You Sleep Better When You Are Un-phenomenal!

To recharge my batteries a bit, I am going to step away from writing a political blog entry for today. I want, instead, to discuss the status of current popular culture. This is something that I bring up periodically, and those that know me, know that I have plenty of opinions on the subject. In particular I would like to focus on the special status that we give to celebrity in our culture. This is special status regardless of talent, ability, intelligence, creativity or any other redeeming quality that you can come up with.

This is particularly odd because you do not find this in any other country accept in the United States. Sure, in Britain there are tabloid newspapers filled with paparazzi articles in which celebrities are stalked and haunted by the press. There are “embarrassing” pictures of females actors topless in the south of France and men with guts that surely no celebrity should have. But in Europe, as with other places, that treatment is reserved for people who have actually achieved something. People like David Beckham, star midfielder for Real Madrid and captain of the England national team or the late Princess of Wales, Diana Spencer. Generally speaking, no one cares what these people think. They just want important details about their private lives. This is standard for people, who cannot separate the athletic feat from the person or the song from the musician.

But in the United States, it is taken to whole different level. Andy Warhol once said that everyone gets their 15 minutes of fame, and ever since it seems that Americans are intent on getting theirs. Just like freed slaves were promised forty acres and a mule, Americans now feel entitled to fame, like it will somehow make them special or, at the least, less worthless.

What is our fascination with celebrity? Why do we place so much stock in the magical powers of fame? If we are not, ourselves, seeking fame and fortune, we are desperately trying to find out how celebrities think and feel on any manner of issues. Unlike in Britain, we don’t want our celebrities to be publicly ridiculed or humiliated. Our celebrities are held up as the elite in society. It used to be that the elite were people who excelled at art, theater, music, business, politics or any number of other disciplines, but now the elite are those who are not most able but the best self-promoters.

We have celebrities of all kinds becoming active in politics when they have no clear understanding of the issues and are no more well informed on the issues than anyone else. Yet their opinion matters and yours does not. Politicians try to share the spotlight with celebrities whether it is John Kerry having Bruce Springsteen campaign with him or the President going mountain biking with Lance Armstrong. These celebrities have what the politicians want; appeal that transcends political ideology. I promised I wouldn’t go into politics, so I will end this line of thinking right here.

In our endless lust for fame and fortune, which we directly equate with being special and not necessarily being talented, our media has brought us reality TV, which Joel Stein says is neither real nor good TV. But, as Stein also points out, we don’t care. We love reality TV, can’t get enough of it. When it isn’t on, we fiend it like crack-whores. It started on cable with the Real World on MTV and slowly invaded every channel on TV including ESPN. Now nearly half of all television is reality based programming with everything from making beautiful women eat maggots on Fear Factor to glorifying plastic surgery and showing you how ugly you all really are on the Swan.

The joke is on you America! Hollywood has never held the same image of celebrity as the rest of the country. It is part of the reason so many famous people live in LA. When you see a celebrity in Los Angeles the only people who lose their minds are the paparazzi and then only because they need to get the shots on the web or on Entertainment Tonight so Middle America can get their famous people fix. I didn’t know one person in my seven years in L.A. who gave a damn about celebrities accept for people who worked in the industry. And then that was because people in Hollywood are so self-centered they believe the hype about themselves being the elite of America. Celebrities are so convinced that they are the elite that the campaign for politicians, they adopt causes to champion, or write memoirs about how hard their lives have been and how they are all really deep people despite the patently megalomania that Hollywood is replete with.

I say again, the joke is on you. Hollywood sees how desperate you all are for fame and fortune. Likewise they see that you do not equate this fame and fortune with creative ability of any kind. Let’s face it; most of you are talentless, at least not with any skills that would warrant celebrity. This is why they created reality television. Pretty girls are a dime a dozen in Hollywood and yet they keep flooding off the buses from Duluth, Davenport and Dallas in droves. Most of these beauties have half a brain in their skulls and even less talent. But they were prom queen back home. They dated the varsity Quarterback and all the nerds lusted for them. I’m not trying to be trite and sexist, the same is true for pretty boy guys who starred in Anything Goes their senior year in Danbury, Dorchester and Durham. For their fifteen minutes of fame, Hollywood makes them roll around in worms or eat buffalo testicles. The people see them back home on the idiot box and when these people slink back home with their tails between their legs and no Screen Actors Guild card in their pocket they are welcomed as conquering heroes, not abject failures.

Wake up people! There is no link between talent, fame or fortune and celebrity. Look at Paris Hilton. Her only talent is that her grandfather was a smart guy and made a load of money. Well, that and she is attractive, in the way that strippers are attractive. She has parlayed this into reality television fame and a modeling career. The sooner we realize that celebrity is as worthless as Paris Hilton is, the happier we will all be. We are all so desperate to be anything but what we are. It is a national psychosis. We need to learn that, as Mark (Peter Sarsgaard) says in Garden State, it is okay to be un-phenomenal, you sleep better.

Am I cruel? Nazareth said it best: “Love Hurts”.

The War of Ideas

After yesterdays blog entry I decided that I wanted to find another quote that would inspire me to express an opinion on a matter. I again chose a quote from President Kennedy.

“If by a ‘Liberal’ they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people -- their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties -- someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a ‘Liberal,’ then I'm proud to say I'm a ‘Liberal.’”

It has been on my mind for a long time that I am a member of a political party that is mostly made up of wimps who fail miserably to clearly explain why they are liberal and why liberalism is clearly the better political philosophy for the society as a whole. Sure, if your goal is to improve your own station in life alone and you are not at all concerned with the success of others, libertarianism or conservatism are your best approaches. But these people who self-identify as conservative or libertarian believe that they live in a vacuum where the actions of others in a society do not affect them at all. They clearly have a distorted view of what it means to be a member of society. If you’ve come here to hear about how evil and selfish these people are, you’ve come to the wrong place. Many well meaning conservatives and libertarians give great resources to their church or charities. They simply feel that the government is not the best instrument to assist the disenfranchised with improving their station in life.

I disagree. I believe that churches and charities do offer assistance that is extremely valuable in assisting the poor or cleaning up blighted neighborhoods or patrolling neighborhoods to lower crime. Their work is noble and it is righteous, but so is much that the government undertakes. Remember that many charities receive a lion’s share of their funding from the government. The reason I do not support the same funding for faith based initiatives is because of the invariable proselytizing and conversion that occurs as a result of the efforts. I do not believe that these religious organizations are out of line in this course of action, I just believe that it is an inappropriate use of government money in a nation that has no official state religion.

Clearly JFKs quote is intended to imply that liberals, unlike conservatives see the world in shades of grey. Things are not either black or white as conservatives, including our current President, would have you believe.

The definition of the term liberal in the American Heritage dictionary is: “not limited to or by established, traditional, orthodox, or authoritarian attitudes, views, or dogmas; free from bigotry.” Clearly liberals believe that there is more than one good way to achieve a policy objective and that the best approach is an enlightened and engaged debate where society chooses the public policy which will best achieve the goals that they judge to be in their national interest.

On the other side of the coin are conservatives. The word conservative is defined as: “favoring traditional views and values; tending to oppose change.” I believe that the last part is most telling; tending to oppose change. I believe that conservatives want to see things through rose colored lenses. Everything in our society is as it should be. Of course, it is hardly shocking that a majority of fiscal conservatives are rich and a majority of social conservatives are religious.

Unfortunately our society has not reached a place where our traditional views and values are sufficient to ensure that all in our society have equal opportunity. Racism is still rampant in the United States. Not everyone is judged equally by all people. Therefore policies which are inherently racist, such as affirmative action, are necessary to level the playing field. I don’t think that anyone believes that affirmative action is an ideal public policy. If you asked African Americans, I believe that they would tell you they would prefer a society where they are judged by who they are and what they know, not what they look like. As a true liberal I must concede that affirmative action creates contempt in certain segments of our population. As someone who is willing to consider other options I would willing engage in a policy debate with people who view the issue differently and try to find a better policy. But conservatives are not interested in the debate. They simply want to do away with affirmative action. Conservatives demonize the policy to breed fear in white Americans by calling it a quota system and telling whites that they will not get this job or into that college because of the color of their skin.

Conservatives in this country have become very adept at cloaking their agenda in the guise of compassion. In the late 90s they spawned a whole compassionate conservative movement claiming that George W. Bush was their standard bearer. This type of subterfuge is not uncommon. You will all notice that this is not a title that conservatives use anymore. Do you know another name for a compassionate conservative? They are called liberals, because compassion walks hand in hand with open-mindedness.

You will notice that I did not mention political parties in today’s piece. That is because there are liberals and conservatives in both parties. I did choose to single out George W. Bush, because I believe he is a particularly good example of a conservative without a shred of true compassion in him, at least not for anyone who is remotely different than him. I, like many observers, see the Democratic Party as the liberal party and the GOP as the conservatives, but it wasn’t always this way. As I stated several days ago, a higher percentage of Republicans voted for the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts in the 60s than did Democrats, but that has shifted and when that shift occurred progressives in the Republican Party were replaced by the likes of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. The disappearance of progressive Republicans did not happen overnight and they are still out there. They are a stunned and silenced segment of the Grand Old Party that needs to awaken and reclaim the party that was stolen from them 40 years ago. Until they do, a fruitful and constructive debate on any public policy in this country is an exercise in futility.

Of course, there is no incentive for these progressive Republicans to re-assert themselves while the opposition Democrats appear weak and unable to defend the liberal ideologies that they hold dear. More on that in the days to come.

Freedom Requires Energy, Faith and Devotion!

In his Inaugural Address on January 20, 1961 President John Fitzgerald Kennedy made a bold proclamation about how leaders should approach adversity. He said; “In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility--I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it--and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.”

[Listen to JFK Inaugural Address]

Anyone alive in this time and place in history must know that we live at another such epic crossroads where we must face adversity. It is in times like this that great leaders emerge to show us the way through the challenges of our time. They guide us along the edge of a knife where teetering to one side or the other will bring Armageddon. I thought it would be interesting to dissect this quote from one of our great Presidents to assess how our current administration is fairing.

All generations face challenges both domestic and international that must be addressed in a skillful manner. The skills required vary to a certain extent. During the Civil War we needed a President who would focus inward and force us to answer difficult questions about the type of society we wanted to create for ourselves. Abraham Lincoln was the perfect President for his time and place in history. Lincoln was a charismatic Midwesterner who grew up on the frontiers of our young nation. He was born in raised in a border state between the North and South on the frontlines of what would eventually be the battlefields of the Civil War.

In the early 1930s the United States economy was bleeding, near death. The government was sleepwalking under the leadership of President Herbert Hoover. The Great Depression of the 1920s and 30s could easily have extinguished American greatness before it was able to take shape. Many have credited President Franklin Roosevelt with being a war President, who saw us through our most difficult years, but FDR was not elected to be a war President, he was elected to rebuild the powerful engine of American innovation which had been brutally savaged by years of rampant poverty and economic decay. Like Lincoln, FDR was the right man for the right time. He saw that American morale was devastated by rampant unemployment. Many men and women who were capable and eager contributors to economic growth in the 1920s were shocked and awed by the economic maelstrom of the Depression. Roosevelt’s greatest achievement as President was restoring our honor and sense of pride. In addition, he created the beginnings of our social safety net that still functions capably today.

In our time, with our challenges, September 11, 2001 has become a cliché. Not the events that occurred that day, but what those events have been used to justify. Into all times of great need steps a leader who restores faith and pride to the people. President George W. Bush was surprisingly capable in the days following those tragedies. He had the country unified in intent and purpose as no one had since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. In addition, he had the good will of the whole world and the ready support of allies to wage a war on terrorism.

It all rings so hollow now to a great many people around the world. All that good will was taken and used to justify the status quo. The same tired and failed philosophy for dealing with foreign threat. In a time when we needed to rip up our military play book and start a new, our government simply spruced up the same play book that we have been using since the Civil War. It is our government’s belief that when adversity is faced you must levee the full weight of the United States military against it. The terminology used at the time was “shock and awe”. It was the same philosophy which General Westmoreland tried to employ in Vietnam. He, like our leaders now, believed that the enemy would simply shrink in the face of such raw power, but the lesson that we learned in Vietnam and then promptly forgot is that our enemy was willing to go through any hardship, endure any amount of losses and would either win or be wiped out trying.

Not surprisingly this shock and awe philosophy has won us very little goodwill with the people in this region of the world. Our first military moves after 9/11 was to invade and “liberate” Afghanistan from the hard line Taliban government. In so doing, we drove Al Qaeda out of cities and into the hills. This was an operation that was widely supported by the international community and so they should hardly have been shocked when the U.S. government took this as tacit approval of using a military paradigm for dealing with terrorists. In the end the Taliban are not gone and Al Qaeda is far more difficult to track. In addition, farmers in this region of the world have begun growing vast quantities of poppies used in making heroin. In spite of all this collateral damage, our government has claimed that Afghanistan was a great success. We have installed a friendly government that really has no power outside the capital of Kabul.

Our next phase was to go into Iraq and take down Saddam Hussein. This was in spite of the fact that there was no clear link between Iraq and any terrorist organization and in spite of the fact that Iraq posed no threat to the U.S. at all. The government trumped up charges of stockpiles of Weapons of Mass Destruction. You all know the events that have followed in Iraq from the “liberation” to the elections which went on despite the fact the Sunnis did not participate in the vote. What we have done is create a terrorist breeding ground. It is what some might call a charm school of jihadi Middle-easterner extremists bent on doing battle with the west.

Our President now tells us that it would be foolhardy to pull our troops out of Iraq because it would send the wrong message to our allies and enemies alike. I am not a foreign policy expert (which I guess would make me a perfect candidate to work on this President’s foreign policy team) but I believe that our presence in the Middle East is part of the problem not the solution. Who cares what message it sends to the terrorists, it is not because of the insurgency itself that we should leave. Truth be told we could do battle with these insurgents indefinitely. It is because if democracy is really to flourish in Iraq then it must come about as a result of their efforts, not ours. I believe that the message we will communicate to our allies in Iraq is that democracy is worth fighting for and ethnic, religious or other differences will not preclude democracy from succeeding there. In the final analysis it is the countries that struggled for democracy, that earned it through hard effort that succeed. These countries include Poland, France, Japan, Mexico and the United States. We are all examples of countries that overcame much to bring about a representative style of government.

The part of JFK’s quote that jumps out at me most readily is the last part where he says; “The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it--and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.” If the Iraqi people value the right to self-determination no insurgency, no matter how large, will get in its way. One should never underestimate the determination of a people to be free. One need only step out of the way and see their will be done. Of course we will be a friend to Iraq. We will assist them financially and morally in the accomplishment of this goal, but the actual victory must be born of Iraqi blood and sweat. If it is not, they will never place the proper amount of value in it.

Innovation In America: Why Are We Falling Behind?

We are a country that is falling farther and farther behind every year. In science, math, computers, innovation. You name it, we’re falling behind. For most of the 20^th Century the United States was regarded as the unequalled leaders in scientific innovation, medical advancement and a place where inventors abounded.

Whether it was Jonas Salk who cured polio, or Wright Brothers who invented the airplane or Henry Ford who invented the assembly line manufacturing facility, ours was a country with the can do spirit about everything it set its collective mind to. As conservative (though recently sounding very moderate) commentator and columnist George Will said on ABCs This Week with George Stephanopolous, our country was founded during the time of enlightenment thinkers. Our nation was designed with the spirit of the enlightenment in mind.

Then why is it that our country has turned so sharply away from the spirit of discovery and progress? Let’s look at some of the issues. Stem Cell research; in 2001 the President changed the federal rules regarding funding research that uses human embryonic stem cells. This was in line with his Christian fundamentalist beliefs on when life begins. It is interesting that as this debate roars on in this country, a debate that is not taking place anywhere else in the world; our scientists are being left in the dust. In Korea last week, scientists cloned an Afghan hound. In this country we can’t even decide if this type of research is ethical.

Now there are few that would deny that a serious ethical debate needs to take place in this country. I firmly support that. Many want to create guidelines for stem cell research so that we don’t start walking down a “slippery slope.” But, as George Will also pointed out, life is lived on slippery slopes. As an example he raised the specter of taxation. Well, taxation could easily become confiscation, Will said, but we are relatively confident that we would be able to put a stop to that. Likewise, I believe that we should be confident that we could put a stop to all forms of inappropriate cloning. It is time to get off the sideline.

It is not only in controversial areas of science that we are falling behind. It is true that American universities are still the most sought after institutions in the world to pursue the study of scientific knowledge, but that is becoming less and less the case. Invariably students are opting to go to Europe, China and other Asian countries. More and more innovation is taking place outside our borders, and even the innovation that occurs in the United States is being undertaken by foreigners.

Most distressing to me is the news that the Kansas board that has been reviewing the “Intelligent Design” issue now stands poised to recommend changing the State’s educational guidelines to include this in the curriculum. I am not going to go into the tenets of intelligent design. If you want to read further you can find Paul Krugman’s August 5^th Column in the New York Times. What is distressing is that our solution for our falling behind in innovation and scientific exploration is to educate students INCORRECTLY about science. Intelligent Design, like Creationism before it, is a pseudo-science that has absolutely no place being taught in our schools.

If you need evidence that American science is faltering you need look no further than the areas where only American scientists exists. NASA is a great example. We still explore space in that nearly 30 year old jalopy of a space shuttle when we could easily find new means for getting our astronauts and our supplies into space more quickly and for far less money.

Shame on the state of Kansas for such backwards lunacy! Shame on President George W. Bush!

The Last Democratic Wolf vs. the Sacrificial Lamb!

Earlier this week champions of all that is right and just in this world won their first major victory in recent memory. By recent memory I mean since George W. Bush was judiciated the Presidency of the United States in 2000. Robert Novak, syndicated columnist and blowhard extraordinaire was finally bested on the sets of CNN by the Democratic strategist and political commentator James Carville. Score one for the liberals. Of course it would be the one Democrat who’s not a total weenie! James Carville, or Jimmy C as he is known in my house, is consistently the only Democrat who will call Republicans out on their complete tomfoolery with anything more than the pathetic whimpers of a school-girl with a skinned knee.

The Ragin’ Cajun should know something about evil Republicans. After all, he is married to one of the most vitriolic Republican of them all, Mary Matalin. Matalin is a senior advisor to Vice President Cheney. Carville clearly understands the mind of the GOP. In addition, as anyone who is married will attest, has learned over the years of his marriage the secret tricks on how to drive them “out of their skin” bonkers.

Those of you who have been living on the moon for the past several years, or are just severely maladjusted, know that Bob Novak has been embroiled in a scandal of epic proportions. His role is not one hundred percent clear. It was Novak’s column in 2003 that leaked the identity of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame to the public, yet Novak has thus far sailed through the whole scandal relatively unscathed. In fact, if one was to ask Judith Miller of the New York Times, who is currently breaking rocks with a chain gang, I am sure she would think that Novak was fairing quite well. It seems sadly ironic that Miller is in jail and she didn’t even write an article on this subject and Novak, Bush’s own personal mouthpiece in the press, is sitting free to write his vitriolic diatribes about the liberal media and how Democrats are ruining this country.

But of course, if his CNN outburst is any indication, Bob Novak is clearly cracking from renewed pressure as the media continue to probe deeper into the scandal and begins asking the hard questions that he has miraculously eluded for two years. It is nice to see that the press finally has their collective heads in the game, though it is a stark contrast in the days since the death of the last mainstream American journalist, Peter Jennings, to see that it has taken the press so long to get anywhere with this story.

In their defense, when the subject is a White House leak, increasingly likely perpetrated by Karl Rove, making anything stick can be infuriatingly difficult. This is a White House that closes ranks with staggering proficiency. From Dan Bartlett, the Communications Director to Scott McClellan, the Press Secretary to the President himself, this Administration marches in lock step when troubles arise. If one was forced to compliment this group of rodeo clowns on one thing it would have to be their stormtrooperesque discipline.

I used to just blatantly slander Bob Novak by accusing him of being Karl Roves journalistic stooge. That was until Novak came forward and claimed that in his conversation with Rove it had been he that had told the President’s political advisor that former Ambassador Joe Wilson’s wife Valerie Plame was the CIA agent in question. This might have been believable if it wasn’t so obviously complete hogwash. Novak, of course, cannot account for who revealed this fact to him. This inability to reveal sources make it clear that not only is Novak a blatant partisan hack, he is also a miserable liar. This excrement smells so bad it is no wonder that old Bobby has a sour puss all the time. Or perhaps it is just that, like Ebenezer Scrooge, Novak has been visited by the ghosts of purgatory past, present, and future and he doesn’t like what the future has in store for him.

Who knows how deep this scandal goes. A crime has been committed. If it was not a legal crime it was at the very least in an ethical one. There is now talk that this may also include the Vice President’s chief of staff Scooter Libby. I think when one achieves the position of chief of staff to a high elected official one should probably drop the elementary school nickname. Who knows what the facts are. Well, let’s hope the U.S. Attorney and Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald knows.

Make no mistake, Bob Novak is going down. I wrote in a previous blog post that Karl Rove will not be scathed by this investigation. Instead the Republicans are going to throw Bob Novak out as the sacrificial lamb. Though he may get lucky, it appears that all the Democratic wolves have been de-toothed with the exception of the Ragin’ Cajun.

I won’t lose sleep waiting for criminal charges. Instead I will await the next installment of celebrity boxing where we will see the Cajun vs. Novak and Scooter vs. Turd Blossom. Now that would really be something!

A touch of class through thick and thin!

Peter Jennings died today at the age of 67. I won’t write a long eulogy to the former ABC anchor and foreign correspondent, others have written far more eloquently than I could. It is sad to me that we have lost our “big three” anchormen. Sadly their era was over and cable news has replaced them with sensational “crap news.”

Jennings, along with Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather were the faces of American news for the better part of 20 years. I recall watching World News Tonight with Peter Jennings and knowing that I was going to get a perspective of the news that was more Washington, London, Cairo and Tokyo, and less provincial. The world was presented in an eloquent worldly manner. Jennings made us look outside of ourselves to see the larger context of issues. That style of news reporting and presentation really suffered after the end of the Cold War and Americans began to become more domestically oriented and less interested in the world.

As a result of this new focus, cable news, with its focus on sensational, celebrity issues stepped in to control the medium. As a result, people know far less about the world that they live in. We, as Americans, are more interested in O.J. Simpson than we are the situation in the Middle East. We prefer to focus on random murder trials than focus on our government on foreign affairs or even the needed reforms to our Social Security and Medicare systems.

I think this must have been enormously painful for Jennings to watch unfold, though through it all he carried himself with class and poise that made it clear that he was a hold over from a more civilized time. Despite the decline in viewership, in the hours after the 9/11/01 terrorist attacks many people flooded back to Jennings and the network news services. And Jennings was there, on the air, reporting the news and reassuring us that we would survive this too. In the years that followed 9/11, Jennings appeared to be bolstered by the renewed interest in the larger world and the Middle East in particular.

But now Peter Jennings is gone. He was the first news anchor of my life, and perhaps it is best that he went out this way. He was unmistakably at the top of his game. In an era of cable and internet news, when everyone thought he was a has-been, Peter Jennings was perhaps the purest source of news to be found. Free of spin, free of personal opinion, free of politics, Jennings was a journalist in the best sense of the word.

The Voting Rights Act: why Republicans don’t want you to vote!

The Voting Rights Act was originally passed in 1965 under the leadership of President Lyndon Baines Johnson and Senate Majority Leader Everett Dirksen-D. As former Senator Bob Dole points out in his Op-Ed piece in the August 6, 2005 Washington Post, a higher percentage of Republicans in both the House and Senate supported passage of the bill.

You can read Bob Dole’s Op-Ed here.

The Act was a monumental piece of legislation that followed on the heals of the Civil Rights Act. The U.S. Justice Department touts the Voting Rights Act as the most successful piece of civil rights legislation in the history of our country. It was enacted in an effort to “codify and effectuate” into law the tenets of the 15^th Amendment (follow this link to read the 15^th Amendment). In addition, the Act had several special provisions to deal with the challenges faced by African-Americans and barriers to voting. One provision struck down the literacy requirement for voting that was used to keep blacks from voting in the Jim Crow south and many counties in the north. These municipalities were further required to seek the approval of a three judge panel of the federal courts in the D.C. circuit or the Attorney General of the United States before they changed their voting laws. Further, the Attorney General could send agents to these municipalities to ensure that eligible people were not being denied the right to vote.

This Act was subsequently renewed in 1970, 1975 and 1982. Along the way it was modified to also ensure that voting materials are available in many other languages to aid foreign born American citizens who do not speak English sufficiently to feel comfortable voting in the majority language. Upon reauthorizing the Voting Rights Act in 1982, President Reagan stated clearly and perfectly that the right to vote is "the crown jewel of American liberties" reaffirming the need to protect this right in the clearest terms possible.

The Act is set to sunset again in 2007 and there are already efforts being made to change key provisions. This weekend there was a march in Atlanta, Georgia to build support for the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act. The march was led by Representative John Lewis, NAACP President Bruce Gordon, and Jesse Jackson. They are fighting to protect two provisions in general and the entire Act as a whole. In particular they want to ensure that multilingual voting materials remain available to for all. In addition they want to maintain Federal oversight of key states.

We are not so far removed from Florida in 2000 when thousands of black voters in Brower County were denied the right to vote. We are not so far removed from Ohio in 2004 when thousands of black voters in and around Cleveland found it enormously difficult to cast their vote due to incredibly long lines and understaffed polling places, problems that did not exist in majority white neighborhoods.

If all that was not bad enough, now Conservatives want to do away with many key provisions of the Voting Rights Act. They claim that singling out several southern states for federal oversight is inherently unfair, and you know what? I agree. I would change the Act to give the federal government the power of oversight of every square inch of the United States from Alaska to Maine and Ohio to Florida.

Racism is still a problem in this country, and despite all its lip-service to brotherly love and welcoming acceptance, it is still a fact that when blacks vote, Democrats win. When blacks are disenfranchised Republicans win. In Florida there was the barely competent Republican Secretary of State Catherine Harris (a key official in the Florida Bush apparatus) doing the bidding to the candidate’s brother, Governor Jeb Bush. In Ohio, Secretary J. Kenneth Blackwell, himself an African American, failed to protect the voting rights of minority and lower class voters.

Bob Dole says in his Op-Ed piece that the GOP is attempting to attract minorities to the Republican Party with the promise that they offer a different approach to civil rights. If their approach to voting rights is any indication, I believe that the GOP has not only not made progress since 1965 but has taken enormous steps backwards. This is in part due to the fact that the Republican Party inherited many of the southern Democrats that opposed the act in the first place. I call them Dixiecrats and if you need any proof you need look no further than former Georgia Senator Zell Miller who endorsed President Bush in 2004 and spoke at the Republican Convention in New York City. He is a man who claims that the Democrats failed to hold true to the ideals of JFK, but clearly Zell in his delusional mind failed to see that the Party had begun changing under FDR and continued on through President Johnson and up until the present. Many of the Dixiecrats can look back on their affiliation with the Democratic Party as a family tradition, which by the time they reached the civil rights movement was clearly no longer a fit.

Republican talk about inclusion and tolerance and I believe that a majority of Republicans are well meaning, but unfortunately the Party allows itself to be led by the most ideological in its midst. The right-wing of the GOP is not inclusive, they are not tolerant, and they are not interested in making the situation of minorities better in this country. They are hateful. The preach hate in the form Christianity. It is a philosophy that could not be more at odds with the core message of Christ which was love and acceptance.

Until the majority of the GOP which are moderate step up and remove this element from their Party they will continue to be a racist Party that does not care about equality and has no interest in helping level the playing field in this country.

They approach education reform by saying that it is wrong to expect less from children in minority neighborhoods so they pass reforms called “No Child Left Behind” and then fail to fund it appropriately. It is not wrong to expect better performance from minority students in poor neighborhoods, it is wrong to expect higher performance when you are not willing to commit the resources to make higher performance a reality.

Minorities are not blind, they are not stupid and they will never sign on with a Party that tries to spin them into joining using rhetoric and nothing else. There is no substance behind the words that the Republicans preach.

60 years after Hiroshima, have we learned anything?

Today is the 60^th anniversary of the day when the United States government dropped the first atomic bomb ever used in warfare on the southern Japanese city of Hiroshima. By all accounts the day started as any other in the industrial city which was vital to the Japanese war effort. It was, after all, chosen as a target for its strategic significance.

At just before 8:15 AM an American B-29 named the Enola Gay took off from an airfield on a miniscule island named Tinian. A short time later it flew in over the city and dropped its entire payload, consisting of one 60 kg uranium-235 atomic bomb that was called Little Boy by the scientists that created it. The bomb detonated 600 feet above the ground a mere second later nearly 100,000 men, women and children were killed in the blink of an eye. Many of those who survived were burned so severely that they walked around in shock with not an inch of skin on their maimed bodies. In the days, weeks, months and years that followed that day in 1945 another nearly 60,000 people would die as a result of these burns and radiation sickness.

There is no way that Colonel Paul Tibbets and his crew aboard the Enola Gay could have any clear understanding of the devastation their payload would unleash on the unsuspecting city below them. One must believe that if they had, the realization alone would have given them pause, if not stopped them outright. It is incomprehensible that any human, with the capacity to fathom the power of such a weapon, would willingly use it.

U.S. President Harry Truman was aboard a Navy battleship somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean when he received word that the attack had been a success. The President was on his way back from Potsdam, Germany where trials were being conducted against Nazis for war crimes committed in the European theater. There is only a hint of irony that this man, who by all accounts was a good and decent man, was returning from a war crimes trial when he was notified that his own war crime had been a success.

Truman, too, could not have been able to comprehend the power of the weapon that he was having built. The scientist of the Manhattan Project holed up at Los Alamos Laboratory, alone, fathomed the power that they were unleashing. Many went into the project with the wide-eyed excitement of school boys working on a science project. It was not until they realized the potential that many, no most of them began to speak out against it. They alone knew that the weaponized potential of atomic energy was so unspeakably frightening that they wrote to everyone they could think of, from Generals to cabinet members to the President himself. No one listened.

The powers that be were so convinced that they needed to end the war quickly for numerous reasons that the ethical considerations should take a back seat. The army believed that it would cost 100,000 American lives to take Japan. This does not even take into account the Japanese lives. These numbers have been disputed over the years, but I am in no position to, so we will take it as fact. Even still, the ethical dilemma is almost painful.

Of course, as history will recall, three days later the U.S. dropped a second bomb on the city of Nagasaki. This time the bomb was named Fat Man. If the first bomb can be forgiven as a staggering lapse in ethical judgment, the second is absolutely, positively a crime against humanity. There are many reasons given for the need to use this bomb, but the obvious reason was the desire to end the war before the Soviets invaded Japan. If the Soviets were allowed to venture too far into the Asian theater then the western allies would have to share the spoils with Stalin. This was something that was unthinkable to Truman and his advisors. So, instead, the U.S. government sanctioned the killing of another 40,000 civilians in mere seconds.

I have no doubt that our leaders did what they felt was right. It is also clear that they could not fathom the destruction. There is no way they could. They did not see the scene on the ground in the aftermath. But we know what it looks like today. With this knowledge that these weapons destroy humanity in great big quantities at a time, it is mind boggling that our current administration would even joke about first strike use of nuclear weapons. No life is worth the use of these evil weapons. Not mine, not yours, no ones!

It is equally shocking, at a time when the Russian economy is lackluster at best, that our government would be stingy about fronting the money to ensure that remaining Soviet nuclear stockpiles are secured and kept out of the hands of sociopaths like Osama bin Laden and other terrorists who would consider using them against us or one of our allies.

Nuclear weapons are, in a word, evil. Nothing good has ever come from them and nothing ever will. Steps need to be taken to prevent proliferation. Iran and North Korea feel they need them as a deterrent against American aggression. This should tell us something about the way our country is perceived overseas. It is not sufficient to simply dismiss these countries as being lead by psychotic leaders. To be sure, Kim Jong Il and the hardliners in Iran are no teddy bears, but we will get much further by treating them with respect and welcoming them into the international community. Despite our differences, once they are brought out of their shells we will learn that we have far more in common then we do that divide us. Most importantly we will see that we are all humans, sharing this Earth together and that we must strive every day to ensure that the breakdown in humanity that occurred 60 years ago never occurs again.

To read more on this subject follow this link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki

Harry Potter and the Adolescent Society?

I read a very interesting and thought provoking column today on the Los Angeles Times web page. It was written by Joel Stein, formerly with Time Magazine. The piece was called: Hogwarts fans, you’re stupid, stupid, stupid. You can read the piece here:

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-stein10jul10,0,200087.column?coll=la-util-op-ed
So riveted was I to this book and its ups and downs that with my wife was on the verge of death this weekend, I could manage only the most tertiary care. I am, ashamed or not, a huge Hogwarts fan!

That being said, Joel Stein raises some very interesting points about the adolescent fixation in our society. It is true that we live in a society where men have debated the “sexiness” of the Olsen twins since they were pre-pubescent. Beautiful aging actresses in our society have their faces stretched tighter then the strings on a tennis racket in order to continue to procure work. We prize youth over wisdom everyday and twice on Sunday. We live in a world that parades a young actresses before our eyes as “nymphets” and then declares it wrong, wrong, wrong to look at them. Plastic surgery is part of our never-ending quest for the "fountain of youth".

The symptoms have been readily apparent for some time. I understand the logic of dumbing down our society. It is clearly a way for people who are grossly over-worked to turn off and tune out after too many hours at a job selling widgets or trading stocks. Our society is lazy, and it is our own fault. We get lazy entertainment because we are too damn sloth to do anything about it.

Unlike Joel Stein, whose writing I regard as first rate, I disagree that Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince fits into this model. He points out that we should make excuses for reading the books, such as parental concern for the content of our children’s reading. Well, I have no children, but I would simply bring Joel Stein’s attention to the fact that good children’s entertainment has always been crafted to be appreciated on two levels. The first is the child who is absorbing the content from naïve and innocent perspective. The second is the parent who is reading the book or watching the movie with the child and appreciating subtlety that the author/screenwriter has inserted to make the experience tolerable for the adult.

This is the way it has always been. Look at good children’s entertainment from history. For example, Hans Christian Andersen or the Brother Grimm, who can possibly claim that there is not a severely sinister sub-story occurring within Hansel and Gretel.

Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory is, in my opinion, one of the worst movies ever made. Especially when not stoned. This is because it incorporates all of the juvenile aspects of the story without any of the darkness. The new version of the story is replete with darkness. Johnny Depp portrays Willy Wonka as a deeply troubled and slightly twisted hermit. This is the way Roald Dahl wanted the adult readers to see him.

Not convinced? Ask your 7 year old son/daughter/nephew/niece who their favorite character on the Simpson’s is, and invariably they will name Bart or Lisa or Millhouse. Now ask their parent or a friend and invariably they will name Homer, Barney, Smithers, etc.

All that stated Stein is right. Our media has been dumbed down to appeal our lazy, tired and unadventurous need for simplicity. Watching comic book heroes, gratuitous sex and violence, and simple unimaginative plots is easy. But who said everything had to be Doctor Zhivago?

I enjoy good books, movies, TV, arts and drama as much as the next person, but on occasion it is OK to be a passenger simply gazing out the window lazily daydreaming about the cheeseburger you are going to have after the movie.

Bravo to Joel Stein for pointing out our societal flaws. It is uncomfortable to have to face such questions, but it is the only way a society grows and matures. All that said, I would urge Mr. Stein to get past his cynicism and read beyond page 50 of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone before condemning the series as adolescent and sophomoric.

I love the Harry Potter books. There are many things that make me lazy, but this is not one of them!

Yosemite Sam goes the New York!

So, I have been dawdling about this weekend, nursing a sick wife who caught her cold from me. In addition, I have been reading Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince. I was supposed to try to write a response to the energy bill that passed out of Congress last week with more pork than a pig farm and, which actually does very little to accomplish the goal which the President laid out. That goal was to reduce our reliance on foreign oil. That piece is coming, but it is not ready yet.

Today I am going to focus on the recess appointment of John Bolton to the position of U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. John Bolton was not able to get out of the Senate, which had significant concerns about this man’s ability to handle the job. The President says that it was “a handful of Senators” which in their obstructionist stance had kept the position of UN Ambassador empty and thus the U.S. has been unrepresented for months in New York. This is a load of malarkey. The position has been empty, but there is an entire mission to the UN and there is a significant amount of State Department staff dedicated to this function. It wasn’t like there was no one there and they had boarded up the windows at the UN Mission or that an inch of dust had settled on our desk in the Security Council chamber. To pretend otherwise is devious and untruthful.

John Bolton is an angry man. One need only look at him to discover that. But we get to do more then that. We get to read what he has written and we learn about how he has treated his colleagues. I separate angry people into two columns. In the first column are those angry people who yell at their kids and/or spouses at home and are generally grumpy. In the second are those dangerously angry people who lose their temper in their workplaces. Both groups are bad, but the latter are not only bad, they are dangerous. These are people who lack the social grace to be able to restrain them in the workplace.

I am not going to get into specific allegation that have been directed at John Bolton, they are well publicized and when we get bogged down in specifics we lose sight of the overall picture. John Bolton is a bully, and like most bullies he uses sheer force of will to overcome a complete lack of tact. Many proponents feel that this is exactly what the UN needs. A little shot of “tough love” in the arm. But anyone who knows anything about diplomacy, and even those who know nothing, knows that it is a delicate science. Diplomacy, like many things, is all about relationships. It is all about the ability to use those relationships to achieve the goals laid out by the President’s foreign policy.

John Bolton has no tact, he is not diplomatic. He is honest and frank with his opinions. Honesty and frankness are good qualities, but not in the hands of a man with no tact. The President has appointed him anyways, and as usual when he does not get his way, he finds the short cut. As opposed to engaging Congress and Bolton’s critics (a rather bi-partisan bunch) in dialogue, he appoints Bolton with a recess nomination. The recess nomination has historically been used to fill urge postings. It can be used almost legitimately when dealing with Federal judges because the court system is so strained and short staffed. This, however, is a clear abuse of the recess appointment privilege. The President is desperate to prove that he is not a lame duck. His social security overhaul plan has conspicuously gone quiet. His foreign policy is under new and perhaps, some would say, critical analysis. Turd Blossom, a.k.a. Karl Rove is being investigated for his role in the Valerie Plame leak.

2005 has not treated the President very well thus far. He will, no doubt, try to spin last week’s energy bill and transportation bill into PR victories. It is what his White House does best. For people that hate Bill Clinton with a furious passion, they sure have learned a lot from him. They spin like pros! In the end, this recess appointment is fact, it happened, and we are sending the John Bolton, UN hater extraordinaire, to represent the United States to the world. The only positive that I see is that the rest of the world doesn’t watch FoxNews, they will see Bolton without the spin. They will see him for the explosive, pompous, mediocre, less than smart, troglodyte that he is.

Sneaky Mr. President! Sneaky! Was it Rove’s idea?

Missing blond high school grads from Alabama!

Is this news? Natalee Holloway disappeared a very long time ago and nothing substantial has happened in this case for a month now. Yet it still finds its way into the headlines. This is thanks in large part to failed lawyer and now hack journalist/legal expert Nancy Grace who created a name for herself by trying and convicting Scott Peterson in the press, tainting any possible jury pool and ensuring that a fair trial was completely impossible. Nancy Grace is a horrible, horrible human being who will likely (if the Buddhists are right) be reincarnated as a slimy greenish black slug. My only hope is that when that happens, some troll-looking young boy is around to pour salt on her. Grace has since gone on to cover such important legal issues of our time as the Michael Jackson trial and more importantly has become the advocate for the Holloway/Twitty Families and personal critic-major of the Dutch legal system. People are giving John Stewart no end of grief for his soft interview of semi-fascist Senator Rick Santorum, but that was nothing compared to the puff interviews that Nancy Grace conducts almost daily with Holloway’s mom, a wannabe MILF who’s only claim to fame is that she has surpassed 40 with all of her teeth intact (something of a feat in Alabama).

I feel for the parents of Natalee Holloway. Nothing could more horrific than losing a child. No parent should have to outlive their children. My heart and thoughts go out to this family as it deals with a nightmare, the likes of which I hope I will never have to endure. But let’s face it, these parents made a rather sophomorically bad decision in allowing their 18 years old daughter to go on a “barely chaperoned” trip to Aruba to stay in a casino. What kind of parenting is that? Perhaps that is what is so upsetting to the family. Knowing that in the moment when it really counted, when Natalee needed an adult to quash her dreams of rum drinks on white sand beaches and sweaty nights at dance clubs, the lights were on but no one was home. And what kind of school organizes such a trip? Have these people never heard of Club Med? Disney World? Disneyland? No, they opted for a trip to a casino filled island! Typical red state hypocritical tomfoolery!

Of course, none of that matters. It really isn’t her parent’s fault any more than it is Nancy Grace’s. It is, quite simply, our fault. I have followed this case. Not because I think it is news. I have followed as something of a sociological research project. Or perhaps I watch for the same reason that we watch reality TV or a car accident on the freeway, because like lemmings, we are unable to turn away. Oh yes, dear readers, I have followed this case, and I am here to tell you that this is not news. It does not even approach the level of news. This isn’t even worthy of the six o’clock news in Birmingham, Alabama, let alone CNN of FoxNews. I guess, though, it is not surprising that it has received press. It is also hardly shocking when it was revealed that a few years ago a couple of black boys were killed on a trip to the Caribbean and they were not mentioned once in the national press.

What is our national obsession with blond white girls? Lindsay Lohan, the Olsen twins, Natalee Holloway, the list goes on and on. We all complain about the coverage this stuff receives and yet it keeps coming. Why God, why? I’ll tell you why, because we are lazy. We are unwilling to use the squishy grey stuff between our ears. In addition, we are like ostriches; we don’t want to know all the horrible things happening in this world. We can’t handle the images of our young men and women dying in Iraq. We can’t handle the images of AIDS and starvation robbing the African continent of any chance at a future. We can’t cope with the devastating rape and torturous killings in Darfur, Sudan that our President has dubbed genocide yet does nothing about. We would rather focus on one American “maybe dying” in Aruba then the over 1000 people who have died in India because of a particular brutal seasonal monsoon.

We need to take a step back and consider what really matters. The death of anyone always matters. Natalee Holloway was probably a good kid who was robbed of a future by some terrible person on her last night in Aruba. Should she have died? No, absolutely not. She should be in Alabama enjoying her summer after high school with her friends. But, in the end, the trail is cold. The family is clinging to anything and all of this media attention is casting the generally good people of Aruba in a bad light and forcing their government to spend way too much money on this case. It is time to call it a day. It is time to let go. Natalee is gone, but hopefully in the hearts of her friends and family she will not be forgotten. It is time for her image to go now, she was never news and we have endured this personal tragedy far long enough. It is time for this story to go away now and make room for more important issues.

What happened to the great blue collar bulldog?

I’m a little late on this piece. I wanted to write it yesterday, but I am battling a head cold and therefore my entire brain is clogged. Not to mention, I spend the whole day fighting off the toxic effects of the Nyquil that I took to sleep the night before. That stuff is evil. It wrangles your brain much like a cowboy hog-tying a calf.

I have been thinking a lot over the last week about the future of organized labor. As many of you know, the AFL-CIO has been holding their national convention in Chicago this week. It was to be a grand celebration of their 50th anniversary of the reunification of the old American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations. The grand union, which until days ago had 13 million members, dubbed the event a celebration “Building New Strength & Good Jobs for Working Families”.

I think it is fair to say that the event hit a few snags. I splinter group calling itself the Change to Win Coalition has decided to split off from the umbrella organization. This coalition includes the Teamsters, the SEIU, the UFCW, the Laborers, UNITE HERE, the Carpenters, and the UFW. I case you have not noticed yet, labor organizers love alphabet soup. The Teamsters and SEIU are two of the AFL-CIO larger unions. All combined they hold 35% of the total membership so this is a fairly major shockwave that has hit organized labor.

Some say there is political infighting and the splinter group has split because they failed to remove John Sweeney, President of the AFL-CIO from power. I am not a labor insider so I will not speculate on internal power struggles. What they are saying is that they are splitting over a difference in ideology and focus. These differences include how the organization should focus its resources. The AFL-CIO wants to use dues to increase political advocacy efforts. This includes lobbying efforts and campaign contributions.

The Change to Win Coalition would prefer to focus on union development. They are strongly advocating going out and recruiting new membership. Union membership has consistently dropped over the last thirty years. In 1973, 24% of all workers were members of a labor union. In 2004 that number had fallen to to 12.5% (according to a Trinity University study, 2005). The Coalition seeks to reverse that trend.

This is obviously not the time, nor the place to solve the problems of protecting American workers (or workers everywhere for that matter). I am, quite simply, not qualified for the job. The point I hope to get across is that many labor unions have lost focus on their rather clear mission. Adam Smith, in his famous treatise, The Wealth of Nations succinctly posited why labor organizations are inevitably. He stated:

“We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate…

“[When workers combine,] masters… never cease to call aloud for the assistance of the civil magistrate, and the rigorous execution of those laws which have been enacted with so much severity against the combinations of servants, labourers, and journeymen.”

In essense, the role of the labor union is to unite workers the way Chambers of Commerce, like many other organizations, unite business leaders. I live in Hawaii. Calling Hawaii a pro-labor state is an gigantic understatement. I do not have a problem with that per say, but I do have a problem with union leaders on the cover of Hawaii business magazines in suits looking rather, well, corporate, for lack of a better word. I do not doubt that these organization do sincerely want to help workers, but they need to take a step back a consider if this approach is an effective long-term strategy. I am not a union member, but if I was, I would look at these leaders in suits try to appease and pacify business critics and wonder; “what do these suits know of my concerns”.

Why should labor want to appease or make themselves more pallatable to business? In my opinion, labor should be the rock, the counter-weight to big business. They should be the great blue collar force that is in businesses face making it clear that mistreating employees will hurt the bottom line.

I believe the Change to Win Coalition has it absolutely right. They want more members. I think labor morale is at an all time low when the environment for workers is at its worst point in the post-World War II era. This is a recipe for disaster. There are so many challenges that are being faced. Rising health care costs, globalization and cheap foreign labor (particularly in China and India), increased technology and worker efficiency translating to fewer jobs, and many others are direct challenges that labor needs to focus on.

These challenges require a new paradigm of thinking, but unions are stuck in a plantation philosophy (to borrow a term from Hawaii). This notion will be greatly offensive to many labor advocates and decendents of plantation workers, as if I am belittling the challenges faced by migrant workers in Hawaii and California and many other states. I intend only to point out that the challenges are new and very, very different. They require new thinking. Unions have not yet adapted. They need to move to make changes or risk total and utter irrelevancy.

Perhaps there are lessons to be derived from how unions in other countries address challenges. In France, for instance, when fishermen are unhappy they dump several tuns of fish on the streets of Paris (aided by unionized truckers), blocking intersections. This in turn snarls Parisian traffic, bringing to city to a stand still. If this happened in the United States sympathy for the fishermen would evaporate. But in France, they have not forgotten the ideals of the French Revolution, “liberte, egalite, and fraternite”. It is fraternite that unites the French people behind the strikers.

That solidarity does not exist in the United States. It is something that we need to resurrect (did it ever exist here?) or the gap between the owners and the workers will continue to widen until we will have a hostile environment and angry workers seeking what Mao called “permanent revolution”. I would rather not live in a communist nation, I believe a true capitalist society with corporate social responsibility is preferable, but that is up to labor and business. I am just an innocent bystander, observing the wheels in motion.

Public Confidentiality? Oxymoron or just plain morons?

Confidentiality has its intrinsic worth in many areas of the government’s business, but there are limits to this right and they grow thin when the business involves considering monumental national policies decisions such as the nomination of a Supreme Court justice. These decisions have implications that affect us all. I believe that the privilege of confidentiality should be reserved only to those cases where a national security threat can be shown. Even then, that threshold should be crossed to the satisfaction of a federal judge, not the executive branch’s legal advisors. Of course, these advisors will want to keep such information confidential. Someday it may be them in the hot seat, and they will want to keep some of what they wrote confidential so they cannot be judged on the merits of this writing.

I am, of course, talking about the announcement by the White House this evening that they no intention of turning over records regarding or authored by John Roberts from the time he served as Solicitor General. Judge Roberts is the President’s choice for a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court. One would think that if the Senate is to take the serious step of considering him, the administration would want to make a good faith effort to make sure that they have all the information they need to accomplish this in a competent and thorough manner.

This administration, however, doesn’t ever use that sort of harsh tone on the record (unless their hand is forced). No, the public front of the Bush administration, Press Secretary Scott McClellan stated in his briefing today that the White House wants “to work with the members of the Senate to make sure that they have the appropriate information so that they can do their job…" but off the record, administration sources are saying that they have no intention of turning over records from when Judge Roberts served as deputy Solicitor General (from 1989-1993).

Briefly, for those of you that don’t know, the Solicitor General is a position at the Justice Department that is tasked with arguing on behalf of the United States government before, you guessed it, the Supreme Court. Having held this position makes Judge Roberts, in my opinion, a very qualified candidate for a justice on the high court. He certainly knows the inner workings, the procedure and traditions of the court. It also means that he has probably used that position to forward at least some positions that he holds or he would not have been appointed to that position to begin with. This is a political appointment, and it is certain that Presidents, Democrat and Republican alike, choose their Solicitors General based on ideological compatibility with their own views.

The usual cadre of GOP mental midgets has come forth to support this line of thinking. They include Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas who said; "I don't think it is appropriate for a lawyer to release documents they've produced for their clients." Of course Senator Brownback is a lawyer as are most of the nincompoops inside the Beltway. If these so-called lawyers are anywhere near the caliber in their trade as Dr. Frist is in his, then we are doomed to painful ignorance across the board. But I digress!

These minions argue that as Solicitor General, John Roberts was serving as the President’s lawyer and therefore these papers are protected by attorney-client privilege. I am not a lawyer, but I am very confident in saying, regardless of legal precedent, the Solicitor General is not the President’s lawyer. He is the American people’s lawyer, and therefore the Senate (as the people direct legislative representatives in this process) have every right to see every single document from decisions and opinions down to doodle pads if they so please.

This is not the first time this administration and others have tried to claim executive privilege. Some may remember the battle between the U.S. General Accountability Office (GAO) and the Vice President’s office over the release of documents pertaining to meetings held with energy industry officials while the administration was formulating their national energy policy. They claimed that they should not be required to give up this information because it is the stated right of the executive branch to meet with whoever they want to develop policy alternatives. This is, of course, absolutely correct. They do have the right to meet with anyone they want about any subject. What they are wrong about, however, is that they have the right to keep that information a secret from the American people (in this case represented by the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council and a number of other environmental organizations). They claimed that executive privilege exists in these cases.

It is funny that they should take that stand after the GOP took the opinion that the Clinton administration should release the names of all the people that they consulted on Hillary Clinton’s now infamous health care policy overhaul debacle. For the record, the GOP was right then, and now that it does not suit their needs they have switched teams. Seems like typical beltway “flip-flopping” to me!

I don’t want to get off on a tangent. The point I hope I have made is that our government does not have the right to keep secrets from us unless there are legitimate national security concerns. Even then, as I have stated, I would favor reforms to the law so that these national security concerns are overseen and audited by the judicial branch, though a good deal of discretion should be granted to the administration with regards to national security matters. I often think that they tell us far too much on this subject.

What I cannot abide is the belief that policy is best made in secret. I believe that the best policy formulation comes about as a part of a great national conversation about what the American people need and what role they want their government to play. Some will say that this is fulfilled when American’s vote. I say that is not enough, I believe that it works best when we are involved in every step of the process, voicing our opinions loudly, even angrily if necessary. Had it been left to our leaders, independence would never have happened. The Boston Tea Party would never have happened. The abolition of slavery would never have happened. The labor movement, women’s suffrage or the civil rights movement would never have happened. All great leaps forward have been the result of citizen involvement in the policy process. Perhaps restoring this will bring the people’s interest back to public affairs of state.

Hey Hillary, You’re Not Bill! Now Shut Up and Go Away!

There are a lot of people out there that are enormous fans of old #42. By 42 I mean William Jefferson Clinton, our 42^nd President. Slick Willy, Semantics Bill, or whatever you call him; love him or hate him, it is impossible to deny that Bill Clinton was and remains an incredibly gifted politician. This is a man who had a higher approval rating then the Congress that was impeaching him.

There are many who admire Hillary Rodham Clinton and believe that she was a strong first lady (especially when compared with Lemming Laura) and is a very capable senator for New York. I suppose Hillary is fine, but she possesses none of the political savvy or charisma that her husband possesses.

Many have marked Hillary as the presumptive favorite in 2008 to win the nomination and finally take America back from the “Jesus Freaks”. Come on, you have all seen the e-mail with the map of North America depicting the United States of Canada and Jesusland. Don’t deny it, quit your stuttering. Lately, Ottawa is looking pretty good, even if Bono did describe Prime Minister Paul Martin as impossible and stubborn.

I am a left leaning politico. I do not deny that. Anyone who reads my blog knows that I generally hate all things Republican and opt for the Democratic ticket. That is no mystery! That said, I do not accept the Democratic Party as a whole. There is plenty of dead wood that could be pitched overboard. Hillary Clinton is one piece of that dead wood. She sucks. There simply is no other way to say it.

In 2004 the Dems nominated Senator John Kerry a relatively straightforward, clear and consistent (is that possible in Congress) legislator and he was labeled as a wishy washy flip flopper (no Northwestern women’s lacrosse jokes please). So, what do the donkeys do? They go out a find the fakest, flip flopper of them all! Hillary Clinton is by all accounts fairly liberal. That is A’OK in my book, except until recently when she has used the long leaping strides of an Olympic triple jumper to scurry off to the center. This I cannot abide.

We live in a country where liberal is a bad word. It is interesting talking to my friends in Europe, there the definition of liberal is completely different and invariably is used to describe a center-right party. Here it is akin to being Karl Marx’ first cousin, some sort of red, commie swine. Republicans from Barry Goldwater to George W. Bush worked very hard to cultivate that perception. As a result Democrats of all stripes cringe at the very mention of the word, like zebras cringe as a lion bears down on them at the watering hole. It infuriates me that my ideological shipmates are such yella’-bellies.

If Hillary Clinton were to face Senator John McCain in the 2008 election I would have to think very carefully about who I would vote for. Like I have said before, I agree with McCain on virtually nothing but I admire his integrity. With John McCain you know what you’re getting. Hillary Clinton is an enigma. If she wants the nomination in ’08 she needs to stop being a coward and start being a Democrat in the vein of JFK, LBJ or even her husband.

Neo-conservative Republicans have a name for fellow party members that they feel are not conservative enough. They call them RINOs (Republicans In Name Only). Perhaps, then, Mrs. Clinton you are a DINO! If you’re not, Hillary, prove it!

Another white chucklehead in a black robe?

President Bush has, quite literally, picked his man. After there was much speculation that Dubya would pick a woman to replace Sandra Day O’Connor as an associate justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, including the enticing “almost leak” of Judge Edith Brown Clement’s name, the President went ahead and selected the relatively young Judge John Roberts from the cornhusker state. Another white chucklehead in a black robe! SWEET!

I am not going to go into the details of Judge Roberts’ background or career except to say that this is a man who, at 50, has a relatively empty and uncertain past. Not that his credentials should be called into question. Roberts appears to me to be very capable and qualified. Roberts was a clerk for Chief Justice Rehnquist. He is known to be a conservative and known the favor states rights to the federal government. Two things that worry me, but I believe that simply worrying a liberal is not grounds to rule him out. There were more qualified conservatives and more qualified moderates. So, why did George W. Bush select this relative newcomer? Roberts will certainly appease the conservative wing, but he’s not THAT conservative. He’ll offend some liberals, but he’s not THAT offensive.

Why then, you ask, pick John Roberts for the bench? Because George W. Bush is a political genius. That’s why. President Bush has selected a man, who in his early fifties, will likely sit on the Supreme Court for 35 years. Dubya has assured that his legacy will be felt for many years to come (as if the Iraq debacle hadn’t already assured that). In appointing this judge who is relatively unknown, he has ensured that the left cannot smear him as this, that or the other, though they certainly will try. It was commented on NPR this morning that Judge Roberts’ decisions are almost too clean. By this I mean, he never allows personal sentiment to overshadow his legal argument. Does that mean that his personal beliefs don’t influence his decisions? No, it means that he has been extremely careful, as if planning for this occasion.

No one knows what kind of justice John Roberts will make. Dubya could have appointed the first Latino to the court. He could have chosen to replace O’Connor with another woman. Some believe that the fact that we know so little about Roberts indicates that he could be the perfect candidate to slip past the Democrats and get another ideologue onto the court, but remember the last time the GOP tried to slip one past the Democrats, with Justice Souter, it came back to bite them on the ass.

In the end I will reserve judgment on the judge. He is the Presidents choice and while I didn’t vote for him it is his prerogative to appoint anyone he wants.

Is Orange the new Pink? Vietnam, Iraq and General Westy

I took the weekend off and not for want of doing it, but because I simply had nothing to say. Those of you who know me, know how shocking that is, but you also know that such speechlessness cannot last. I’m back baby, and oh boy do I want to talk.

It turns out that General William Westmoreland died over the weekend. Really briefly, General Westmoreland was the commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam from 1964-68, during the build up of the military effort in Southeast Asia. The good general was both praised and criticized for his handling of that role.

Those who praise him say that he did the best that could be done under the constraints laid out by President Johnson and, in fact, was an innovator the way wars were fought. They refer of course to the birth of helicopter warfare. Air mobilization combat had never been attempted before but I think it is too generous to credit ol’ Westy with that innovation. The general defended his failure in Vietnam by saying that LBJ had denied his request to widen the conflict to Cambodia, Laos and North Vietnam so the military could adequately do battle with the very mobile Viet Cong forces.

I think it is Westy’s critics who hit closer to the bulls eye. The general is criticized for implementing an obsolete strategy trying to simply levee so much massive brute strength against his enemies that, he believed, they would simply cave under the threat. He was, as history proves, colossally wrong. There is a great quote from military historian and former Army major, Andrew F. Krepinevich, in today’s New York Times obituary. Krepinevich believes that Westy suffered from self-delusion stating; "In focusing on the attrition of enemy forces rather than on defeating the enemy through denial of his access to the population," General Westmoreland's command "missed whatever opportunity it had to deal the insurgents a crippling blow."

This of course brings us to the point of today’s blog piece. Does this sound vaguely familiar to anyone? Perhaps the generals in command at the Pentagon today are suffering from the same delusions as ol’ Westy and his obsolete cronies. Many try to say that Iraq is the new Vietnam. It is popular to throw around terms like quagmire and Vietnam War to describe the current situation in Iraq. Any comparison between Iraq and Vietnam are abstracts in the equally delusional mind of some pinko, peacenik, liberal, sap. Iraq is not the new Vietnam in the same sense that orange is the new pink. Iraq is the new Iraq. My point being that generals are damned slow to adapt to changing challenges because they are victims of doctrinal “group think”.

Clearly the generals creating strategy for Iraq face the same challenge albeit with different variables. The challenge is fighting a completely new style of war. I am glad that we have finally figured out how to fight the Vietnam War, but that ship sailed a long time ago. These clowns who were Lieutenants in Vietnam who were “in the shit” and are now bitter about the way the war was fought. The same way that the “Swift-boat Veterans for Truth” insist on painting a revisionist history of the Vietnam War so that it is not revealed that they fought for and their friends died for the biggest nothing in history.

Unfortunately Al Qaeda (not Iraq or any Islamic nation) are not the Viet Cong, they are not the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) or any other group involved in the Vietnam conflict. I am not a military tactician, nor am I a defense strategy specialist. So, if you came here expecting the blue print on how to fight the “war on terror” you came to the wrong place. All I know is the one similarity that the Viet Cong and Al Qaeda share is a willingness to go to any length to achieve their ends. In Vietnam that meant never surrendering, no matter how many fatalities they suffered. The same is true for the insurgency in Iraq and for Al Qaeda as a larger organization. The conflict cannot be tit for tat, we simply do not have the fortitude to go the distance with them. As in Vietnam, if we follow this approach a time will come when the public will no longer stand for it. Unlike Vietnam, the war on terror is not one that we can afford to lose.