Good riddance 2007!

As the dreadful year 2007 is consigned to history, I can't help but think of all we have lost.

First are all the vibrant, young human beings who will never again take a breath: 899 military men and women who died in Iraq; 32 students and teachers at Virginia Tech; 13 drivers on a bridge in Minneapolis; 14 Californians in the wildfires of October; and a charismatic female leader in Pakistan.

These are just a few among many others who died as a result of war, genocide, poverty, AIDS, cancer, inadequate health care, inner city gun violence, drug wars and automobile accidents. We lost many beloved people in 2007, as we do every year, but many of these deaths were completely senseless and premature, the result of terrible governmental policies or crazed fanatics.

We also lost a lot of financial security in 2007. Millions lost jobs to mysterious corporate policies like "downsizing" and "outsourcing," and, because of greed that led to the mortgage crisis, millions more lost their homes. It is estimated that by the time the mortgage crisis is resolved, $1.2 trillion in property values will be lost. In the California wildfires of 2007, 1500 families lost their homes and the insured value is estimated at $1.6 billion.

With enormous implications for global warming, the Greenland ice sheet was recorded to have lost 10% more ice in 2007 than it did in its previous record year. The amount of ice lost is equivalent to two times all the ice in the Alps.

The biggest loss in 2007, however, was the utter and complete loss of trust and faith in the conservative republican government of the United States, led by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Of course, this isn't new to 2007, merely a continuation of what began with the election of 2000 and the utter disregard for the Constitution by the Supreme Court, and continuing ever since then with the countless abuses of the Constitution by the Bush administration.

From the Patriot Act to the suspension of Habeas Corpus, from unlawful detainment of citizens to the torture and extraordinary rendition of non-citizens, from illegal eavesdropping to illegal "sneak and peek," from violations of the Geneva Conventions to illegal wars, from manipulated intelligence to refusal to honor Congressional subpoenas, from absolute secrecy surrounding White House activities to deleted emails and destroyed videotapes, from hundreds of signing statements to the unitary executive theory, from the illegal outing of a CIA agent to the commuted sentence of one of the guilty, from no-bid contracts for Cheney associates to work in Iraqi cities to broken promises regarding the rebuilding of an American city, this administration is responsible for the single most important thing we have lost this year and over the past seven years: trust and faith in our government.

And along with that loss, we have suffered the loss of many of our liberties guaranteed by the Constitution, and indeed we are on the verge of losing the Constitution itself.

In an editorial today, the New York Times summarized it well:

Out of panic and ideology, President Bush squandered America’s position of moral and political leadership, swept aside international institutions and treaties, sullied America’s global image, and trampled on the constitutional pillars that have supported our democracy through the most terrifying and challenging times. These policies have fed the world’s anger and alienation and have not made any of us safer.

In the years since 9/11, we have seen American soldiers abuse, sexually humiliate, torment and murder prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq. A few have been punished, but their leaders have never been called to account. We have seen mercenaries gun down Iraqi civilians with no fear of prosecution. We have seen the president, sworn to defend the Constitution, turn his powers on his own citizens, authorizing the intelligence agencies to spy on Americans, wiretapping phones and intercepting international e-mail messages without a warrant.

We have read accounts of how the government’s top lawyers huddled in secret after the attacks in New York and Washington and plotted ways to circumvent the Geneva Conventions — and both American and international law — to hold anyone the president chose indefinitely without charges or judicial review.

Those same lawyers then twisted other laws beyond recognition to allow Mr. Bush to turn intelligence agents into torturers, to force doctors to abdicate their professional oaths and responsibilities to prepare prisoners for abuse, and then to monitor the torment to make sure it didn’t go just a bit too
far and actually kill them.

The White House used the fear of terrorism and the sense of national unity to ram laws through Congress that gave law-enforcement agencies far more power than they truly needed to respond to the threat — and at the same time fulfilled the imperial fantasies of Vice President Dick Cheney and others determined to use the tragedy of 9/11 to arrogate as much power as they could.

In the year 2007, the president and vice president have continued their abuses of the Constitution, and deprived the people of the United States of their rights, liberties, and reputation with the rest of the world.

We have a chance this year to overturn the nightmare of the past seven years. We have a chance to finally put in power someone who will restore the Constitution and truly represent the people of the United States of America.

This election is the most important in half a century.

We shouldn't elect someone because they oppose gay marriage, or go to the "right" church, or even because they believe in God. We must elect someone because they believe in the Constitution.

We shouldn't elect someone because they promise to protect our borders from Mexicans and Central Americans, but because they will protect the ideals and the liberties for which our forefathers fought so valiantly.

We shouldn't elect someone just because they scream "9/11" or promise to be the toughest guy on the planet, but because they know how to work with other countries and are more interested in peace than in war.

We shouldn't elect someone because they promise to lower taxes but because they promise to use tax money wisely.

We shouldn't elect someone who makes us afraid. Rather we must elect someone who promotes courage and hope.

In 2008, we will joyfully witness the end of the reign of George W. Bush and the criminal gang he brought to Washington.

In 2008, we have the opportunity to elect a wise and ethical leader who will restore our democracy and our Constitution.

So I'm not sad to see 2007 go. I'm looking forward to 2008.

Here's to a New Year, a new leader, and new hope.

Decision Time

Yesterday I got my voter pamphlet in the mail in preparation for the February 5th primary.

This is it – the beginning of a month of caucuses and primaries that will determine the 2008 nominees for president.

I have long believed that the fix is in and newspapers, corporations and Democratic power brokers are determined to make Hillary the nominee. That's how I think it works. No matter how much a populist candidate like Edwards or Obama, or Dean last time around, captures the imagination of the people, the media, the corporate power structure, and the party machine are simply too strong to allow the great unwashed masses to have their say.

I hope I'm proved wrong. It's not that I don't think Hillary would make a competent president. She would be entirely competent if she ever became president. But there are two huge problems with a Hillary candidacy, the first being that I fear she can't win. No one can run dirty, smear campaigns like the other party, and they despise Hillary Clinton more than they despised John Kerry, and they pretty much made mincemeat out of him. Could she overcome that and win anyway? She might be able to squeak out a narrow victory depending on who the Republicans nominate, but many of us would suffer enormous anxiety until the results are in.

The second problem is that even if she wins, she won't bring the kind of change that most of us in the party want to see. Her presidency won't be a transformational one, an inspiring one, a unifying one. Under President Hillary Clinton the corporations will grow stronger and the middle class will grow smaller, and the divisions in the country will continue and possibly grow wider.

Will I still vote for her if she is the nominee? You bet your life. I may think she is the worst choice for the democrats, but even the worst choice on my side is better than the best choice on the other side. At least Hillary would do something to protect the environment and to repair our reputation around the world. Under a Clinton presidency something would be done about health care and the budget deficit. And a President Clinton, being an attorney and a former Senator, would understand how important it is for the president to obey the law and honor the Constitution.

None of those things (environmental protection, international cooperation, health care, sane economic policies, and a rededication to the Constitution) would be a sure thing in any Republican nomination. Just listen to the candidates.

So while I will be disappointed if Hillary wins in both Iowa and New Hampshire and then goes on to win in the primaries on February 5th, I will still support her. I will, however, be enormously disappointed that we democrats, by not choosing the populist Edwards or the inspiring and brilliant Obama, missed a real opportunity to say "no" to the media, the corporations, and the democratic machine. And I will be fearful every day until the national election that the choice of Hillary may mean four more years of republican destruction of the middle class, refusal to join the international community, environmental disaster, and the horrible specter of war.

Conservative fears, conservative fictions

Every once in a while a seemingly trivial event happens that not only exposes the modus operandi of a group of people, but actually stands as a metaphor for who they are and what defines them.

That event happened last week at Princeton University when conservative student Francisco Nava called 911 and hysterically reported he had been attacked by two masked men. He had cuts and bruises on his face, and insisted his attackers had been people who had been making death threats against him because of his conservative views on sex.

Nava, a supposedly pious Mormon, belongs to a society on campus that promotes abstinence and condemns the university's policy of providing condoms to students requesting them.
Conservative university activists and commentators like Robert George and David Horowitz, as well as a number of conservative bloggers came to his defense and implied this "hate crime" proved how much the left hated religious students who speak up for their beliefs.

The only problem was that Nava eventually admitted he made the whole thing up. The death threats had been fabricated and the wounds were self-inflicted.

So what does the fabricated story of one obviously demented young person represent in terms of the bigger picture?

First of all, it represents the extreme paranoia of the radical right. From the feared takeover of America by Communism in the fifties, to the hysteria over hippies and sexual expression in the sixties, to the fear of "liberal courts" in the seventies, to the fear of AIDS and homosexuals in the eighties, to the fear of Clinton in the nineties, to the fear of "Islamofascists," liberals, and illegal immigrants today, the one thing that unites extremists on the right is either actual fear of what they see as one or another "demonic" movement, fueling the activities or beliefs of other human beings – often their fellow citizens - or the use of fear to score political points. Either way, real or cynically hyped fear of some horrible fate has defined radical conservatives for over fifty years. It is what fuels the continuing support of the war against a nation that did not attack us (because in their minds it could have) as well the assertion that there is a "war on Christmas" (which they see as one battle in the war against Christians).

Secondly, it represents the willingness to blatantly lie to achieve your ends. Whether we are talking about a deranged college student with a fear of sex manufacturing death threats and actual attacks against himself, or the president of the United States and his paranoid vice president concocting a fantasy of aluminum tubes and mushroom clouds, radical conservatives who live on fear demand absolute power over their fellow citizens, and to achieve and maintain power they will lie, fabricate, distort the facts, and even hide and destroy contrary evidence.

Fear is such a terrible thing to live with on a daily basis. It keeps the body in a state of alert unnecessarily, because most of what we fear simply does not come true. All but a handful of the things we feared as children were irrational and most of us who achieved some level of maturity grew out of those fears. That doesn't mean no bad things happen in life. Of course bad things happen, but interestingly enough most of those bad things surprise us. The things we obsess about, however, are usually things that never come to pass. Conservatives spent decades worrying that the Soviet Union would start a nuclear war with us, and it never happened. On the other hand, no one seemed worried that planes could crash into buildings and kill thousands of people, yet today we live with the terrible memories of the surprise attacks of 9/11.

Yes, there was a Soviet Union whose leader said "We will bury you," but those were words. The reality is that ultimately the Soviet Union buried itself. And as much as some religious conservatives want to fret about it, homosexuals are not ruining marriage, antiwar citizens are not going to "defeat" America, the courts are not going to outlaw Christianity, and no one is waging war on Christmas.

Either radical conservatives have completely lost their minds, or this is all a very calculated move on their part to scare people into giving up their rights, their ideas, and their freedoms in order to change America into a place where they can once again be spoiled children, demanding that mommy give them everything they want, and having temper tantrums when they have to face something they don't like and don't understand.

We liberals, who are the target of their attacks, their lies, and their fears, are simply ordinary people who look at the world differently than they do. We aren't liberal because we want to take away anyone's freedoms. We are liberal because we believe in equality and freedom for all, not just for the white or the wealthy. We aren't liberal because we are trying to steal anyone's hard earned money. We are liberal because we believe in the power of a community coming together and pooling some of their resources for the benefit of all. We don't condone sexual promiscuity, but we also don't want to see the spread of sexually transmitted diseases or an increase in abortions because young people give in to powerful sexual urges and have unprotected sex. I could go on and on, but the point is really simple. We may differ on some ways to go about building a better society, but we are not the enemy.

We also don't use violence to achieve our ends and never have. We use words and legal means to get our points across. We don't attack people physically and we aren't trying to destroy morality or society. Those who look for physical attacks, falsely report physical attacks, or see the threat of nuclear annihilation or societal decay around every corner, whether they are Francisco Nava or Dick Cheney or Mike Huckabee, who seems to have his own irrational fears about sex, writing in 1998 that "it is now difficult to keep track of the vast array of publicly endorsed and institutionally supported aberrations—from homosexuality and pedophilia to sadomasochism and necrophilia," have something seriously wrong with them psychologically.

They should, of course, be afforded the same freedom of speech as the rest of us, but the American people should educate themselves, see how irrational they are, and consign them to the fringes of society.

The greed market and the growth deception

Over at Outraged Citizen, I have presented a laywoman's perspective on the current housing crisis as only the latest example of how the "free market" over the past sixty years has been a predatory market, how it is destroying the middle class, and how the measurement of "growth" in the economy is a decptive indicator of the health of our economy as well as our democracy. Today's free market lures Americans into buying things they cannnot afford on credit, and then penalizes them when they cannot pay:

If the "free market" has become nothing more than a market to make the rich richer, while using and abusing the poor and working classes in deceptive financial proposals they don't understand and shouldn't be expected to understand, tempting and luring them into wanting the things the upper class and upper middle class can afford, convincing them they "deserve" these things, and offering them creative ways to possess them, only to penalize them later because they could never afford them in the first place, then it is a market controlled by powerful, unconscionable forces that threaten us all. It is a market that is neither "free" nor "fair." It is a predatory market, a market that could eventually crush the middle class.

The importance of timing

I'm beginning to think that victory in the presidential race is all about timing.

Four years ago, Howard Dean was doing quite well, leading in many polls as the Iowa Caucuses neared. However, he lost there, coming in third as I recall. Kerry, who had been quite a bit behind both Dean and Gephardt just a few weeks before the caucuses, pulled out a surprise victory and Dean and Gephardt saw their chances end that day. Many have attempted to explain that turn of events, none of them satisfactorily.

This year, just two weeks before the caucuses, the long time frontrunners in both parties, Romney and Clinton, also seem to have peaked too soon, and now we see Huckabee surging from out of nowhere, and Obama finally overtaking Clinton. These are clearly two of the most inexperienced candidates, in terms of governing at the federal level, but perhaps have campaign teams that know something about the psychology of the American people, who can be quite fickle, are easily bored, and embrace novelty.

It is possible, of course, that these last minute changes in candidate preference have to do with voters evaluating the clients over time and thus changing their minds as they accumulate more information. Or perhaps this really is a change election, and Obama and Huckabee, being unfamiliar to many Americans prior to the campaign, represent the biggest change. But it is also possible that American voters, trained by advertising to opt for the new brand, simply get tired of seeing and hearing so much from and about the frontrunners.

Could timing have as much to do with it as anything else? And if so, is this really the best way to choose a president?

David and Goliath in California

The small town of Portrero, California, in San Diego County just stood up to Blackwater USA, a company that has been called "the world's most powerful mercenary army." 824 acres in and near the town had been the choice for Blackwater West, a new training facility for mercenaries and bodyguards (and possibly future border guards), and the city council had been inclined to approve the project.

The ordinary citizens of Portrero, however, opposed having Blackwater in their backyard for many reasons: fire hazard, traffic, noise, water rights, etc. They wanted to preserve their quality of life in this rural town and they didn't want a private army marching in. So they stood up and voted this week to oust all the pro-Blackwater council members and replace them with leaders who oppose the invasion of Blackwater.

The San Diego County Board of Supervisors has the final say on the project, but it will now be more difficult for them to approve it because these residents of the affected land have spoken so loudly. The Board may still reject the will of the residents of Portrero, but they might want to think twice. Supervisors can also be recalled, and Blackwater officials don't have a vote.

A Senator in the White House

We have a myth in this country that anyone can grow up to be president. Not true.

For one thing, voters prefer to elect governors rather than senators, which is why the last senator elected to the presidency was John Kennedy, forty-eight years ago. Since then, we have elected three candidates who had served as vice presidents, and four who were governors. For some reason, many voters are suspicious of Washington insiders, and think lawmakers are not good choices for the presidency. Therefore, they often prefer to bring in an "outsider," no matter how incompetenet or inexperienced that outsider is.

Yet in this primary campaign, we have many senators running for office, all of them the most qualified candidates for the job.

In the Republican field, John McCain is the only senator running, and he is by far the most experienced and qualified of the Republican candidates running for president. Mitt Romney has experience as governor, as does Huckabee, but neither seems very knowledgeable in foreign policy, which is essential at this time in history. Besides, they seem more interested in fighting with each other over religion right now. Rudy Giuliani's best experience seems to be with finding new wives and assigning police officers to protect them from imaginary threats, and Tancredo and Hunter like to act tough on their respective issues - immigration and the war – but don't have much to say about anything else. Ron Paul has apparently figured out how to raise money, but he wants to shut down so much of the government that he really can't be considered a serious candidate for the presidency.

On the democratic side, one former senator and four current senators are vying for the nomination: John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Chris Dodd, and Joe Biden. Dodd and Biden probably have the most experience and would make wise presidents, but Clinton and Obama have the most money and the most media attention. Edwards is an attractive candidate, but many believe him to be unelectable as he was on the losing ticket last time. Kucinich is right on most of the issues, but he can't get traction with the media, while Richardson just doesn't seem to connect with the voters. The democratic voters are in the mood for dramatic change this year so they will probably go with the first female nominee or the first African American.

It is definitely time to change the pattern and put a senator in the White House. Electing only governors, with experience only as chief executives, has only led to massive increases in the power of the president with a decrease in congressional power, which is not what the founders intended. And presidents who have never served in the legislative branch tend to have bad relationships with Congress, unless the president and Congress are of the same party. Few of the nation's problems are addressed when there is gridlock or open hostility in Washington between these two branches of government.

If the electorate holds to their previous forty-eight year pattern, however, and the republicans nominate Huckabee or Romney, both white male governors, and then manage to effectively "swift boat" Hillary or Obama with ugly misogynist or racist attacks, which they surely plan to do, we might have four more years of republican hell.

We can hope, though, that the electorate has finally woken up. Maybe the incompetent, power mad, and secretive presidency of George W. Bush will finally have cured them of their longstanding pattern of putting only governors in the White House.

Returning to the Dark Ages

I really, really don't like having the negative view of organized religion that I have these days.

I'm not talking about faith, or spirituality, or one's search for meaning in the universe, or even the sincere practice of a faith that encourages one to love one's enemies and care for one's neighbor.

I'm talking about the many negative manifestations of organized religion today in this country and around the world, manifestations that are self-righteous, arrogant, petty, hateful, and even deadly.

We are all familiar with the self-righteous ramblings of radical Muslims, and their call for jihad against the West, as well as their unconscionable acts, but should we not also be appalled by the Christians and Jews among us who are war's biggest cheerleaders and torture's apologists?

And what are we to think of the Catholic Church scandal involving the molestation of children by priests, and the multiple scandals in evangelical churches involving secret homosexual affairs by ministers even as they rail against homosexuality? The hypocrisy, of course, is stunning.

And now, religion has entered the presidential race in full force.

The Republican Party has been showing great deference to the evangelical community for years now, even as its leaders like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell insist Americans brought 9/11 on themselves, but the presence of a Mormon in the Republican field has made the specter of religion in politics even more absurd, if not dangerous.

Today, for instance, candidate Mike Huckabee, soft voiced, dewey eyed, dimple cheeked minister, with the name reminiscent of that beloved urchin created by Mark Twain, asked if rival Mitt Romney didn't believe Satan was the brother of Jesus. Though he later apologized and acted as if he meant no harm, the horrible word was out: Mitt Romney believes Satan and Jesus are in the same family. Now this is, to the best of my understanding, part of the rather convoluted dogma of Mormons, but how different is it really than believing that Lucifer was once the brightest and most important of all the angels, which is what Christians believe? It isn't all that different. Both are part of the complex narratives each religion tells. (Some of the things I was taught in Catholic school were real doozies, but let's not go there.) However, the very fact that Huckabee would bring this up, knowing how it would inflame Evangelical Christians, shows just how viscious he can be, and how dogmatic he knows many Americans to be, when it comes to religion.

At first, it seemed the republicans might embrace the Mormon Mitt Romney as an acceptable candidate, mostly because Rudy Giuliani was pro-choice and didn't hate gays, and no other candidate seemed capable of beating the democrats. He seemed nice enough, his looks were Reaganesque, and he was a white guy, but that religion thing just wouldn't go away. Apparently a group of evangelical home schooling parents in Iowa who couldn't stomach a Romney presidency began supporting Huckabee big time, and his candidacy has taken off. Now that it seems he can win, the evangelicals are flocking to support him, because, after all, it doesn't matter to them who might have the best economic or foreign policies or who might be the best leader, it only matters what one's religious beliefs are.

This, of course, is why our founders wanted to keep church and state separate, and why they said there must be no religious test for candidates for public office. They wanted to protect us from the kind of nonsense that ensues when we begin judging candidates on the basis of the church they attend and the religious dogma they embrace.

I thought we had gotten over this when Kennedy was elected president and proved that his religion had nothing to do with his presidential decision making. Fears of the pope sending orders to Kennedy, of course, were never realized and Kennedy is revered today by both Protestants and Catholics. But something has changed today. We seem to be in a big hurry to return to the Dark Ages when faith trumped reason, and religious affiliation was somehow proof of one's character and worthiness.

We should all remember how all of that turned out. The Crusades and the Inquisition, the two bloody and vicious historical events that pitted groups of believers against other groups of believers, are permanent blights on Christianity. Huckabee's attack (and other attacks circulating on the internet) may not be of the same severity as the attacks of the Inquisition, but they are in the same tradition.

Fortunately, the Dark Ages gave way to the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment, which is what inspired our founders to create this nation and to separate church from state.

Now, it seems, some in the Republican Party want to join church with state again, not formally of course, at least not yet, but informally, through whispering political campaigns, and slipping "innocent" questions about someone's faith into an interview, or as Romney did, implying that atheists and agnostics are simply not good Americans, or as others are doing, using Barack Obama's ancestry to imply he might be a "secret Muslim."

When it comes right down to it, the problem is dogma, i.e. beliefs that are held as absolute, mostly because some "prophet" or group of anonymous writers or preachers declare them to be the truth. Most dogmas contain truly unbelievable things to those who don't share the faith. Not being a Mormon or a Muslim, the belief in the "revelations" to Joseph Smith and Muhammad seem far fetched to me, but then as a Catholic, I have to admit that the teachings about guardian angels, Limbo, Purgatory, and indulgences are pretty out there as well. And the evangelical belief that the earth is only 6000 years old and that someday the good will be "raptured" up into heaven leaving behind their beloved family members, not to mention their clothes, is pure fiction to me. But it doesn't matter what I think or what anyone thinks about one's own or another's religion as long as it doesn't force its way into our politics.

In this country that was founded by wise and enlightened men, who professed many different faiths, there should be no need to debate our religious beliefs. All of us have some nutty teachings in our religions, at least nutty to those outside. So what? We are free to believe what we want about God and spiritual things in this country, and that is what makes us such a great nation. So why do we want to blow it by getting all worked up about what one group believes vs. another group? Do we want to divide the nation even more than it is already divided?

A focus on the religious beliefs of the candidates is simply a distraction from the things that do matter in this presidential campaign, like the war in Iraq, health care, poverty, the shrinking middle class, the environment and global warming, the need to find alternative sources of fuel, the population explosion that threatens to deplete the earth's resources, AIDS, the housing crisis, and so on. I want to hear about those things, not about the candidate's prayer habits or his religion's dogma. Have we forgotten so soon that Saint Ronny of California, the Republican patron saint, and Blessed Nancy, his wife, rarely attended church and brought astrologers into the White House? Perhaps in today's climate, Saint Ronny would have had to drop out before the second debate.

These attacks on people for their religious beliefs are part of the dark side of organized religion, and they both anger and terrify me. Not only does this intolerance divide us from each other, it ensures the ignorance and laziness of certain citizens when it comes to governance and voting. It is much easier to vote for a candidate on the basis of one issue, such as gay marriage or abortion, than to do the hard work of finding out all the policy positions of the candidate and the broad direction in which he or she wants to take the country. And it is much easier to simply believe God will guide the nation and anoint the leader, and then whisper his choice to you through your minister, than it is to educate yourself as a citizen.

It can't be said often enough that we are electing a president, not a saint, a theologian, or a holy man. We should be looking for courage and wisdom and maturity and stability and the ability to remain steadfast when trouble comes. We know that the pressures on any president are enormous. If prayer gives the president courage and strength to endure, terrific! If he gets his courage and wisdom from some other source, who cares? His religion, or even his lack of faith, should not matter. What should matter is his competence, his trustworthiness, and his vision for this country we all claim to love.

What shouldn't matter is whether he believes Lucifer was an angel or the brother of Jesus.

Hallelujah!

From the L.A. Times:

A proposed initiative that drew national attention for its potential to affect next year's presidential election will not appear on the June ballot, organizers said Thursday. Republican backers of the measure, which could have tilted the presidential contest toward the GOP nominee by changing how California awards electoral votes, conceded that they were unable to raise sufficient funds.

Sacramento consultant Dave Gilliard, the campaign manager, said that even if a financial angel were to shower the campaign with $1 million, there was not enoughtime to qualify the measure for June."I was surprised that more people that finance these types of efforts didn't step forward," Gilliard said. "We had strong supporters and good supporters but didn't come anywhere close to making the budget."

Whitehouse puts White House on notice

There is a new American hero in the Senate: Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who today took the Bush administration to task in a speech on the floor of the Senate in preparation for an attempt to repeal the "Protect America Act." It's worth reading at least twice. After outlining three formerly "highly classified secret legal opinions related to surveillance" which suggest the president has almost unlimited powers, including the unprecedented power to offer legal determinations that the Justice Department is bound by, he says,

We are a nation of laws, not of men. This nation was founded in rejection of the royalist principles that “l’etat c’est moi” and “The King can do no wrong.” Our Attorney General swears an oath to defend the Constitution and the laws of the United States; we are not some banana republic in which the officials all have to kowtow to the “supreme leader.” Imagine a general counsel to a major U.S. corporation telling his board of directors, “in this company the counsel’s office is bound by the CEO’s legal determinations.” The board ought to throw that lawyer out – it’s malpractice, probably even unethical.

Wherever you are, if you are watching this, do me a favor. The next time you are in Washington, D.C., take a taxi some evening to the Department of Justice. Stand outside, and look up at that building shining against the starry night. Look at the sign outside- “The United States Department of Justice.” Think of the heroes who have served there, and the battles fought. Think of the late nights, the brave decisions, the hard work of advancing and protecting our democracy that has been done in those halls. Think about how that all makes you feel.

Then think about this statement: "The Department of Justice is bound by the President’s legal determinations."

If you don’t feel a difference from what you were feeling a moment ago, well, congratulations – there is probably a job for you in the Bush administration. Consider the sad irony that this theory was crafted in that very building, by the George W. Bush Office of Legal Counsel.

Minister, Mormon, Muslim?

Mitt Romney gave his "don't disqualify me because I'm a Mormon" speech today, trying to fend off Mike Huckabee's surge among evangelical Christians. He spoke some moving words about religious freedom and tried to convince listeners that people of faith are all alike (until he talked about Muslims later in the speech). But he indicated that the president should be a man of faith, and should represent all people of faith in America. What he did not say is that the president represents all people in America, period. In fact, for blatant political reasons, he attacked people who profess no religion. He said:

"We separate church and state affairs in this country, and for good reason. No religion should dictate to the state nor should the state interfere with the free practice of religion. But in recent years, the notion of the separation of church and state has been taken by some well beyond its original meaning. They seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God. Religion is seen as merely a private affair with no place in public life. It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America – the religion of secularism. They are wrong."

In this deliberate slap at atheists, agnostics, and also people of faith who believe in a much clearer separation of church and state than most of the republican candidates, Romney is saying it is important to have religion in politics, and those who wish to have less religion in politics are somehow less worthy as Americans.

Romney also referred to the founders' determination not to have a religious test for candidates for public office, but instead of agreeing with them, Romney was basically implying that there is a test, and he has passed it. By saying a president must be a person of faith, Romney was instituting his own test, which would exclude atheists and agnostics as viable candidates for the presidency.

What Romney, and many in the Republican Party don't seem to grasp is that it is possible to consider oneself a member of a religious faith, or a very spiritual person with no specific religious affiliation, and still desire a secular society. There is no secular "religion" that I know of, but there is a desire on the part of some of us, including some with deep religious faith, to keep religion out of politics, because when you don't keep religion out of politics you get two things: insisting God has anointed you as candidate, or using religion as a weapon against an opponent.

The current religious test that many evangelicals seem determined to administer is one that says one must be an evangelical Christian to be president. This is why Romney, a Mormon, felt he had to give this speech today. It is also why you hear ordained Baptist minister Mike Huckabee saying, in response to a question about what accounts for his rise in the polls, that it was God responding to all the people praying for his candidacy. "It is the same power," he said, "that helped a little boy with two fish and five loaves feed a crowd of 500 people."

When politics and religion get all mixed up together you get this kind of response. You get Mike Huckabee in 2007 implying that God wants his candidacy to succeed, and you have George W. Bush in 1998 saying he believed God was calling him to be president.

At the same time, you have slanderous emails saying Barack Obama, a devout Christian, is a secret Muslim, who is hiding his real faith and who is a tool of al Qaeda who will help them destroy America from within. Anyone who has followed the candidacy of Barack Obama knows this to be absurd, but if you mix politics and religion, (and in this case paranoid fears of terrorism) and if you set up an informal religious test for the presidency, then all you have to do to succeed in getting yourself or your candidate elected is to prove you meet the test and your opponents do not.

Huckabee, like Bush before him, is sending signals to evangelicals that he passes the test, while Romney and Obama are faced with an uphill climb just to prove they are worthy. Romney, a Mormon, must prove Mormonism isn't that different from Christianity, while Obama, a Christian, must prove that he did not adopt his father's Muslim faith.

If we really honored the intent of the founders to disavow any religious test for public office, they wouldn't even be in that position, and those who are attacking them wouldn't have a leg to stand on.

I do not believe what the Mormons believe, and as an outsider I view some of their beliefs as more like science fiction, but I also don't think Mitt Romney would bring his religious beliefs into the presidency, nor allow leaders of the Mormon Church to tell him what to do. I know Barack Obama is not a Muslim, and having a Muslim father (who left the family when he was a baby) and having lived in a Muslim country for a few years doesn't make him one. And I also don't think Obama would allow his Christian pastor to influence his decisions as president.

There are many things worse than promoting a secular society where people are free to practice any religion they want even as they keep it out of politics and government. One of them is ending up with George W. Bush as president. The others are voting for candidates because they profess the "right" religion, or demonizing them in the name of religion.

I would gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today

Popeye's friend Wimpy was always trying to con people into paying his way, and one phrase he is famous for - "I would gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today" - could be our national motto, for that is the nature of the credit based society we live in today.

Clever advertising, crafted over the decades by retailers and credit card companies to convince Americans to buy now and pay later, and furthermore to convince them they "deserve" the things they want now but can't afford, is one of the main culprits in the current housing crisis and possible recession.

Banks and industries are unfortunately now reaping what they have sowed, and the indoctrinated consumer is getting the shaft, as they always do in an unregulated market.

Read the entire article at Outraged Citizen.

A matter of trust

I don't know what to make of the new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that concludes Iran stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

Apparently everyone else is off and running with it.

The Bush administration, in the person of Steven Hadley, was quick to spin the NIE, saying it proved the administration was right that Iran wanted a nuclear weapon and that its diplomatic efforts are paying off.

Except, of course, if the NIE is right, the administration has been wrong all along, claiming non-stop that Americans must be very afraid of Iran's "new Hitler," President Ahmadinejad, because he and his government are working their little fingers overtime to build a bomb. Cheney, especially, has been pushing for military strikes against facilities where those "bombs" are being built. Just a speech or two ago, President Bush spoke of Iran and "World War III" in the same sentence, just as he used to invoke the specter of mushroom clouds and 9/11 in every sentence about Iraq.

Others are embracing the report and blindly trusting it, even though the NIE was completely wrong about Iraq, and gave the Bush administration some of the cover it needed to wage the war it had been lusting after since it came into power.

How can we trust the NIE now when it got things so wrong before? Could it be wrong again? Or is it doing exactly the same thing it did nearly five years ago? Is it simply doing the bidding of the Bush administration?

In 2002, the administration needed justification for their war, and one came in the form of the NIE. In 2007, it may need justification NOT to go to war, and a new estimate gives them just that.

A lot of people, including myself, believed strongly that Bush was heading for, at the very least, air strikes against Iran. None of us quite knew how he was going to do that, in that our military is so tied down, its resources squandered, in Iraq, but none of us have ever seen Bush as being practical, and so a strike against Iran was always a possibility, especially with uncle Dick pressing his protégé so hard.

But it seems a few with much more common sense - and sanity - than the vice president may have prevailed. The release of the NIE may be the work of the Secretary of State, who has favored diplomacy all along, and seems to have learned from her mistake in supporting the Iraq War. It also may be that this president finally realized striking Iran would not only further damage his legacy, but possibly destroy the Republican Party not only in the upcoming election, but for decades to come.

It's too early to know, however, why this report came out now, and why it includes what it does. For that matter, it's too early to even trust what it says.

What I wish I had written...

Marty Kaplan has an essay in today's Huffington Post that reflects my sentiments exactly: in spite of just having suffered through seven years of governance by the worst president (and even worse vice-president) ever, there remains the real possibility that next November the American people could elect someone just as bad, or even worse (which seems unimaginable).

Here's a sample:

Despite all this country has gone through, anything can happen next November. Why should we believe that 2008 will not produce a president as incompetent and lawless as 2004 did, or as unelected as 2000 did?

If we think the news media in 2008 will rescue us from lying and demagoguery, we must have slept through its coverage of the run-up to Iraq, its yawning at Valerie Plame's outing and the Justice Department's corruption, its enabling of the Social Security "crisis," of "amnesty" propaganda, of the "other side" to evolution and climate change.

If we think that three billion dollars' worth of campaign ads in 2008 won't persuade Americans that day is night and black is white, we must not recall the Swift Boating.

If we place our faith in the critical thinking skills of the American people, we must have amnesia about the majority persuaded that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11.

If we believe that turnout in November 2008 will be unprecedented, we must also believe that voter caging, voter roll-purging, voter intimidation, papertrail-free machine voting, dubious election eve indictments, and the rest of the Rovian coup technology will somehow, perhaps out of the goodness of their own hearts, have been renounced by the Republican executive branch overnight.

Why Romney's "JFK moment" won't work

Mitt Romney has decided to channel JFK and give a speech about his religion. Spooked by the recent Huckabee surge in the Iowa polls, Romney wants to reassure Iowans that his Mormonism is not all that different from their Christianity, and that it will not determine the decisions he makes as president.

I suspect this ploy won't work for two reasons.

First, Mormonism is very different from the various Christian faiths in the United States. Mormons may, as Romney said, believe in the Bible, but they also believe in extra scriptures, among them The Book of Mormon and Doctrine and Covenants. Mormons also do not believe in the literal interpretation of the Bible and are suspicious of its accuracy. As Joseph Smith said, "I believe the Bible as it read when it came from the pen of the original writers. Ignorant translators, careless transcribers, or designing and corrupt priests have committed many errors." While some traditional Christians might agree with parts of this statement, it will not sit well with many others.

Mormons consider themselves nontraditional Christians, or a new type of Christian, and their desire is to convert traditional Christians to what they maintain is the true faith. That faith involves believing the teachings of Joseph Smith that, among other things, Mormons are called to restore the true Gospel of Jesus Christ that has been distorted by other churches. Again, this will not go over positively with most evangelical Christians.

Mormons also conduct secret ceremonies in a Temple which is off limits to all but a select group of Mormons in good standing. My guess is that most American Christians, who open their churches to all not just for the purpose of worship, but for the purpose of evangelism, would find this bizarre, elitist and even dangerous.

During JFK's run for the presidency, there was very real prejudice, mostly based on disinformation, against Catholics, but there are not that many differences in core beliefs between Catholics and Protestants. Both believe in the same scriptures and neither has extra scriptures unacceptable to the other group. And finally, the Catholic Church does not exclude people from its churches nor conduct secret ceremonies. Therefore, the main thing JFK had to reassure voters about was that he would not take orders from the Pope. Unlike Romney, he was not in the position of having to convince most Americans that he was a Christian, or that he believed the same things they did.

Second, we are living in a different age than the one in which JFK made his speech. Separation of church and state was the issue then, and evangelical Christianity was not the force that it is now. In JFK's time, most Americans worshipped privately, and wanted all religion to stay out of government. Today many Christians would like to see more of a connection between church and state, but only if the church is of the evangelical Christian variety. Because of this, a Mormon president would simply be unacceptable. So this puts Romney in an impossible situation. Romney must try to convince voters that his religion will not be brought into the oval office, when what the Republican base really wants to hear is that a candidate will bring his faith there, only it can't be Romney's faith.

This is why Huckabee is surging in Iowa. He will bring church and state together, and not only is his Christian faith acceptable to the Republican base, but Huckabee is an ordained Baptist minister.

With the evangelical Christians having found an acceptable candidate, Romney's presidential bid will soon be dead. And the speech he plans to give, unlike the speech given by JFK, will not help resurrect it.

Big Brother emerges from retirement

Most of my friends on the left have re-read Orwell's 1984 within the last five years and have noted the many similarities between the fictional world of Big Brother and the real world of George W. Bush, especially in the distorted use of words and language. The three slogans of Oceana, the fictional country in which 1984 takes place ("freedom is slavery," "war is peace," "ignorance is strength"), remind us of some of the titles of legislation offered up by the Bush administration ("clear skies initiative," "no child left behind," etc) which mask the real purpose of the laws. It doesn't require too much stretching to see how the Bush administration, with its mastermind Karl Rove (who just might qualify as the modern embodiment of the mythical "Big Brother"), learned how to distort language in order to fool the public.

The Bush administration also has a long history of distorting facts, as in the infamous WMD rationale for the Iraq War. Again, the truth is the exact opposite of what the administration tried to claim. And again, like the mythical country Oceana, which would be at war one day with Eastasia, and then the next day with Eurasia, with all references to the war with Eastasia gone from the public record, the Bush administration went to war in Afghanistan one day, and a few months later was at war with Iraq, with references to Afghanistan all but gone from the news. Likewise, just as Oceana was involved in a perpetual war that bestowed unlimited power on its leader, so George W. Bush has begun a permanent "war on terror" which he insists gives him unprecedented powers.

However, the blatancy of the lying has gone one step further with the re-emergence of Rove from his recent "retirement." Now Bush's Brain is blatantly rewriting history, accusing the Democrats of being the ones pushing for war with Iraq in the year 2002, when they were in fact the ones trying to delay a vote even as Rove's boss was preparing for a war he was determined to wage, even without a Congressional vote. Peter Baker of the Washington Post does a good job of proving Rove a liar by quoting former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer and former Bush chief of staff Andrew Card. According to Baker, Card said Rove's "mouth sometimes gets ahead of his brain" and Fleisher asserted "It was definitely the Bush administration that set it in motion and determined the timing, not the Congress. I think Karl in this instance just has his facts wrong."

Now if we really were living in Orwell's 1984, Card and Fleischer, like Winston, the hero who rebelled against the mind control of Big Brother, would have their faces stuck in rats' cages to have their noses eaten off. But this is Bush country, 2007, and Rove cannot stop the news media and the Democrats from refuting his lies.

But it doesn't matter to Rove. He knows he doesn't have to use torture and thought police to be effective. In a country of couch potatoes and mindless consumers, and a media controlled by a few corporations who care more about profit than truth, all he has to do is get the lie out there, just like the Swift Boat ads, and he can create a stir. Even with a few reporters finally rebutting him, the lie is still there and some people will believe it.

Rove has always implemented a strategy of winning with narrow majorities. He doesn't have to discredit the Democrats with a large number of voters, he just has to fool or confuse enough people to allow his side to win. So he lies, the lie is spread on page one of the major papers, the media belatedly and unenthusiastically rebuts the story on page nine, and he has "catapulted the propaganda," as his great leader once said.

This has been the Rovian strategy for the past two presidential elections, and now that Rove no longer has an official job in Washington, he is free to make similar mischief in this election. And, so far, just as the citizens of Oceana were powerless to confront Big Brother, the Democrats do not have an effective strategy to fight him.

And that is very bad news for all of us.

Questions not asked in the CNN republican debate

These are questions I wish someone had asked the republican candidates on Wednesday night. I think the answers would have been far more interesting than the anwers given to the same old questions always asked - even by "ordinary" citizens.

These are questions I've thought of since Wednesday. I'm sure I'll think of more, and some that should be asked of democratic candidates as well. I'll post them as I think of them.

Why do you want to be president – not why do you think you're qualified – but why do you want the job? What's in it for you?

What do you think of the job George W. Bush has done as president? What, if anything, would you do differently from him?

(Holding up a copy of the Constitution) Do you agree with everything in this book? Do you believe in everything in this book?

For example, do you believe in the balance of powers?

Do you believe, as it says in the Constitution, that only Congress can declare war?

Why did we really go to war in Iraq?

Under what circumstances, if any, would you go to war against Iran?

Why did we not go to war against Saudi Arabia when 15 of the hijackers were Saudis?

What do you think of the job your party and your president did in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina?

If a corporation can't be arrested, can't be convicted of a crime, and can't go to prison, and if a corporation can't get sick and be in need of medical care, and if it doesn't have a conscience or a soul or a mind or a body, should a corporation still be considered a person?

Do you consider health care a right or a privilege?

If you believe all Americans have a right to medical care, what would you do to improve our system of health care so that all Americans, including middle class citizens who cannot afford health insurance, have access?

Why is there no racial or gender diversity in this field of candidates?

If a pregnant woman's life was in danger and terminating the pregnancy was necessary to save her life, do you think abortion should be legal in that circumstance?

Do you believe in the separation of church and state?

Do you believe America is or should be a "Christian nation?"

Is water-boarding torture?

Should a nation of Christians engage in torture?

Are there any religious groups whose members would be disqualified from serving in your cabinet?

Would you ever include a Muslim in your cabinet?

What would you want your legacy as president to be? What would be the most important thing, other than winning the "war on terror," that you would want said about your presidency long after you die?

God, guns, gays, torture and taxes

I forced myself to watch the CNN You Tube debate last night because I wanted to put down my partisan loyalty for two hours and see if there was just one candidate on the Republican side that I could support in his bid to be president.

There wasn't.

In fact, my allegiance to the Democratic Party is stronger than ever, even with all of its weaknesses and flaws. How anyone could support any of those ridiculous white men after two hours of dissembling, flip-flopping, taunting, muscle flexing, Bible interpreting, Hillary hating, and gay and immigrant bashing I don't know.

What I learned by watching the debate was not only that I have no respect for any of the candidates as candidates (as people some of them might be okay) but that I simply cannot identify with any of the issues the republicans are obsessed with.

Since this was a debate in which ordinary people (except for Grover Norquist who appeared mid-debate) asked the questions via home made videos, the questions were representative of what republican voters care about. Sure, CNN picked the videos, and obviously slanted the topics to those they thought would be of interest to republicans, so there may have been other videos about other topics. However, these seem to be the topics the candidates always talk about, so I think it was representative of the republican mindset.

The debate began with a question about illegal immigration and immediately Rudy and Mitt were in a schoolyard name-calling contest about who provided sanctuary to illegal immigrants. It was embarrassing. The candidates all insisted they wanted a secure border (who doesn't?) but couldn't come up with any real policy to solve the problem of illegal immigration. No one seemed to want to touch the idea that corporations lure people here with the promise of jobs and that the Mexican economy is a big part of the problem, but that would involve having a sophisticated answer and apparently these candidates think their supporters only crave the red meat of immigrant bashing. It was shameless.

There were the inevitable questions about guns. The other candidates wanted to trip Rudy up on all the gun laws he supported, and the crowd actually booed when he said he thought there should be reasonable regulations. The answer was in response to a video where a young man caught a rifle that was thrown to him by someone off camera, at which point the ridiculous Duncan Hunter gave everyone a lecture about gun safety and the importance of not throwing guns to people.

McCain talked about all the guns he used when he was in uniform but, in response to an absurd question about what guns each candidate owned, he said he didn't own any now. I guess that means he can appeal to gun lovers and gun haters, I'm not sure. Maybe it just means "I'm so tough I don't need a gun." Romney, in one of his many more ridiculous moments, also tried to appeal to gun lovers and gun haters by saying there were two guns in his home, but they belonged to his son.

I wanted to get on You Tube and ask this question: "Do any of you know the psychodynamic significance of bragging about your guns?"

The blood thirsty crowd also liked questions about war and torture, although they did not look kindly on the retired gay general who asked when gays would be allowed to serve openly in the military. By far the most absurd answer of the evening was given by Duncan Hunter who claimed all the people in the military are Christians and they should not have to put up with gays in the military because it violates their moral code. Really?

I lived next to Camp Pendleton for nearly eighteen years and I can tell you that a great many of those Marines violated as much of the Christian moral code as was possible.

No one seemed willing to channel the father of modern conservatism, Barry Goldwater, who said it shouldn't matter whether you are straight as long as you can shoot straight.

From there it was on to torture. Again, Mitt wanted to have it both ways. He wouldn't ever torture anyone, but he refused to say waterboarding was torture. McCain jumped all over him and said waterboarding was most definitely torture and if a president won't condemn it and refuse to use it, the U.S. might as well withdraw from the Geneva Conventions. Good for you, John. If you weren't such a warmonger, and so contemptuous of the American people, whom you blame for the "loss" in Vietnam, I might be able to support you. (Note to John: it's those American people who opposed Vietnam and now oppose Iraq that you want to vote for you. Might not be such a good idea to attack them.)

One of the questions was from a very menacing looking young man who fit the stereotype of the Hollywood mass murderer. He held up a copy of the Bible and demanded to know who on the stage believed every word in the book. This struck me as a really stupid question. Does a candidate for president really now have to profess to a belief in the literal interpretation of the Bible? Only Mitt, Mike, and Rudy answered this one. The others (except Duncan Hunter) probably wanted to hide under their podiums. As much as I dislike Rudy, I believed he answered this best, saying the Bible is instructive but much is allegorical and metaphorical. Mike the preacher said he believed everything in the Bible although he couldn't claim to understand it all as he isn't God. Then flip-floppin', please-let-me-have-it-both-ways Mitt just kept saying he believed the Bible, hoping no one would ask him about those extra Mormon scriptures he also believes in.

There was another God question, this one asking whether Jesus would support the death penalty. No one gave a direct answer, because the answer would have to be "no," and the candidates know that republicans love the death penalty. Huckabee talked about how many people he executed as Governor of Arkansas and how difficult that was. Until this question, I was going to say Huckabee should run for preacher of a megachurch rather than president, but I'm not sure he qualifies for that either with his record on executions.

Grover Norquist had all the candidates falling all over themselves pledging not to raise taxes. A few said they wouldn't make the pledge to him but to the American people, while the mostly silly Duncan Hunter said he wouldn't make a pledge because there might be a national emergency. What a ridiculously absurd thing to take a pledge not to raise taxes, unless these eight old men can see into the future and know what we might face two or four years down the road. And they all must know that even if one of them becomes the president and keeps his pledge, everyone's children and grandchildren will be faced with higher taxes.

Republicans are so clever. They all lower taxes and pledge never to raise them, creating huge deficits and enormous economic problems for the country, knowing full well that eventually a responsible democrat will come along and be forced to raise taxes, whereupon they can point to democrats as those evil people who always raise your taxes. Brilliant!

So there you have it: God, guns, gays, torture and taxes, the big topics of the night. There was no discussion of the deterioration of the middle class, how to save Social Security and solve the health care crisis, how to shore up the economy, create jobs, and improve education. The one question about how each candidate would repair our image in the world was answered universally with statements about protecting America from "Islamofascists," and continuing the "war on terror," which is to say the question was not even understood by the candidates.

Another topic that was not addressed was the man they wish to replace as president. George Bush was not even mentioned, although Hillary was nearly a half dozen times. Mike Huckabee made the most hostile (though the audience thought it was quite humorous) statement of the evening when, in a question regarding the space program, he said he would like to send Hillary Clinton to Mars. I can't imagine a democrat saying the same thing about Laura Bush were she to run for president or any other office. For sheer nastiness, no one can beat a republican candidate, even one who calls himself a preacher. In fact, that's one of the defining characteristics of the Republican Party and one that came out quite vividly in this debate: their members claim to be Christian, but act in the most ugly, hostile, bullying, and unchristian ways imaginable.

As for my assessment of the individual candidates, I see each as fatally flawed. While Giuliani makes sense in terms of regulating gun ownership and not criminalizing abortion, he is too much of an imperialist, agressive warmonger. He truly scares me.

Mitt Romney is a joke, trying to be on both sides of every issue and trying to explain away positions he held years ago when it was necessary to hold those positions to win. He will do or say anything to get elected and so nothing he says can be trusted.

Mike Huckabee is a fundamentalist who, in spite of absolute evidence to the contrary, believes the world was created 6000 years ago. What other insane things might he believe and act on?
Ron Paul may have it right on the war, but he has it wrong on everything else. You can't just abolish all governmental agencies in a country this big and this interconnected. Libertarians who hate government shouldn't be in the business of governing.

Tom Tancredo is off the radar and should drop out soon. Thompson's candidacy makes no sense to me, nor does he. Hunter is a nutjob. And McCain is too old, too bitter, and too single minded about the war. It doesn't help that he despises the American people.

The question I was left with at the end of the debate was this: Couldn't the Republicans find any better candidates? I would still probably disagree with them on policy issues, but it would be nice to listen to one of them who was honest, decent, and who also made sense.

The only presidential candidate representing a new direction

It's just over one month until the Iowa Caucuses, the first chance ordinary citizens - and not journalists and pundits - get to say who they want to be the party nominees for president.

The caucuses are different than primary elections where people simply mark a ballot. In Iowa, people actually get together, discuss, debate, and lobby each other. They talk about electability as well as personal and policy matters and often end up voting for the person that started out being their second choice. This is why the results in Iowa are often such a surprise and why they often change the dynamic of the entire race. People aren't just voting alone; they are talking to each other and thinking things through with other citizens. What a concept!

Currently, Obama leads the Democratic field in the Iowa polls, but just barely. Hillary Clinton is close, as is John Edwards. As we all know, Howard Dean was the favorite in Iowa a month out, but his surprise loss there pretty much ended his campaign.

On the Republican side, Romney's early advertising and digging into his own pockets has him first in polls, but Mike Huckabee is closing in. Giuliani and McCain have not paid much attention to Iowa and so are not high in the polls. I guess they don't want to upset their slick media based campaigns with an appeal to the great unwashed masses. This way, they can simply discount the results in Iowa by saying they never really tried to win.

The way I see things today, I believe Obama might just pull off a big victory in Iowa, which will enable him to come in no lower than second in New Hampshire. Then it will come down to super Tuesday in February, when 22 states will hold primaries.

In fact, I think it just might be possible for Obama to win the nomination and even go on to be the first African American president in the history of the country. I don't say this because of any inside knowledge, but because I think he represents the best candidate in either party on which the American people can pin their hopes and dreams.

Every other candidate in the race is either a well known commodity infused with the negative taint of politics (Clinton, Giuliani, McCain, Edwards, Romney), a second tier candidate who excites some but is way too ideologically bound (Tancredo, Hunter, Kucinich, Paul, Huckabee) or someone who is really running for Vice President or Secretary of State (Dodd, Biden, Richardson).

Obama is someone new with a fresh face and a quick mind. He is psychologically just what the American people need right now. He is nothing like George W. Bush, and for that matter, nothing like Bill Clinton. His intelligence and ability to speak clearly outshine Bush. He seems more sensible and down to earth, and is not nearly as ideological as Bush has proven himself to be. While he shows strength, he doesn't display arrogance, something we have seen too much of with the last president and vice president.

He has charisma, but not like Clinton. He is not nearly as slick, having already made a few mistakes on the campaign trail. But the mistakes only make him more human, more likeable and more trustworthy.

His moving up in the polls is an indication, I believe, that the American people are starting to feel quite comfortable with him. At first, the Democrats gravitated to Clinton, believing she was tough enough to take on any Republican. But the people may be growing weary of her for a variety of reasons, and having second thoughts about voting for her. Like the Iowa caucus voters, Americans are thinking things through and may be deciding that the best solution to the national depression we feel, after seven years of Bush and six years of fear and war, is to turn in a completely different direction to a completely different kind of candidate.

I sense a real change of mood with the American people, and I think that is good for an Obama candidacy. We will have to see, however, if the monied interests and the media will prevent the American people from really knowing their own minds, and influence them to vote not only against their own interests, but against their political instincts.

All about family

The holiday season officially starts tomorrow and thoughts turn from politics to family, the reason some of us care so much about politics in the first place.

This year on Thanksgiving my three sons will be spread out across the country. Jeff is accompanying his girlfriend to her parents' home in Virginia. My son Matt and his wife Maria will sit down with my oldest son, Terry, and assorted friends in Seattle.

My husband and I will enjoy the company of my parents, my daughter and her husband, and my three beautiful grandchildren, Sean, Grace, and Maddie. The three will delight us with their youthful spirits, their imaginative play, and their boundless energy. Sean and Grace will run upstairs and get out their favorite toys - one of which is a six foot long soft toy snake that they drag throughout the house and dangle over the upstairs banister. Maddie, who is two, will amaze us with her ability to keep up with her older siblings who love Star Wars and Harry Potter. Note in the picture her Star Wars shirt, and her two "babies," whom she has named "Harry Potter" and "Malfoy."

Happy Thanksgiving!

Facing a moral crisis

In my last post I used as an example of the media focusing on trivial things, the story about John McCain laughing when a woman in the audience asked him how to "defeat the bitch."

Bob Fertik, over at Democrats.com, has a different view and I have to agree he makes an excellent point. He says:

Here's a thought experiment: imagine if John McCain had been asked by a South
Carolina supporter, "How do we beat the nigger"?

How do you think he would have reacted? Would he have fought off laughter, then cracked up, then said "it's an excellent question"?

Not on your life.

McCain would have looked at the woman straight in the eye and said "Madam, that is an appalling question." And if he hadn't, the media - and the American people - would have been all over him.

It's interesting that while racial slurs are no longer acceptable in political discourse, gender slurs apparently are still okay. Even though many still hold strong racist sentiments, they (everyone except George Allen) know enough not to use them. But some politicians apparently still think it's okay to laugh at a gender slur.

What is the word "bitch," after all, but an assault on a woman's femininity and an attempt to shame her into returning to a submissive feminine role?

It should be noted that John McCain did not use the word himself. He knows better than that. But his laugh and his comment indicate that deep inside he still holds the traditional view that women like Hillary Clinton are too uppity and should not be taken seriously.

Hillary Clinton may not want to play the "gender card, "pretending instead that she is being treated exactly the same as her male counterparts, but in fact she is being treated differently. The story a few weeks ago about her laugh is but one example. It has been described by numerous pundits as a "cackle," and by smarmy political consultant Dick Morris as "loud, inappropriate, and mirthless... a scary sound that was somewhere between a cackle and a screech." Of course, we all know what image the mind conjures up when he hear the word "cackle." More importantly, can anyone think of a male politician whose laugh was ever criticized? (Howard Dean comes the closest, but it wasn't his laugh that was demeaned but his "scream," which wasn't characterized as witchlike so much as proof he was unhinged.) No, Hillary Clinton's laugh was targeted because she is a woman, and only women can be characterized as witches, those mythical distortions of femininity who cast spells and eat children.

Hillary Clinton is also criticized for being calculating, for crafting careful responses, for raising huge amounts of money from corporate America, for using clever tactics that make her seem too polished, too ambitious. How is this strategy any different from that of most male politicians, and most particularly that of George W. Bush? Is she more calculating than he was when he put secret religious language in his speeches? Is she being more ambitious than he was with his rangers and pioneers? Is her responding to planted questions any more devious than his refusing to allow anyone into his campaign events unless they sign a loyalty pledge? Of course not. No one can match George W. Bush and Karl Rove in devious, dishonest, and calculating campaign tactics.

The difference with Hillary is that she is female, and somewhow female politicians are not supposed to compete the way men do, if they're even allowed to compete at all. As a woman, she's apparently supposed to charm men into voting for her, and assure women that she is not a threat to them.

Hillary Clinton, however, is a powerful woman in her own right, unlike most First Ladies who defer to their husbands. She was a respected lawyer who kept her own surname even though she was the First Lady of Arkansas for many years. She was a different kind of First Lady of the nation – one who dared become involved in something other than beautifying the nation or glamorizing the White House. Now she is a Senator with much influence and even more power. She is the strongest woman ever to achieve public office in this country and a force to be reckoned with – and many people, both men and women, cannot handle that very well. So they resort to demeaning her, cutting her down to the size they want her to be, using the tactics they always use to keep an "inferior" in his or her place.


The media's attempt to play "gotcha" with McCain's inappropriate response to a female questioner is not the real story here. I doubt McCain is the only Republican candidate who would have reacted this way. The question caught him off guard, and he did not have a canned response, so his natural prejudice came out unintentionally.

The real story is that prejudice against strong women still exists in this country, especially in the Republican Party, and in voters as well as candidates. There has been, and continues to be, a backlash against the feminist movement and against strong women, among conservatives and especially among certain religious conservatives who believe women must be subservient to men. (If you doubt that, just listen to Rush Limbaugh for one day.) McCain did what many in this group would do when he recognized a belief that he agreed with but dared not express himself. He laughed.

Above all, what the story tells us is that true equality does not exist in this country where large groups of people do not believe blacks are equal to whites or women are equal to men. Look at the Republican candidates – all white men - not a woman, not a Hispanic, not an African American among them. White supremacy and male supremacy still dominate large segments of this society and the candidacy of Hillary Clinton is the most serious threat ever to those ideologies. The candidacy of Barack Obama would likewise challenge them. These are ideologies based on fear, phenomena that I will explain in a future post. For now, I simply want to make this point:

Should either Senator Clinton or Senator Obama be the Democratic nominee, I predict we will face something of a moral crisis in this country. The once disguised biases of one segment of the population will become even more obvious, and we will have to decide as a country if we really believe in equality for all, as we say we do, or if we are simply fearful, lying hypocrites.

Getting the leaders we deserve?

I can't decide whether I want to scream for about five minutes, or throw an entire set of dishes across the room.

That's my general reaction to the presidential campaign, already in full swing one year prior to the election.

There is so much nonsense, insanity, dishonesty, and ugliness. There are so many dirty tricks, and media attempts to make mountains out of molehills, that the entire process of choosing a president seems tawdry and unbecoming a powerful and (supposedly) educated nation.

What bothers me the most, however, is the media's unending focus on trivial things. Last week, for instance, there was the story about McCain laughing when a woman at one of his speeches asked him how to "defeat the bitch." Then there was the story suggesting that the Hillary camp was playing the gender card. Then there was the debate in Las Vegas where CNN convinced a questioner to ask Senator Clinton if she preferred diamonds or pearls.

I am tired of hearing about John Edwards' haircut, or Hillary Clinton's laugh, or Mitt Romney's Mormonism, or Barak Obama's ancestry, or Mike Huckabee's Chuck Norris endorsement, as if these have anything to do with how good a president any of them would be.

In the meantime, the media doesn't pay nearly enough attention to things that are significant, such as Rudy Giuliani's actual record as mayor, Hillary Clinton's record as senator, Richardson's record as governor, and Edwards' work on behalf of the poor.

Because scandals and nonsense are easy to report and supposedly get ratings, the media seems unwilling to focus intensely on the candidate's positions on issues of importance, like the economy, jobs, health care, trade and foreign policy. We hear a little, but not nearly enough.

But, then, the media has decided the public isn't really interested in policy. They're convinced the public looks at political campaigns they way they read People magazine, or watch Entertainment Tonight. To the media, the people care about Hillary Clinton the same way they care about Brittany Spears, and so they call them both by their first names, and spread gossip about them in equal measure.

With this approach to covering campaigns, I can see it now – how two match-ups might play out in the media.

Rudy Giuliani vs. Hillary Clinton. A battle between the adulterer and the "bitch." A fight between a straight man dressed in drag, and "Nixon in a pantsuit." A contest between a guy who exudes enough testosterone to defeat the enemy, and a woman who is scary precisely because she's as tough as Giuliani. Giuliani and Clinton are the two candidates with the most baggage – he as a tough talking mayor who has been with a number of women (three of whom he married) - which is also a comment on his testosterone, she a perceived manipulator who, though married only once, chose to forgive her husband even though he has also been with a number of women. Rudy may be a cad, but he knows how to attract women - which makes him a guy's guy. Hillary may be forgiving, but she doesn't know how to keep her man interested, which reflects poorly on her as a woman. (These things might not be said, but they are implied.)

His claim to fame is walking around looking competent after 9/11 (even though the firefighters would say otherwise), hers is a failed health care plan in 1994 (even though she has been an exceptionally competent Senator for eight years). This would be an ugly race with an enormous amount of disgusting advertising about things that have nothing to do with the actual responsibility of the presidency. As such, it is the race the media wants, the one it promotes daily.

The other possible race that might appeal to the media is one between Mitt Romney and Barak Obama. The media would spin it this way: the Mormon vs. the son of a Muslim. Since neither candidate has the baggage of a Giuliani or a Clinton – both have been married once, both have limited experience in government, and much less media visibility – the campaigns would, I suspect, appeal under the radar to racist and religious bias. One side would appeal to anti-Mormon sentiment, the other to anti-black prejudice.

In spite of the ugliness that might appear in a Romney - Obama race, I prefer it over the Giuliani - Clinton race. Both Giuliani and Clinton have become caricatures, and a race between them would not be good for the country, nor would it be good to have either of them as president. While I think Clinton would make a relatively good president, in terms of ability, the radical right would do everything it could to destroy her and would thus cripple her presidency. Giuliani, on the other hand, would be a disaster even worse than Bush.

A Romney - Obama race, on the other hand, even with its potential for fueling all of our prejudices, might actually stretch us a little. It took JFK to finally convince people that a Catholic could be a good president. It might take Romney to convince people that a Mormon could be a good president or Obama to convince them of the same thing regarding an African-American. (And isn't it a shame that the people have to be convinced.)

How I long for a unifying leader, someone with integrity, someone who can appeal to a large enough group of Americans to overcome the partisan ugliness. On the other hand, maybe it isn't our candidates, maybe it's us. After all, there is no perfect candidate. If our media focuses only on their imperfections while it ignores their abilities and their platforms, and we let the media get away with that and vote on the bases of our prejudices, we will never again have a strong and competent leader.

Maybe we really do get the leaders we deserve.

Stop them now!

Every day in my house I throw away between one and five catalogs that arrive in my mail. Most of them come unsolicited - actually all of them come unsolicited as I never signed up to receive any of them. A few, however, have been welcome over the years and they continue to come because I have purchased something that I saw on their pages.

For years, though, I have been troubled by the waste that they represent. How many trees must be cut down just to print them? It must be an enormous amount. And now, with each of the companies that publish catalogs also having websites, it has become quite easy to just go on line when you are in the market for something. So catalogs, for me at least, have become unnecessary.

However, companies don't just want to sell things to people who already know what they are looking for. They want to sell to people who are relatively satisfied with what they have, at least until they see that new gadget or special dress or fancy cookware in a catalog. Sears knew this decades ago when they began sending out their Wishbook at Christmas time. Kids looked through it, found toys they had never seen before, and made up their list for Santa.

Today, a catalog is something you might just browse through after work when you look through the rest of your mail. All it takes for the catalog to pay for itself is for one thing in that catalog to catch your eye. Even if you don't order it immediately, your brain is primed to think about it, and eventually to want it. You may pick up the phone and order it in a day or two, or wait until you go into the store and buy it then. Either way, the psychology of the catalog has worked.

To my thinking, the enormous number of catalogs that flow uninvited into our homes, while beneficial to the companies that publish them, have created many problems for our society. One has already been mentioned - the destruction of our forests. Another is enticing people to buy things they don't need, creating clutter and storage problems for us as we run out of room to put the special decor for Christmas that is used only two weeks out of the year, the latest cleaning gadget that doesn't really save us time, the fiftieth pair of shoes that we wear only once, and the toys that our children spread all over the house. Finally, in enticing us to buy so many things we don't need, catalogs deplete our bank accounts and run up our credit card debt.

Finally, there is hope - a way to stop the flow of catalogs to your home, to stop the destruction of the forests, the cluttering of your house, and the enticement to buy things you will only regret later.

What we have lost

The news from the wars in the Middle East appears to be good. While our servicemen and women are still dying in Iraq and Afghanistan, the numbers of dead are down and there are fewer suicide bombings and IED explosions. There are fewer Iraqis who are dying as well.

This is terrific news, and although I always have been and remain adamantly opposed to our presence in Iraq, I hope the good news continues.

But good news in Iraq does not translate into good news for many returning veterans. Reports of suicides and divorces among those returning from Iraq are shocking. Traumatic brain injuries, PTSD, depression and other mental illnesses may temporarily or permanently affect the quality of life for many veterans.

The statistics are slowly leaking out on these things, as is the reality that returning veterans face joblessness, homelessness and long waits for decisions on their claims for disability. In other words, after leaving home and family, facing bombs and bullets each day for a year or more, and being willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for their country, their country does not ensure they have a good life once they return. In fact, for many, after less than a year at home trying to put their lives back together, their country sends them back to face the bombs and bullets again.

Congress and military groups are finally calling attention to the plight of veterans, but who is attending to the families of these men and women? They, too, are suffering. First they must face the agony of saying goodbye, not knowing if it will be the final goodbye, and then they are asked to do it again, and again. Some must make funeral arrangements and face a life without the person they love so deeply. Others find the man or woman who returned is not the man or woman they married, and the marriage, as well as the soldier or Marine, become the casualty. And in these instances, I am only talking about the pain experienced by adults: the parents, spouses, brothers and sisters of the serviceman or woman.

What about the children? How do we begin to calculate the pain to the children of men or women who have died or committed suicide, who are incapacitated with traumatic brain injury or PTSD, or who are gone from the home because of war-related divorce? How do we measure the effects of bedtime stories not read, back-to-school nights and little league games not attended, fatherly or motherly advice not given, smiles not seen and hugs not felt, and graduations not celebrated?

The ramifications of war are widespread, affecting the fighting men and women, their parents and spouses, brothers and sisters, and above all their children, who are to most of us invisible. And what of all the other children in this country, those who simply watch as the adults in their lives glorify war? What does it do to them? Will the next generation be even more callous than this one?

War affects us all, however, even if we don't know anyone in uniform. War, especially war that is waged far away, makes death and violence ordinary, reduces it to a topic of conversation at cocktail parties, a game of statistics on the nightly news, a political debate among legislators.

This war, waged on the basis of falsehoods, and wholly unnecessary to defend our country, has tarnished all of us, divided us from each other, depleted our treasury, and passed an enormous burden of debt on to our children. And as part of what the President calls the "Global War on Terror," of which the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are considered just one part, we have kidnapped and tortured hundreds of people, including many who were innocent of any wrongdoing.

We are no longer a moral nation, a shining beacon of freedom and dignity and goodness. A few short years ago, we were the nation that was trying to broker peace agreements between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Now, the rest of the world holds its collective breath, waiting to see if the United States will wage war on another country.

We are a war machine, willing to sacrifice our own sons and daughters for victory and access to oil, willing to ignore the pain of their children, unwilling to even consider the pain of the children of our "enemy." We have lost something precious in these years of war, besides the more than 4000 brave men and women who have died.

We have, I fear, lost our soul.

The fight over evolution

Last night I watched the Nova special "Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial," a two hour documentary on the Dover, Delaware court case challenging the School Board's attempt to introduce the concept of Intelligent Design into Dover classrooms.

When the school board mandated that a statement challenging evolution be read by all science teachers in science classrooms, the teachers refused and a number of parents filed the lawsuit.

After watching the program I thought about the many attempts that have been made and continue to be made by evangelical Christians to oppose the teaching of evolution. As I was fortunate to have fourteen years of excellent Catholic education, where the theory of evolution was not challenged, and in fact was considered by my instructors to be wholly compatible with Catholic teaching, I have not understood why so many American evangelicals are so adamantly opposed to it. In fact, the opposition is so extreme that the judge who ruled against the school board in the Dover case received multiple death threats, as did the parents who filed the suit.

Then it occurred to me that this one issue is an existential one for many evangelicals, especially those who are also fundamentalists, i.e. believers in the Bible as the literal and unerring word of God. By existential, I mean threatening the truth and thus the very existence of their faith and ultimately their own survival beyond this life.

If your faith includes the belief that the world was actually created in six days and that God formed man out of clay and woman out of man's rib, as fundamentalists believe, then the intricacies of evolution simply cannot be true. Yet, if vast numbers of your fellow citizens, and nearly the entire scientific community, say the evidence for evolution is overwhelming, your faith is greatly threatened. You must do everything you can to fight the theory of evolution, because if it continues to be accepted as truth, it will do dreadful things to your children, your faith, and to you. It will present your children with ideas that are contrary to biblical ideas and might cause them to abandon their faith. Not only will it threaten the story of creation that you believe in, it will threaten every other belief you have that is based on the infallibility of the Bible, including your very belief in God. Finally, with the basis of some of your beliefs challenged, and perhaps eventually proven false, you will be left without a foundation for your faith, and thus with no foundation for a belief in an afterlife, which means you have got yourself a real existential crisis.

Those of us who were raised in a faith that looks to the Bible for inspiration rather than literal truth have no problem with the theory of evolution. We can easily believe in both God and evolution, as the creation story for us is a metaphor rather than literal truth. The God we believe in is a mystery and how the universe was created is also a mystery. If evolution is the way the mystery of life unfolded, over millions of years rather than over six, that complexity actually adds to the wonder of creation and the majesty of the Creator.

All fundamentalists would have to do in order to resolve their existential crisis over evolution would be to accept the Bible as metaphor rather than literal truth. Why they can't do that when people of other faiths can, I don't know. But for now, it appears, they can't, and the Dover case that was won by the proponents of evolution will not be the last case in which fundamentalists fight for their absolute belief in the Biblical story of creation, which as we have seen is a fight for their very existence.

Tragedy in the neigborhod

On Sunday night, just a block and a half away from my home in a very quiet golf course neighborhood, five people were shot to death in what police are calling a murder suicide. Monday morning, the street was still blocked off with police tape, and news trucks with very tall satellite hookups lined the adjacent streets. As I drove to the grocery store I was met by a line of cars, filled with insensitive people, coming to gawk at the circus.

And on the local paper's website, hundreds of readers posted the most absurd comments imaginable. A sample: these were renters and renters are scum; our city isn't safe anymore; cheap houses have brought in gangs and low-life; it was probably illegal immigrants; I'm moving to Alaska. Other readers chastised their fellow readers for their negative value judgments and prejudice. Of course, no one knew the facts; no one knew who had died.

Today we know the identities of the victims, but we still don't know who did the shooting. A man and his seventeen year old son died, as did the man's girlfriend and her fifteen year old twin girls. There were gathered together for a Veteran's Day barbecue; a flag waved from a flagpole over the garage.

None of the neighbors seem to know much about the family, other than that the father who died was the only permanent resident of the home. His son, who died with him, and his daughter, who escaped, lived (live) with their mother. The entire family had lived together in a different home in this development as recently as a few years ago. Then, apparently, the couple divorced.

Speculation is that it was the teenage boy who pulled the trigger, although no law enforcement official has confirmed this. What can be assumed, however, is that at least one of the people in that house on Sunday was very disturbed and had access to a deadly weapon to express his or her pain.

Although this incident will not get the same media attention as other multiple murders - eg. the Simpson case, Columbine, Virginia Tech - some will use it to speculate about who and what is to blame for one more example of senseless violence. It's guns, some will say, or violent video games. Others will blame parental neglect of a troubled teen.

Since we still have little information, it seems premature to pin the blame on anyone. However, one thing seems clear. This is a family that was isolated from its neighbors, a family that was broken, a family that had few lifelines to grab onto, a family whose distress was invisible.

And that seems to be the single unifying characteristic in nearly every instance of mass killing we have seen in the news over the past few years, from the school shootings to the family murder-suicides. To some extent the family, and especially the shooter, are not well connected to the neighbors and the larger community, so that when the tragedy finally happens, everyone is surprised. No one saw it coming because no one really saw the individuals who were so troubled.

This is the disease of our times. We are all isolated, to some extent, from each other. We know our neighbors by name, but we do not learn much more about them. They go about their business and we go about ours. We get into our cars, drive off to work, have a superficial relationship with those at the office, drive home after work, enter our garages by pressing the automatic door opener, hit the button again to close the door, and go into our house. We're rarely outside where we might converse with neighbors. We don't go outside to wash our own cars, mow our own lawns, or pull our own weeds. Those things are largely done by the illegal immigrants we insist should go home.

Whatever troubles we have stay within the confines of our "castles," which may not be surrounded by moats and fortified walls, but might as well be. Isolation is what breeds the despair that leads to these horrifying outbursts of violence. Interestingly, the neighbors say the teenage boy was outside washing his truck the morning of the shooting. No one, however, says they talked to him. What if someone had? What if just one person came over and showed some interest? Might it have made a difference? If, indeed, he was the shooter, might that small display of interest been the one thing that made him feel validated and hopeful and stopped him from the action he took?