s saturated with most other
common vulgarities associated with sex: “c. . .t, p. .
.y, c. . . k,” you get the idea. Let us not forget,
this show is titled, Sex and the City.

Though we are told that these women are
professionals, an attorney, a writer etc., beyond the
telling, the professions are of no consequence; the
focus of these shows maintains an incredible fidelity
to the theme announced by the title Sex and the City.
In terms of dramatic complexity the action doesn’t
wonder much beyond the sophistication of what’s
happening between dogs joined in the street. Now,
I’ll willingly admit my view is a bit harsh. .
.jaundiced even. We do learn a bit about these
young women and do develop a voyeuristic interest in
their lives not unlike the relationship people have
with the TV soaps in the afternoon or the more current
batch of reality tv shows. It’s sadly true that in
modern obese, porked up America, we’d rather sit on
our ass in front of the TV eating, drinking and
watching people live lives of adventure, no matter
how base or mundane, than to actually expend the
energy necessary to have that adventure ourselves.
I’m not a prude, I’ve done a few things in this
life that won’t recommend me for beatification anytime
soon; and I’ve done a few others that I’d do again if
this old body were only willing, but as we discover at some point in
life, if we’re perceptive enough, the past is past,
not to be reborn again tomorrow. And, given the
vociferous, self-righteous moralizing that so
characterizes the rhetoric of our times, I’m a little
reluctant to venture into any commentary that touches
upon the morality of shows like Sex and the City. To
be sure, the carnage that attends the current war is
of far greater, more immediate concern in my world.
Still, I can help but worry some about what impact
such programs as this will have in shaping our future
lives and the way we relate to each other. I don’t
have answers only concerns. In someways I think,
maybe 1984 arrived on schedule we just didn’t know it;
i.e., Big Brother wasn’t quite so obviously apparent.

Lookin’ at tv,

Davy Crockett

Immigration Myths and The Real World

2005-05-31T10:30:00.003-05:00

The following article, complete with footnotes, is
from the Organization of American Immigration Lawyers.
I'm forwarding it because there seems to be more than
the usual amount of xenophobia in the mainstream
currents of thought (if it can fairly be called
thought) at the moment.

As one who has spent a lot of time in the Third World
over the course of the last twenty or so years, I've
been very concerned about the misinformation that
floats around out there. . .much of it is not only
flat wrong, but it is often mean spirited.

I rather suspect that much of the concern stems from
the seemingly weekly reports of jobs being lost in
communities all across this land. In fact the jobs
lost are jobs that are typically shipped to China,
India, Viet Nam or some such place. . . .even Canada.
For example, when I located in Oshkosh some 25 or so
years ago, Oshkosh’bgosh clothing was manufactured in
Oshkosh. . .that hasn’t been true for a number of
years now; the old manufacturing site is boarded up. . .closed!
In addition the ubiquitous Leach Garbage truck, noticeable on city
streets all over America, was manufactured just a mile or so down the street
from my house. . .as of December 2004 the doors closed
on the Leach factory and re-opened in Canada, now all
we have is their garbage. The same sorts of business
closing and moving stories have been repeated for
well over a couple decades now; and during the last
presidential race, our president even told us it was
a good thing. . .that is., shipping jobs overseas.
The point is the movement of jobs from the US to low
wages in foreign lands is not a new trend and is not
caused by immigration. Indeed, immigration may even
serve to slow the process. But the fact is, there are
a number of folks who believe the following
immigration myths. We can not deal with reality if
we continue to live in a fictional world; we need to
rid ourselves of the mythology.

Ever on the watch for political polecats,
Davy Crockett

Five Immigration Myths Explained

Anti-immigration groups, in their efforts to further
restrict immigration and oppose any positive reforms
to our immigration system, often propagate myths to
support their agenda. Several of these myths are
addressed below—together with facts to set the record
straight.

Myth Number 1: Immigrants take jobs away from
Americans.

Myth Number 2: Most immigrants are a drain on the U.S.
economy or treasury

Myth Number 3: America is being overrun by immigrants.

Myth Number 4: Immigrants aren’t really interested in
becoming part of American society.

Myth Number 5: Immigrants contribute little to
American society.

Myth Number 1: Immigrants take jobs away from
Americans.

It is not true that immigrants take jobs away from
Americans. Here’s why:

* Immigrants do not increase unemployment among
natives. A study by economists Richard Vedder, Lowell
Gallaway, and Stephen Moore found that states with
relatively high immigration actually experience low
unemployment. The economists believed that it is
likely immigration opens up many job opportunities for
natives. They wrote, “First, immigrants may expand the
demand for goods and services through their
consumption. Second, immigrants may contribute to
output through the investment of savings they bring
with them. Third, immigrants have high rates of
entrepreneurship, which may lead to the creation of
new jobs for U.S. workers. Fourth, immigrants may fill
vital niches in the low and high skilled ends of the
labor market, thus creating subsidiary job
opportunities for Americans. Fifth, immigrants may
contribute to economies of scale in production and the
growth of markets.” 1

* Research on immigration’s labor market
consequences on minorities has also yielded
information that suggests little negative impact. In
her study on immigration’s impact on the wages and
employment of black men, the Urban Institute’s Maria
E. Enchautegui concluded, “The results show that in
the 1980s black men were not doing worse in areas of
high immigration than in other areas and that their
economic status in high-immigration areas did not
deteriorate during that decade.”2 The National Academy
of Science study The New Americans, while finding
there may be some impact of immigration on some
African Americans locally, concluded that “While some
have suspected that blacks suffer disproportionately
from the inflow of lowskilled immigrants, none of the
available evidence suggests that they have been
particularly hard-hit on a national level.”3

* Even in particular sectors of the economy, the
evidence of a negative impact of immigrants on natives
is limited. A review of studies by Jeffrey Passel of
the Urban Institute found that “The majority find no
more evidence of displacement than is revealed by the
aggregate data. Even studies of more highly skilled
occupations, (e.g., registered nurses), find no strong
evidence of displacement.”4

* Immigrants fill niches at the high and low ends
of the labor market. This will be increasingly
important in the future. As the U.S. population ages,
many skilled workers and professionals will retire,
leaving gaps for employers. Meanwhile, as jobs in the
skilled professions become more attractive, natives
will continue the trend of gaining higher levels of
education and abandoning lower skilled jobs. (Today,
less than 10 percent of native-born Americans have not
completed high school.) That will create gaps at the
lower end of the job market, as the demand in health
care, hospitality, and other service jobs increases as
the U.S. population ages.

* Some wage studies are dubious. Harvard economist
George Borjas has argued that immigrants lower the
wages of native high school dropouts. His theory is
that these impacts do not show up locally, since
natives move out of state in response to immigrants
moving into an area. However, research by Columbia
University economist Francisco L. Rivera-Batiz shows
the flaw in Borjas’ theory, since Rivera-Batiz found
that native out-migration in states that receive many
immigrants is barely measurable and to the extent it
occurs it is college-educated natives who have left,
presumably for a variety of reasons. Rivera-Batiz
concluded that “Although the supply of workers with
less than a high school education has been increased
by immigration, both theory and empirical evidence
suggest that there has been very little, if any,
impact of immigration on the wages of high-school
dropouts.”5

* There is no such thing as a fixed number of
jobs. Contrary to the belief that an increasing number
of people compete for a static number of jobs, in
fact, the number of jobs in America has increased by
15 million between 1990 and 2003, according to the
Bureau of Labor Statistics (U.S. Department of
Labor).6 Between 2000 and 2010, more than 33 million
new job openings will be created in the United States
that require only little or moderate training,
according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This will
represent 58 percent of all new job openings.7

Myth Number 2: Most immigrants are a drain on the U.S.
economy or treasury

Here’s the truth about immigrants, taxes and the
economy:

* All individuals who work in the United States
are required to pay federal income taxes. The only
exception is if they are exempted due to their level
of earnings, a provision of the tax code that results
in no taxes, or a bilateral tax treaty.

* Significant total taxes are paid by immigrants.
Immigrant households paid an estimated $133 billion in
direct taxes to federal, state, and local governments
in 1997, according to a study by Cato Institute
economist Steve Moore.8

* State level tax payments approximate natives.
Immigrants in New York State pay over $18 billion a
year in taxes, over 15 percent of the total, and
roughly proportional to 3 their size in the state’s
population, according to a study by the Urban
Institute. Average annual tax payments by immigrants
are approximately the same as natives—$6,300 for
immigrants versus $6,500 natives.9

* Long-run benefit. The National Academy of
Sciences concluded that “Over the long run an
additional immigrant and all descendants would
actually save the taxpayers $80,000.”10

* States come out ahead. In Congressional
testimony, University of California, Berkeley
economist Ronald Lee, the principal author of the
fiscal analysis in the National Academy of Sciences
study, concluded that a dynamic analysis, with the
appropriate assumptions, would likely show that 49 of
the 50 states come out ahead fiscally from
immigration, with California a close call.11

* Some of the Academy study is misused. Professor
Lee testified that some have misinterpreted the
Academy study’s use of the annual costs of immigrant
households to argue that immigrants are a large fiscal
cost to states. He has stated that “These numbers
[annual costs of immigrant households] do not best
represent the panel’s findings and should not be used
for assessing the consequences of immigration
policies.” He found that it is misleading, on an
annual basis, to calculate the schoolage, native-born
children of immigrants as costs caused by immigrant
households but not to include the taxes paid by those
children when they enter the workforce. Professor Lee
also testified: “Reducing immigration would make it
more difficult to support the health and retirement of
the baby boom generation.”12

* Overall economic benefits of immigration. The
report by the National Academy of Sciences also found
that immigrants benefit the U.S. economy overall, have
little negative effect on the income and job
opportunities of most native-born Americans, and may
add as much as $10 billion to the economy each year.
As a result, the report concluded, most Americans
enjoy a healthier economy because of the increased
supply of labor and lower prices resulting from
immigration.13

* Economists agree on immigration’s benefits. In a
poll of eminent economists conducted by the CATO
Institute in the mid-1980s and updated in 1990, 81
percent of the respondents opined that, on balance,
twentieth-century immigration has had a “very
favorable” effect on U.S. economic growth.14 Moreover,
56 percent of the economists polled believed that more
immigration would have the most favorable impact on
the U.S. standard of living, while another 33 percent
felt that the current levels of immigration would have
the most favorable impact.15

Myth Number 3: America is being overrun by immigrants.

Here are the facts on immigration statistics:

* The number of immigrants living in the United
States remains relatively small as a percentage of the
total population. While the percentage of U.S.
residents who are foreign-born is higher today than it
was in 1970 (currently about 11 percent), it is still
less than the 14.7 percent who were foreign-born in
1910.16

* The annual rate of legal immigration is low by
historical measures. Only 3 legal immigrants per 1,000
U.S. residents enter the United States each year,
compared to 13 immigrants per 1,000 in 1913.17

* The 2000 Census found that 22 percent of U.S.
counties lost population between 1990 and 2000. Rather
than “overrunning” America, immigrants tend to help
revitalize demographically declining areas of the
country, most notably urban centers.18

Myth Number 4: Immigrants aren’t really interested in
becoming part of American society.

Here’s information about immigrants’ feelings about
the country and the future:

* Immigrants more optimistic about nation’s
future. “A poll of Hispanics finds they are far more
optimistic about life in the United States and their
children’s prospects than are non-Latinos,” according
to an August 2003 New York Times/CBS News poll.19

* Immigrants identify with America. “Nearly 70
percent of foreign-born Hispanics say they identify
more with the United States than with their country of
origin,” according to the New York Times/CBS News
poll. Only 16 percent, including those here fewer than
5 years, said they identify more closely with their
native country.20

* Immigrants believe in the American Dream. A
CNN/USA Today poll reported that more immigrants than
natives believe that hard work and determination are
the keys to success in America, and that fewer
immigrants than natives believe that immigrants should
be encouraged to “maintain their own culture more
strongly.”21

* Immigrant children learn English. In San Diego
90 percent of second-generation immigrant children
speak English well or very well, according to a Johns
Hopkins University study. In Miami the figure is 99
percent.22

* Naturalization rates rising. Statistics from the
2000 census indicate a steady rise in the
naturalization rates of immigrants. In 2000, slightly
more than 37 percent of all foreign-born residents
were naturalized, a 3 percent increase from 1997.23

* Immigrants want to become proficient in English.
Reports from throughout the United States indicate
that the demand for classes in English as a second
language far outstrips supply. Data from fiscal year
2000 indicate that 65 percent of immigrants over the
age of five who speak a language other than English at
home speak English “very well” or “well.”24 The
children of immigrants, although bilingual, prefer
English to their native tongue at astounding rates. In
fact, the grandparents and parents of immigrant
children have expressed some concern that their
youngsters are assimilating too quickly.

* Immigrants learn English. Only 3 percent of
long-term immigrants report not speaking English well,
according the National Academy of Sciences.25

Myth Number 5: Immigrants contribute little to
American society.

The facts show that immigrants contribute
significantly to America:

* Immigrants show positive characteristics. A
Manhattan Institute report showed that immigrants are
more likely than are the native born to have intact
families and a college degree and be employed, and
they are no more likely to commit crimes.26

* High levels of education for legal immigrants.
According to the New Immigrant Survey, which measures
only legal immigrants, “The median years of schooling
for the legal immigrants, 13 years, is a full one year
higher than that of the U.S. native-born.” The New
Immigrant Survey is a project headed by the Rand
Corporation’s Jim Smith.27

* Immigrants help with the retirement of baby boom
generation. While countries in Europe and elsewhere
will experience a shrinking pool of available workers,
the United States, due to its openness to immigration,
will continue healthy growth in its labor force and
will reap the benefits of that growth. Federal Reserve
Board Chairman Alan Greenspan has stated that
“Immigration, if we choose to expand it, could prove
an even more potent antidote for slowing growth in the
working-age population.”28

* Foreign-born expertise aids U.S. research and
development. Foreign-born scientists and engineers
make up 28 percent of all individuals with Ph. Ds in the
United States engaged in research and development in
science and engineering, helping to spur innovation.29

* Immigrants contribute to entrepreneurship. Inc.
Magazine reported in 1995 that 12 percent of the Inc.
500—the fastest growing corporations in America—were
companies started by immigrants.

Our understanding of the meaning of American
patriotism would not be complete without considering
the pride and commitment immigrants demonstrate on
behalf of the United States. According to the U.S.
Department of Defense:

* More than 60,000 immigrants serve on active duty
in the U.S. Armed Forces.

* Immigrants make up nearly 5 percent of all
enlisted personnel on active duty in the U.S. Armed
Forces.

* Nearly 7 percent of U.S. Navy enlisted personnel
are immigrants.30

Historically immigrants have made significant
contributions to the defense of America:

* More than 20 percent of the recipients of the
Congressional Medal of Honor in U.S. wars have been
immigrants, a total of 716 of the 3,406 Medal of Honor
recipients have been immigrants.

* 500,000 immigrants fought in the Union Army
during the Civil War.

* A special regimental combat team made up of the
sons of Japanese immigrants was the most decorated of
its size during World War II.

* Major U.S. weapons, such as a more advanced
ironclad ship, the submarine, the helicopter, and the
atomic and hydrogen bombs were developed by
immigrants.31

* On July 3, 2002, President Bush recognized the
contributions of immigrants in the U.S. Armed Forces
by signing an executive order that provided for
“expedited naturalization” of noncitizen men and women
serving on active-duty since September 11, 2001. The
order granted some 15,000 members of the U.S. military
who served fewer than three years the right to apply
for expedited citizenship in recognition of their
service.

* After the passage of Section 329 of the
Immigration and Nationality Act, 143,000 noncitizen
military participants in World Wars I and II, and
31,000 members of the U.S. military who fought during
the Korean War, became naturalized American citizens,
according to White House statistics.32

* At a time when Americans value patriotism more
than ever, immigrants demonstrate that they are a part
of this spirit through their service in the military.
Paul Bucha, President of the Congressional Medal of
Honor Society, has stated: “I put to you that there is
a standard by which to judge whether America is
correct to maintain a generous legal immigration
policy: Have immigrants and their children and
grandchildren been willing to fight and die for the
United States of America? The answer right up to the
present day remains a resounding ‘yes.’”33

Conclusion
In sum, who are these people we call immigrants? They
could be your parents, your grandparents, your
teachers, your friends, your doctors, your policemen,
your grocer, your waiter, your cook, your babysitter,
your gardener, your lawyer, your favorite actor,
actress, or sports hero, your shopkeeper. Immigrants
permeate the fabric of America. They are an integral
part of our society, its goals and its values. The
backbone that helps make this country great, they set
us apart from every nation in this world. In short,
they are us.

Footnotes

1 Richard Vedder, Lowell Gallaway, and Stephen Moore,
Immigration and Unemployment: New Evidence,Alexis de
Tocqueville Institution, Arlington, VA (Mar. 1994) at
p. 13.
2 Maria E. Enchautegui, “The Effect of Immigration on
the Wages and Employment of Black Males,” Urban
Institute, Washington, D.C. (May 1993) at p. 17.
3 The New Americans, National Research Council, 1997,
p. S-5.
4 Jeffrey S. Passel, Immigrants and Taxes: A
Reappraisal of Huddle’s ‘The Cost of Immigration’, The
Urban Institute, Washington, D.C. (Jan. 1994) at p.
51.
5 http://www.columbia.edu/~flr9/
6 Council of Economic Advisers. Economic Report of the
President 2003, Table B-37.
7 Daniel E. Hecker, “Occupational Employment
Projections to 2010,” Monthly Labor Review (Nov.
2001).
8
http://www.immigrationforum.org/about/articles/tax_study.htm.
9 http://www.urban.org/url.cfm?ID=900094
10 Testimony of Ronald D Lee, Member, National Academy
of Sciences Panel on the Demographic and Economic
Impacts of Immigration, Before the Senate Immigration
Subcommittee, “Economic and Fiscal Impact of
Immigration,” (Sept. 9, 1997).
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.
13 The New Americans, supra note 3.
14 Julian L. Simon, “Immigration: The Demographic and
Economic Facts,” Cato Institute and National
Immigration Forum (Dec. 11, 1995).
15 Ibid.
16 Griswold, Daniel T., “Immigrants Have Enriched
American Culture and Enhanced Our Influence in the
World,” Insight on the News (Feb. 18, 2002).
17 The New Americans, supra note 3.
18 Ibid.
19 Simon Romero and Janet Elder, “Hispanics in the
U.S. Report Optimism,” New York Times (Aug. 6, 2003).
20 Ibid.
21 http://www.cato.org/pubs/handbook/hb105-29.html.
22 Ibid.
23 American Immigration Law Foundation (AILF) Policy
Report “Realities of Immigration Emerge in 2000
Census” (Mar. 2002).
24 Elizabeth Grieco, “English Abilities of the U.S.
Foreign-Born Population,” Migration Policy Institute
(Jan. 1, 2003).
25 The New Americans, supra note 3. The report stated
that, according to the 1990 Census, “of those who had
been here 30 years or more, only 3 percent reported
that they could not speak English well.”
26 http://www.cato.org/pubs/handbook/hb105-29.html.
27 Stuart Anderson, “Muddled Masses,” Reason (Feb.
2000).
28 Testimony of Alan Greenspan before the Special
Committee on Aging, U.S. Senate (Feb. 27, 2003).
29 Science and Engineering Indicators 2002, National
Science Foundation.
30 AILF Policy Report, “U.S. Soldiers from Around the
World: Immigrants Fight for an Adopted Homeland”
(updated Mar. 2003).
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid.

Newsweek and Afghanistan

2005-05-30T15:59:00.000-05:00

Unless you've been living the life of a mole
underground, oblivious to it all, you know that this
past week, Newsweek caught hell, and in a very real
sense the main stream media too, from the Bush
Administration for printing an unverifiable story
about prison guards desecrating the Arab holy book at
our prison site in Cuba. Never mind now that numerous
other sources, including the International Red Cross,
The Washington Post and The New York Times
have made the same charge on numerous occasions. The
Bush Administration blames the Newsweek piece for
causing the deadly reaction against Americans that
resulted in the death of 17 people in Afghanistan. The
question then is this: Are the Arabs reacting to the Newsweek
sentences?
(As a nine sentence paragraph in the Periscope section, it hardly qualifies as an article.)

Before we castigate Newsweek any
more, we'd be wise to remember some of the many
reasons this administration has given the Arab World
for hating us, and given the Bush Administration's
reaction to the offending sentence in Newsweek,
perhaps it would be wise to reconsider the damage done
by the hundreds of pictures taken in the Baghdad
prison depicting inhumane treatment of Arab prisoners,
or how about the brutal murder of prisoners in
Afghanistan? Is it possible that those incidents might
have triggered the violent response?

And then , as Frank Rich noted in the NYTimes, there is the
case of Rummy's right-wing Lt.
General William G. Boykin “. . .barnstorming American
churches making internationally publicized
pronouncements that his own Christian God is 'a real
god' and Islam's god is 'an idol.' " Lest you think
that the good general was merely expressing his views
as a private citizen, remember that he appeared in
fully dress uniform, giving the unquestioned
appearance of the Pentagon point of view. Now
really, who do you really think did more damage? The
General being broadcast all over the world on
international television or the actions of a couple punk prison guards
mentioned in Newsweek’s Periscope, and in fact the Newsweek piece went
unnoticed for a week or so. However we decide to apportion blame in
this matter, it is painfully obvious that ideas, actions and deeds do
have consequences. It is shortsighted beyond comprehension to believe
that it is only some obscure piece, tucked away in the Periscope section of Newsweek,
that attracts notice in the Arab world.

Davy Crockett

Update: This from the NYTimes: 26 March 2005

May 26, 2005
Documents Say Detainees Cited Abuse of Koran by Guards
By NEIL A. LEWIS

WASHINGTON, May 25 - Newly released documents show that detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, complained repeatedly to F.B.I. agents about disrespectful handling of the Koran by military personnel and, in one case in 2002, said they had flushed a Koran down a toilet.

The prisoners' accounts are described by the agents in detailed summaries of interrogations at Guantánamo in 2002 and 2003. The documents were among more than 300 pages turned over by the F.B.I. to the American Civil Liberties Union in recent days and publicly disclosed Wednesday.