Gimme a break

I wanted to shut up for a while and see what quiet felt like but damn, there is such sick folly afoot.

The NY Times, you don't need me to tell you, has a mixed record on getting their facts straight but when they report congressional testimony of several recent Surgeons General to the effect that the Bush league routinely pressured them to water down any health policy or reported findings that didn't look good for Rethuglican supporters, I assume that the Surgeons General have not garbled their facts. It is a fresh provocation to see old lies and disservices to the republic laid out afresh like the corpses of so many dead truths unearthed.


As Seen on the Internets: turning over a rock so that you won't have to...

I was still coming down from a bit of a high I had over the great turnout for Live Earth/Party for the Planet last weekend, when this horrid pile of lies crashed me jarringly back to the realities of the fight for our planet. I don't know if I should have done them the favor of a link but rather than go there, just see a few of their headlines:

Origins of Environmental Religions
Jay Lehr, Ph.D. - July 12, 2007
Conventional religions have been under attack for some years from liberals who have drifted into secular humanism and away from any devout belief in God. ...

Global Warming Scapegoat
James M. Taylor - July 09, 2007
Regarding “Officials discuss health, climate change” (July 2), it is amazing how global warming is becoming this generation’s version of UFOs; anything that a cursory analysis doesn’t immediately explain must be a UFO… or global warming....

And there is much more merde where that came from...they get some ignorant liar to write a crank letter to the WaPo and then publish it in their little web page of bought and paid lies as if it were news that bore repeating. Who is this "Heartland Institute"? Pretty much the spewers of specious conclusions that only bush league supporters could swallow. Herbert J Walberg, from the Hoover institute, heads their board of directors. He managed to get in a career in academic psychology before he found it more appealing to denounce school desegregation and argue that total free market treatment would leave no child with a behind. Joseph L Bast, frequent contributor of articles and co-author with Walberg did not even earn his stupidity: he is blatantly a paid liar who just repeats the lies of others.

How very Bush League of them: a PhD adviser to the department of education with his name all over a web zine of utter rubbish denials of well established science on the environment.

individuality: to be or not to be for myself.

Please correct my vocabulary if you know a better word than collectivism to set in opposition to individualism. Though dictionary.com had glowing words for individualism ["virtue"] , it and synonym.com drew total blanks for an antonym and I conclude that our culture and its language are deficient for carrying on a vital debate. I want words that stake out the two ends of an axis or spectrum on which political animals array themselves, find their spot and then, sometimes, dig in even though the line often moves. Examination of the nature/nurture issues that lead a person to their spot may be an interesting topic... perhaps later. Location on this axis is not exclusively the measure, but to my mind, a good summary of a person's politics. In the US, individualism gets great press. It can be applied to lefty inspirations like H. D. Thoreau despite conservative commentators being sure the concept is in their corner, rooting for every selfish cause they advance. Despite a pall of vilifying rhetoric claiming an unbridgeable gap with monsters on the other side, all you have on the left and right are people. Face to face, you could find out whats eating someone and if you were perceptive, what they are afraid of, what they have thought through and what they are inclined to accept uncritically. You could. But for too many Americans, this axis is not seen as an avenue of intellectual commerce, a space to be explored to the right and to the left. Instead, its chopped up, and the most damage is done by partisan campaigns to put "bridge out" signs where, in truth, they simply fear to get into a dialogue. "Collectivism", per Webster, is not ramified with the awareness of community or other members of the system in which one operates but rather is just written up as the opposite of privatized, as if it only meant to describe farming in Stalinist Russia, a synonym for Bolshevism. So what is the word that is the opposite of individualism? Egolessness?

Sorry Rush, individualism is a broken word. Its not that we aren't each unique in our thinking. I mean, you could pick a church, ashram, mosque, or whatever and carefully question each member in private and come away with the impression that they each had a slightly different religion. The same goes for political parties. Extolling only one end of the spectrum makes for a broken culture in that it fosters a bias against developing awareness of how connected and directly and indirectly interdependent people actually are. Indirectly includes so much: the resources we share, the wall to wall social environment we form for each other just by being on the street or in the market....so much. To stress individualism exclusively is a stuck-in-Reagan's-80's arrested development, egotism enshrined and the inconvenient burden of sharing the world with others deftly cropped out of the world view. Go ahead, take all you can grab. But tell me, for what slaughterer do you fatten yourself? Do you know you drag the rest of us to a slaughter of exhausted resources?

Another way the word is broken is that it has broken into two connotations: "courage to need no crowd behind you when you announce your cause" [positive spin] and "denial of connection to the opinions and resources of others" [a social philosophy based on personal immaturity]. I am out of my league if I try to speak for [which, as electronic and impersonal political discourse has devolved, means against] all conservatives in saying that they operate from the "denial " usage but loudly claim the "courage" usage. Claiming to know the real thoughts of liberals is an industry among conservative commentators so perhaps my assertion puts me in their shabby league.

So its broken and overused and kind of like the idea of faith, subject to suspect claims, always relative yet inviting self assessment in terms of absolutes. The most literal and chest thumping claim of individualism would require a blindness to the country, the community and the many others who played in the life story that brought the claimant to their moment of proclamation. Individualism as the dictionary defines it: "A doctrine holding that the interests of the individual should take precedence over the interests of the state or social group" is simply one of those cakes you cannot both have and eat. The opposition seen between individual and social group is a false and childish take on the inevitable and necessary fact that we cannot live alone. As I have said elsewhere, group and individual are yin and yang, only defined in terms of each other and meaningless without each other.

To profess that you are a rugged individualist, dependent only on your own wits and resources is delusional unless you are literally a hermit. And to whom does a hermit profess?

Mature apprehension of and constructive discussion of the balance that our survival requires us to strike in integrating personal or subgroup wants and needs with group and societal needs could start with stepping outside the bickering we call politics and seeing the length of the axis.
One of the most succinct yet fruitful expressions of this process of balancing [yes "process"! the world has never stood still and no fixed line or rule would long mark the balance point] the interest of group and individual was set down by Rabbi Hillel around 100 BC and taught to me by my dearest teacher:

If I am not for myself, who will be?
If I am only for myself, what am I?
If not now, when?

I think pondering those questions on all scales from personal to global is a healthy exercise. It's led me to a couple of thoughts.

1. That government [or lack thereof] implementing a social philosophy that neglects the needs of society [e.g. bush league doctrines] will fail just as that government [or excess thereof] that neglects the needs and aspirations of the individual [Bolsheviks e.g. as opposed to Mensheviks ]. Either will hurt both society and individuals on the way to failure for in the end, society and individual are allied and their joint welfare is all that should be established and protected. Any other purported objective, history has repeatedly shown, degenerates into the establishment and protection of power and the powerful.
2. It might be that talking up individualism is just safer than coming right out and saying that "society" is a fiction and has no real needs. That idea is a bit more subtle than message machines are good at delivering but, Mr. Limbaugh, Ms. Coulter, Mr. Rove, I will be looking at your words more carefully hence forth. Your great leader is still trying to pronounce words...I'll skip him.

Notes:
So much for brevity and for being oblivious to particular persons. And no, the executioner does not take himself all that seriously, in fact "The laity doth protest too much, methinks". But he does take the wreck of society by a bumbling captain and pirate crew very seriously. He has to note that he had great fun writing this because he did NOT start by knowing that individualism was Mr. Limbaugh's personal talisman but googled to it while sanity checking his perception of the trashtalking conservatives [there are MANY conservatives who the executioner reads, enjoys and occasionally learns from. No offense meant to all conservative persons as a category, just the mean, the cheap and the unconstructive]. He also found that National Socialism was at heart always racism and that continues today. The executioner does not think that sort of warped view plays in the bush league's politics and whatever bad things fall out along racial lines are just an artifact of socioeconomic stratification not invented, though not helped, by the republicans. To call the bush league Nazis is then a dumb mistake. [Fascist, on the other hand fits better but take care: few audiences will know the difference or pay attention long enough to have the difference explained] In terms of depth of thought and effect on society, Bush is much more like King Louis the XIV, a bumbler who woke up with his finger on the trigger of big guns he inherited and just said whoo hoo and started shooting. [hey! Americans LIKE a guy who's uninhibited and decisive!]

postscript 25 July '05: Little vacations are nice...you get a chance to read a bit. A review in TPM Online led me to a book by Kwame Appiah in which the author presents some carefully thought out views about identity. Such analysis requires addressing individuality and its dynamic with social and personal forces that work toward community and the review persuades me the author did careful work there as well. I will have to read the book to be sure but what I think is left out is the deeper analysis often left out of works by authors in the western traditions of thought: the ground of being is a bare consciousness, that can hardly be said to vary or be distinguishable from one person to the next. We all possess this of necessity, but like a diamond in a mud hole, it is lost to us without a very special, focused and patient search.

Bush has you surrounded, come out with your priorities up

Air, you won't miss it until its gone. Natural resource issues seem a remote concern to many urban and suburban Americans. But consider how at first the war seemed distant and bearable to its supporters. With each coffin and each day's deterioration in Iraq, the war comes home to main street America...and the closer it gets, the fewer its supporters. Those with misplaced revenge fantasies or a preexisting hard-on to exercise American military might are all the support the war has left. Well, that and the sorry class of people who can simply never own up to a mistake. There are many fronts on which the republican administration, listening only to its friends in industry, have degraded what was not theirs to spoil. A bit of overshadowed news today serves to remind that there are many counts to bring against the administration, many wrongs to prioritize and deal with.

While you were all distracted with botched wars, cover-ups of fudged intelligence ops and "massacres" of prosecutors who were either getting too close to a republican or failed to respond to hints they should drum up cases against Democrats, (certainly enough to keep your attention), the bush league have been giving away national heirloom resources that should have been community property of US citizens for generations to come. And they had to muzzle quite a few scientist to do it.
In today's NYTimes, there is a report of Bush appointees silencing scientists who were trying to protect your forests and wildlife even though that is exactly what the scientist's were hired to do. The article reminds of us of similar clumsy censoring of climate science at NASA last year. The bush league has mounted a steady assault on resources, environment and the people who study them. NRDC cataloged the repealed protections, exploitative grants to industry and suppression of science in 2003 and 2004: it takes 100 pages just to list the damages done. Perhaps biologists should be next to go on the endangered species list since they seem, by trade, to be stationed between environmental hen house and the republican foxes. It was this way back in the reign of Bush the 1st [I am amazed such controversial old e-mails still exist on the web]. For a contrast, consider that in the middle of the Clinton administration, US Forest Service employees were [a] recounting the coercion of their former Bush I bosses and [b] writing their own whistle blower guidelines.

The words "scientific integrity" would essentially be a redundant pairing were it not for the Bush administration and all the similar oppressors of factual inquiry back to those who silenced Galileo.

A bit of trouble for anti-bush bloggers

Atrios and Lindsay have both got posts today about a bill just signed into law by Bush which could be used by the bush league to harrass their political enemies. This new act has a name that sounds like it would be protective of good citizens but the language allows it to be used to protect bad politicians. For those who, like myself, blog anonymously to save themselves and their family or employer from distress and unwanted attention, this is clearly a threat to free speech. As Mumon points out, you don't even have to lose the lawsuit that could show this is an unconstitutional bit of bushwhackery to be damaged by exposure...who wants to sue first?

But why should I worry? The bush league would never harrass someone just for saying bad things about them. Of course not!

Wolfie finally gets his clue

I have less than no time to post this week but I so like short stories that have a moral...

One of the authors of Dubya's Debacle in Iraq, Paul Wolfowitz, has managed to disgrace himself thoroughly enough by conflict of interest as president of the world bank that the only choices left to him were resign right now or be fired. He has resigned. That NY Times article has a tidy little time-line box if you are interested in the blow by blow of how the man brought himself down.

The most amazing thing to me is how radically sentiment about the man's qualifications differs between bloggers like me and the accidental president with the subnormal IQ. Long before he left the Pentagon to run the world bank, Wolfowitz was almost uniformly criticized as a clumsy conservative ideologue by writers outside of the charmed circle of neoconservatives. Nothing has happened in the years since he planned the reconstruction of Iraq [how's that going?] to do anything but reinforce that opinion. Bush gave Wolfie the world bank job as a sop when it was clear he was damaged goods to the Pentagon and too rough a customer even for the Bush whacking school of governing. We could ask of Dubya, "What was he thinking?" but the answer is plainly "not much".

Posters and commenters on the blogs I read readily quipped "OMG! He has an actual girl friend" when the Shaha Ali Riza salary shenanigans came to light. I was surprised that he even has friends. The word "friend" appears seven times in the text of Steven Weisman's NYT article. But here is the heart of the illness that is Bush League conservatism: Lacking competence or a decent respect for arguments that proceed from facts, this administration relies on friendships and unexamined reputation. Friendships then, must be of the most honest and psychologically healthy sort if they are the glue that holds where ability is lacking. The character of the friendships on which the Bush white house runs aren't, can't be, much better than the character of the players in that tragedy. The "friendships" have a strongly conditional aspect and many operate on a mafia-like dynamic of reward and punishment:

But others say Mr. Wolfowitz repeated the mistakes he had made at the Pentagon: adopting a single-minded position on certain matters, refusing to entertain alternative views, marginalizing dissenters.

“Wolfowitz unsettled people from the outset,” said Manish Bapna, executive director of the Bank Information Center, an independent watchdog group. “His style was seen as an ad hoc subjective approach to punishing enemies and rewarding friends.”

Though he was one of the original coterie of "Vulcans", and had a few accomplishments in foreign service to his name when Bush took him on, Wolfie had demonstrated his incompetence by the time he was given the World Bank job. Why this is not a mark against Bush in more minds is a mystery to me. Wolfie cosponsored some of this young century's most abject and inhumane failures and, like Bush himself, met competence with conflict if it did not fit his ideology:

His time at the Pentagon was characterized by infighting, especially with the Central Intelligence Agency, which he thought underestimated Iraq as a threat to the United States. He clashed with Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, and others who warned — correctly, it turned out — that the United States would need more forces in Iraq. His vision of democracy in the Arab world also ran aground in Baghdad.

You may think I am mistaken here: aren't the stubborn shows of fidelity such as retaining Rumsfeld far past his usefulness at least a sign of closeness or faithfulness that real friends should enjoy? But I maintain that friends don't let friends govern drunkenly: these "friends" could not criticize effectively or listen to each other if the messages were not positive. They are stuck with each other more than they are friends.

Bush and his supporters have claimed that you should choose leaders based on character. They may be right, we should try it some day in this country. Until then, give me a brain trust that actually has some brains.

[A Bomb a nation] (not) Becoming the Enemy

What spares a group who see themselves pitted against an enemy (some other group) from becoming just like that enemy in order to win? What spares them is the questions they ask themselves. Because answers arrived at by partisans generally are predermined from their questions, it is the questions that should be drawn up with care.

I sit for several hours a week in poorly airconditioned MoveOn.org office space crammed with phones, rickety chairs and tables and determined volunteers. One call at a time, we are finding the seven to ten percent of all MoveOn members who think its so important to get out the vote that they will put aside a few hours of their week, brave the interesting wierdness of calling strangers and help us make the calls. There are few lulls so we don't spend much time chatting with each other but we can't help but try our pet slogans and pitches out on each other. That is how I have come to trust these volunteers have asked "What should we be fighting for?" rather than "How can we win?" In that choice is an opporunity to make a seductive mistake. Even at this foot soldier level, you can see that opposition to the corrupt and cowardly congress and the bush regime is spontaneous and multifacited. There are college kids here, a few gray heads such as mine and 30-somethings.

We now witness in the newspapers the unraveling of the unwholesome coalition of neoconservative and cryptofascist theorizers, corporate influence marketers and the narrow and biggoted excesses of the religious right wing. What put that tacky marriage together in the first place? Tough that wedding of antidemocratic factions seemed to work, the source of their fears and desperation were distinct. It was brokered by folks like Karl Rove who would only ask this question: "how can we win?" There must be a war or some other metaphor that revolves around winning. No principle comes before winning. And so "winning" comes first and all its costs come later. Mr. Rove, Mr. Cheney, Mr. Bush: history has presented you with your tab and its time to pay up. You have taken far more freedom from us than Osama Bin Laden ever dreamed of. You have become the enemy and even your admirers see it.

The crush of things that must be done this month leave me little time to blog but there appears to be a theme so bear with a post that wads together what might better have been two or three short reads. My friend Shokai finds synchronicities but for me the coincidence of the several occasions for blogging is to be understood as arising from a common cause: the poisoning of many aspects of our lives by the pervasive reach of neoconservative policy: the starved arts and sciences, the life-wasting and money-wasting foreign policy, the pall of fear that dims political vision...all these taint a life we used to enjoy living. Everywhere, like rising vomit, we are soon going to try and heave out the poison.

Late last night [why oh why do such good authors get shunted to the deadest time slots] on C-SPAN bookenotes, I caught a wonderful talk by Thom Hartmann promoting his book "Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class -- And What We Can Do About It". The guy taught more insight in to history in 40 minutes than Bush slept through in his years at Yale. It bothers me to be reminded that over 30% of my income is taken by the IRS because I work for a living while the dividend-funded lifestyle parts with only about 15% of its income...not to mention what obscene things are done and what vital things NOT done with that money.

The musical 1776 has just completed a run at the Lyric Stage in Boston. When we took in the show Saturday, the producer introduced the show with the news that it was the best attended performance this company's 32 year history. Ben Franklin's punchlines adorn a serious struggle to get the declaration of independence written by a bunch of men who could easily [and some did] have hoped to keep their comfortable station in life by appeasing King George. The audience gave it a standing ovation. It was not anti-war [probably why it beat out HAIR for the Tony award in 1969] but not too subtly anti-conservative. It sang of how the conservative urges among the continental congress provided all the resistance to declaring our independence. And then last night I was hearing Hartmann reminding me that G. Washington and Thom Jefferson were self identified liberals: the cummulative result of all this stimulation is that I awake this morning aware that our history is still alive, our great experiment is neither dead yet nor forgotten but needs to be defended from its internal enemies, the sightless selfish who find in true democracy a chaotic threat to their priveleges.

The time of separation between moral pondering and political action has past. For too many of us that separation has meant that uninhibited greed, fear and xenophobia have worked their will on the character, policy and enterprises of our nation. We now witness the stinking debris in the wake of that will. Act. Act now. Get your face down to the party meetings, the candidate coffees, put a sign on your lawn and support the Get Out The Vote efforts. Act even though mistakes may be made, because systematic destruction of lives, human rights and the environment are not likely to be among those mistakes.

Yesterday I got an email via a fellow congregant from a group of rabbis against torture.

Vigil Mourning the Death of Our Most Cherished Values

Tuesday, October 17, 2006 at 9 a.m.

Lafayette Square or at a Post Office Near You

"Don't mourn -- organize!" It's time to do both. On Tuesday, October 17, at 9:00 a.m., President Bush is scheduled to sign the Military Commissions Act of 2006. This is the much-opposed bill which eliminates the right to habeas corpus for detainees, allows them to be tried without access to evidence against them and places decisions about interrogation methods solely under the President's control. The Washington Regional Religious Campaign Against Torture (WRRCAT) is calling for a "vigil mourning the death of our most cherished values" and for signing a counter-statement to the one that President Bush will sign that day. Vigil participants will attempt to get this statement to the President.

RHR-NA is a proud co-sponsor of this event and we are writing to urge you to participate in this event or in solidarity events in your local area.

How frightfully inured we have become to Bush wiping his ass with the constitution. The dubious points in support of this act raised by Bush apologists would not be relevant even if they were legally sound: the man already pays far less attention to the laws than his toadies and this one only gives him further latittude.
Sad to report only a few of us from the congregation are willing to show up with signs on a work day morning. It does benefit the Bush league that being in the middle class now means "working too many hours to show up for a protest". Sick as we are of Bush, it would benefit us all if a few more were ready to have America vomit him and his congress out of office. We are looking to other synagogues and a local mosque for some show of solidarity. I have a costume in mind, if I can figure out how to hold my arms out straight for an hour:


I expect a few idiots to lean out of their pickups and yell "traitor" or such at us Tuesday. For them I have the same answer as to the question that begins this post:

Don't get mad. Ask questions.

--
Posted by GreenSmile to A Bomb a nation at 10/16/2006 11:11:00 AM

its the leadership

Near the top of my daily reading list is Agonist.org. Back on May 11, a post about the legality and the origins of the NSA-run tap of all US phone call records began a comment thread that eventually provided an encyclopedic collection of facts and informed comment on the matter. Vladimir made some useful contributions to the discussion but when he opined:

I think people who live in fear, in gated communities, with security systems on their homes, won't really care if so-called liberals are saying "it's illegal", as long as the bush crowd can convince them that it will make the "safer"--trust us, we'll protect you and those liberals are soft. It's dishonest, but it has been quite effective. So I think that the best argument is that these are a bunch of incompetent frat boys who are over-riding the real professionals.

It made me wonder if the "bush crowd" and the "people who live in fear" are not in many ways the same kind of people except for how much power and information they possess. The root of this spying is not the incompetance and in fact, its not even that fascism-ready personalities abound even in normal times and democratic countries. I was at work when I read that comment. I no longer feel at liberty to post, and strictly speaking, it is prohibited to make public poltical statements using my employer's computers so I kept from keyboarding the following notion until I got back home from my travels.

There have been fascism-friendly functionaries in every era, in most administrations. We had J. Edgar Hoover long before we had Nixon but we didn't feel a need to spell out, in FISA, to the executive that warrantless or otherwise unchecked spying on our own citizens is wrong until Nixon gave his henchmen free rein. There is a little sign that could be on Bush's desk, if you will pardon my french: "the f_ck starts here". People who react to unknown and potential danger by trying to be even more dangerous than what they percieve rather than investigating their perceptions are not what is new: how many of them now run our country is what is new.

The little people in the military and civilian spy agencies may or may not possess any conscience about the meaning of the Bill of Rights or the legal precedents our courts have woven from the BoR. After all, these people are born worriers and have a career stake in mistrusting all humanity. They will do more than the spirit of the law allows if not held in check. This president is an even littler person than his voters, dwarfed by his insecurities, and welcoming state inspection of every iota of communication if his minions tell him it makes us safer.

Why the hell isn't he spying on the message traffic in and out of Pakistan where our most thoroughly documented enemy hides out? Al-Jazeera can get video tapes from people the US military can't even lock up when they are in our allies' hands. Why on earth would we want such ineptness loosed on our own citizens?

In the end, I think about the issue in my favorite how vs why framework. In a search for understanding of the natural world "why" is useless and leads to religious short-cut thinking. But in the world of the actions, collective and individual, of people, "why" is more important than how. Had he a different staff, or a different set of friends, the Bush league would still be a coterie of people taken in by their own fears. How they go about acting on their fears would be different in the details from our present carving of the flesh of liberty away from the words of the constitution but the why is the same...its the "leadership".

You can't change people, you can change leaders.

the only thing that matters

Bush supporters would never read anything I write anyway but I particularly advise any such supporters who have stumbled upon this page to hit the back button. Changing your minds must be sooo very painful. McCain promises to continue the ruinous idiocy I am looking at here and besides, the matter is in the hands of Bush appointees who will not be up for a vote...


I am coming to the impression that the only thing that matters to the people at the helm of the economic ship, where you and I are in steerage with subprime bilge up around our knees about now, is the Dow Jones Industrial Average. I got out of stocks three years ago because I thought Greenspan was letting us all go down between the shoals of debt and inflation. I thereby missed some profits and was baffled that the market defied all the economic gravity of our situation.

Something that should matter just got kicked to the curb: the going price of our treasury bonds took an instant hit because of the Fed's move. Those bonds are the means by which your government borrows money. Via that means, for instance, the Chinese have lent us about a trillion dollars. You think they want to do that much longer? I wonder if they are tolerating such stupidity because they know the money is being spent on useless military adventures in the middle east...which have paved the way for the Chinese to access the Arab oil resources. That would be the oil our brilliant Commandeer in Chief was told his war would secure for the US! In any event, the rising price of borrowing money [and borrowing money is all the Republican president who knows how to run oil companies into the ground can understand of finance... not the repaying] means the amount of your taxes spent keeping our country's creditors happy must go up.

Historically the market was basically an ever upward trending thing. But that is not a given any more than the superior fortunes of white males is a given. It was a trend based on an America full of jobs with few foreign competitors and a vast stock of cheap resources the ends of which we thought we'd never see. I see now that brief swing at 13000 was economic smoke and mirrors. The liquidity they pursue is made of ever more frail and less substantial inventions...now your sorryassed over-mortgaged house is being put up by the bank and the only outfit willing to take it at face value for collateral is the guys in charge of making the economy appear sound. You just watch what happens in the next few days after the stock market is jonesing for another money fix and the rest of the world has to decide if it would rather be holding euros or dollars in light of yet another dilution. It is not a dilution of the dollar so much as of the faith that the dollar is representative of sound financial infrastructure rather than one swamped in debt. Just watch. I am on the sidelines just watching and grateful that tax-free municipal bonds and money markets based on them have not yet disappeared.

Granted there is an appealing unambiguous sense of the "score" or the "bottom line" about that one stock market number as a metric. Symbols and simplifications are a reliable road to error. It is a metric that matters in a direct way only to investors. Most of us are only indirectly investors in securities and far more affected by the percentage of our taxes that go into debt service and wars as compared to education, infrastructure and health care. The debt has mounted astronomically under the last three Republican administrations. Sucking all the real money out of the economy and making up for it with Federal reserve bank policy and Treasury bond sales that try to substitute borrowed money, has helped replace our factories with financial houses of credit cards institutions like Bear Sterns and Countrywide Home Aloans.

America's part in the course of the world economy had to contract in any fair scenario. Our G7 and latter participations in planning globalization is necessary to make the vast populations of other countries more equal as players in the economy. Although industries shape these policies, they seem unaware that economies are ultimately just the tools by which we dispose and share the bounty nature left us. That is why I do not complain that our trading partners have become our equals and betters in capitalism. What I object to is that we as a country decided to forget about balancing our own checkbook and, to please a swaggering neocon minority and an insecure uneducated majority, simply continued to run a quasi-colonial foreign policy. Do you remember what Afghanistan did to the Soviet government? Do you think George Bush remembers Gorbachev?

I would recommend to those who wonder why so much is going to hell in our country's finances "in spite" of the Federal Reserve Bank's desperate measures and Bush's assurance that we are just in a little "slowdown" that you read a bit more widely. Asia Times is particularly valuable both for the political insight into important rising Asian nations and for the variety and depth of its economic writers. Even AT's conservative columnists, like Hutchinson, called the Fed's predicament quite accurately months ago. Agonist also has some very informed perspectives. Brad DeLong is prolific and I find him sometimes over my head but worth the time.

A question to billionaires from Wall Street and elsewhere who have had a perpetual picnic with republican tax cuts and pour a huge [to us it is huge] amount of cash into GOP campaign coffers: Do you have somewhere to hide all the money and continue to make money in this economic environment? Are you sure the Bush league and its policies are your best friend? Do you feel no pain at all? Sustainability is not just a concept for ecologists, you know.

And for the rest of us, yes, fellow voters, I do think it is teh stupid economy. What makes you think the other errors of our leadership have not grown so enormous as to become entangled in our financial lives?

Power also comes out of the end of a breadline, if you let it get long enough.

Patriotism

Since the "fourth of July" is going to last for about 7 days this year, I feel obliged to say something about patriotism.

We sat in the Koussevitzky Shed at Tanglewood Saturday evening in the audience for the live broadcast of Prairie Home Companion. Garrison Keillor's star guest was James Taylor. We have never seen the show before, not even when it comes to us because the tickets sell out months in advance. But this year some friends who are big fans of the show bought tickets for a van-full of us back in February. We made a day of it with the picnic on lawn and the whole nine yards.

The entire Tanglewood grounds were packed, around 13,000 people according to a Tanglewood employee we know. Keillor could run for president in Massachusetts and get away with it. He really had a knack for working a crowd. His wireless mic must have an incredible range because he walked through the crowd to open the show, all the way to the back of the shed and stood on benches to wave to the sea of folks with lawn tickets.

This crowd was not quite a slice of Massachusetts. Readers of The Boston Globe would have outnumbered readers of the Herald. Keillor got plenty of applause for jokes that mentioned the Redsox in a favorable way. Plenty of other material in the show reflected that Keillor or his writers knew the sympathies of the audience. The one joke that tells much about that knowledge was a skit in which James Taylor's worst secret fear was revealed: that George Bush was a fan.

So I am left to wonder, and hope someone can explain, how Keillor could get that audience on its feet to sing the corniest patriotic tunes [ the show started with the national anthem and later, we did a great job on America The Beautiful] and run a nominal 2 hour show a full hour longer with encores of equally sentimental favorites. These people are, by comparison to the crowd YOU happen to be standing amongst, fairly liberal but you could have heard the same warmth for patriotic songs in Dakota or Kansas. What is patriotism? Its just what you were taught: loving your country, having a good feeling about the place you come from.

I just said two things in that last sentence and first is everybody's claim but in particular conservatives and especially the Bush league: love of country, whatever that means. But the second is exactly what the neocons have sullied and deprived us of: how can we be proud of being a country that tortures people, spies on its citizens and stages deadly invasions of other countries on false premises? Keillor made us feel good but its a kind of parlor trick in which we feel good about a country to be found mostly in songs and memories. At least he can make us feel good. He knows those memories and can spin a yarn that leads us back to them. That Bush and the petty fascists that prop him up have made those old favorites ring more hollow than ever before is something I don't intend to let anyone forget.

Cause and Effectiveness

PZ Meyers is in high dudgeon in this post exhorting those who lay any claim to an understanding of the processes and the overwhelming logic of evolution to stop laying low in the company of deniers and fence sitters. Comment there is split over whether the fierce charge is helpful to the cause or merely reassuring to those who are already comfortable with the power of Darwin's idea. If you work in the biological sciences, you might have seen this paper but, being about the "tribe of science" [Dr. Free-Ride's term, most handy] rather than science, I doubt it made it to the top of your stack of papers to be read. OK, so its meta-science, but it appears to be a pretty well designed study from what I can read. The contention, to get right to the point, is that there is a clear and measurable reluctance by researchers who are in fact involved in the evolution of pathogens to actually call a clade a clade and use the "e-word". The frequency of occurrence of the word "evolution" in the titles of articles in three categories of journal: general science, evolution research and biomedical research is almost monotonic increase from 1990 until now. This is interpreted to indicate the growing understanding of genetic basis of most biological phenomena and the understanding that the gene is the key link forever on the anvil of selection pressures. But an unmistakable chill in the use of the word shows up in the graph of frequency in titles of research grants from the federal government beginning early in the rein of Bush the second: a rapid rise of frequency in NIH grant titles suddenly plateaus and a general up trend in NSF grant titles abruptly slopes down.
The authors used a very large set of observations. This is no anecdote. And remember that this is being said of research you are paying for with taxes, research that is supposed to be curing or understanding diseases you may have or get:

This reflects the growing importance of evolutionary concepts in the biomedical field, and highlights even more the strange rarity with which the word “evolution” is used in the biomedical literature dealing with antimicrobial resistance. It has been repeatedly rumored (and reiterated by one of the reviewers of this article) that both the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation have in the past actively discouraged the use of the word “evolution” in titles or abstracts of proposals so as to avoid controversy. Indeed, we were told by one researcher that in the title of one proposal, the authors were urged to change the phrase “the evolution of sex” to the more arcanely eloquent wording “the advantage of bi-parental genomic recombination.”

I have to wonder what happened to the research ideas of scientists like PZ who would rip heads off, [figure of speech, OK?] if asked to censor one of his grant proposal's for the e-word? Does the Bush Stooge looking over the shoulders of competent administrators at NSF round file those? Such titles would not even show up on these graphs, one of the ways in which bush league government is a black hole.

This is not some tempest in an academic teapot. Medical science can not work fast enough and damn well knows it. None of us should be quiet about an administration that puts the brakes on research we need.

Nowadays, medical researchers are increasingly realizing that evolutionary processes are involved in immediate threats associated with not only antibiotic resistance but also emerging diseases [1,2]. The evolution of antimicrobial resistance has resulted in 2- to 3-fold increases in mortality of hospitalized patients, has increased the length of hospital stays, and has dramatically increased the costs of treatment [3,4].

I am not a strategist who could devine the optimum tone of a campaign to remove the shackles of superstitions banded about a sound and vital category of research. But certainly, I can no longer begrudge PZ his anger and contempt at the damage to the effectiveness of science by this administration and its abettors.

Authority issues

I am tempted to gloat. I should refain since the choir is probably hoping for a more substantial sermon.

Well, OK, one little dig and then I get serious...

It turns out, in spite of all this Bush league spinning, lying and muzzling of scientists that, legally speaking, there really is such a thing as global warming. That being so, the SCotUS found the present administration negligent of its duties to do something about green house gasses.

Yes, that supreme court, the one Dubya and his daddy packed with conservatives.

And now a few thoughts this development puts in mind...

So our bus crowded with an unlikely assortment of strange bedfellows who sooner or lately realized we must stop global warming all should be asking: Are we there yet?

Most of us probably think "told ya so" with a shrug and go back to our other concerns. For some of us I expect global warming is as big a problem as we will ever have...wars are hell but they are just detours in the path of history. Those with professional or personal priority for global warming's problems will take this victory as one more plodding step. Next we move on to identifying solutions and preparations, now that discussion of constructive measures won't be suppressed by the Republicans. The capitulation of the Republican's "f__k the environment" school of policy is not complete but how do you mark a turning point in the battle? Which is the belated step in the right direction to which a long time proponent of reducing our GHG emissions can point and say to any laggard denialist "See, even the dimwit-in-chief says we have to change our tune because we are hurting our world and our selves"? Bush jumped on the bandwagon a few days before the G8 summit, actually tried to commandeer the bandwagon, with policy "initiatives" a decade too late. The polite toleration of his posturing by other world leaders is better than Bush deserves.

But is that change of tune meaningful? Does the court's decision mark a corner turned by an entire nation? Do money and serious intention now materialize to support scouring universities and industry for the brains and means to start putting the brakes on carbon emissions? Will those dusty Rolodexes with names of climate scientists whirl again?

If in fact this decision truly does lift the roadblocks to environmental responsibility then that is the meaning of the decision and it is authoritative.

But it could be meaningless. For those of us who think a response to man made climate change is long over due, there won't be any questioning of the authority of the court. Those who have mountains of coal to burn may think otherwise. The flock tended by Rev. Senator Inhofe may think otherwise. Money we little polluters pay in the name of our own convenience is dribbling out of out check books as always and continues to flood into the coffers of oil and coal lobbies. That money needs to dematerialize. Global warming denial is a stupid activity until you consider its balance sheet.

What is "authority" in a personal sense? Is it an agency, of whatever human or institutional form, that promulgates the rules a person recognizes via the tug of their own conscience? Is it more than mere expertise, more than a reputation for knowing a little more than the next guy? I do not mean authority in the sense of "the authorities", i.e. those who have laws written to their purposes and the guns of policemen if need be, to back up their wishes under these laws. I mean what commands your will, what tells you "This is right, whether I like it or not, and I will not connive or work against its aims." Since some people have bought off their own conscience with their own wealth, no law, regardless of its logic of common good and necessity, has the authority with such parties to make them relinquish the agenda to profit personally despite horrible consequences to others. "Others", if removed in consanguinity, geography or time are remote enough to be absent from considerations where a good conscience would weigh their interests. In this sense, then, I doubt the parties who profit or most of US consumers and end-of-the-pipe polluters see much authority either in the SCotUS or even the poseur-in-chief. You can still sell papers by printing this kind of denialist crap.

one more time, WHY are we in Iraq? [xpost from a bomb a nation]

Because Saddam had the bomb. That is a lie the Bush league wrung out of the CIA

Because Saddam had Al Qaida contacts and supported them. That was news to Al Qaida.

Because we were going to bring democracy to those poor Arabs. Then why do a higher percentage of Iraqis vote than show up at the polls in America?

Certainly not because we want the oil under our control. We can't say that on the air can we, Karl? Lindsay at Majikthise translates WaPo out loud for the hard-of-thinking conservatives.

By Peter Baker

Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 5, 2006; Page A06

GREELEY, Colo., Nov. 4 -- During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, President Bush and his aides sternly dismissed suggestions that the war was all about oil. "Nonsense," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld declared. "This is not about that," said White House spokesman Ari Fleischer.

...

You can imagine a world in which these extremists and radicals got control of energy resources," he said at a rally here Saturday for Rep. Marilyn Musgrave (R-Colo.). "And then you can imagine them saying, 'We're going to pull a bunch of oil off the market to run your price of oil up unless you do the following. And the following would be along the lines of, well, 'Retreat and let us continue to expand our dark vision.' "
Bush said extremists controlling Iraq "would use energy as economic blackmail" and try to pressure the United States to abandon its alliance with Israel. At a stop in Missouri on Friday, he suggested that such radicals would be "able to pull millions of barrels of oil off the market, driving the price up to $300 or $400 a barrel.

The man who put the most pressure and planted the most toadies among the defense intelligence analysts to get his war decision also has close ties to the defense contractor that went on to overcharge millions to provision the warriors under a no-bid contract. [that is over a million google matches, few involving refutations...well? ]

Why are we still in Iraq?

If (approval < 20%) print "WMD Found";

There, I just saved Karl Rove a bundle. That line of code can be his whole program at this point.

Here is the trickle up of factoids gleaned from real authentic pre-invasion Iraqi secret documents as it moves up the food chain of right wing blogs. The last time ANYONE was that uncritical of a document was when Dan Rather took Bush's national guard records at face value and ran with it. Considering that our government possessed these documents for nearly three years, many of us find it curious that no one saw a need to disclose these "smoking guns" until bush approval ratings dip into mid thirties. Even the pros get burned. Now that its the blogger's turn to tell their hope from the straight dope, we'll see who gets it right. Glenn Reynolds was wondering why MSM hasn't made more of this pile of papers.

Seems clear to me why not. The for-profit press, for all the compromises it has made with this administration, still employs some able reporters and fact finders. If by now they haven't dug up this information in the normal course of their snooping its likely because this was never regarded as substantial. The public esteem for dear leader and his gang and their adgendas dwindle. He has already done the neocon causes much of the serious damage and discrediting they deserve. I would imagine he flips back and forth between staying the curse and writhing about looking for a way to cut losses and get out of Iraq while he can still hang "mission accomplished" on this abortion. It must be appealing to the bush league to find a few left over crumbs from that cardboard feast of "information" that was so useful in getting us into the war. What a clear sign of desperation that after two years of discediting for each claimed cause for war, they are still trying to sell Saddam's Scary War Machine to us. Or maybe they need to convince themselves that somehow the "facts" that justify war are true because they can't voice an unconsious fear of something the anti-war souls have known all along:

What true victory could come of a war based on lies? What if you couldn't repeat a lie often enough to make it true?

Slow motion train wrecks, mything the point

When myths about ourselves are too cherished to let reality in to our awareness, myths will collide with reality in horrible, repeating, predictable train wrecks.


Myth: America enjoys a uniquely decent culture and the pious and heterogeneous roots of that culture have made us more benign as individuals and as a society than other cultures, especially Arab cultures.
Reality: Marines from Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division in Haditha, Iraq on November 19, 2005, react to the death of Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas in an IED explosion by going into nearby homes and killing unarmed noncombatants including women and children.

This is not the only reality. Reality is an unknowably large record of "what actually happened". Even my hopes rose momentarily when Iraqis really turned out to vote. But to deny that angry barbarity is a part of the reality of what Americans can do is to make all claims of objectivity suspect. Those who are surprised that such things happen or who are still in denial that they have happened are indirectly at the root of why they have happened at all. What war never got nasty? Do we send saints for soldiers or are they rather ordinary youths different from enemies they hunt only in their expensive fire power? Who, any more, thinks the Marines have landed to save some kind of Grenada-with-camels? Why is there any surprise or disbelief that an atrocity in Haditha, and who knows how many more such, have happened and will happen? A "war president" owes his citizens, particularly those who have been kept at arms length from reality, a few frank reminders of what war entails. The sad truth is that if you don't come right out and say "we have decided to shed some blood in a far away country", you are going to catch some people by surprise when corpses turn up. Really, that is what war is. If I were a well armed young man still shaking from the sight of my best friend blown full of holes by a car bomb planted by faceless assailants in a neighborhood I had come to disarm, would I be calm? Could I stay sane at all? Really, that is what war is. If you aren't there, you can't say what you would do. Our country puts young men in these situations and dreams nothing ugly will happen, nothing counter to our myths. But we are sending only human beings to war and war coarsens the combatants it does not kill. Any more optimistic view of war than that is a myth. As the myth slowly disintegrates against the reality, there will be more handwringing in myth-burdened America than in Iraq where some myths are just one more luxury events long ago shattered.
When Iraq finds itself, in pieces or in tact, on some far off anniversary of the departure of American troops...then it will have its own new set of myths about its people's durability and we will not be flattered.

Playing to myth, taking political advantage of the fond beliefs that we Americans are all for and all of motherhood, family values and apple pie has been a key Republican strategy. It is divisive because it casts the "reality based" constituencies as outsiders. It is a disservice to those flattered to be identified as insiders in the circle of good people because it disarms their critical faculties. The misuse of myth for political advantage is not exclusively a Republican folly but now that it has blown up in their face, let us examine briefly the operation of myths implicit or explicit in their campaigns.

I will posit a working definition of myth first. A myth is a story exemplifying character or an assertion about character that may have little factual basis yet is embraced and even protected from examination by many because it provides a powerful label and a succinct means for possessing a positive identity for ones self. Some myths are about glorious things "we" did and some deeper myths are about who "we" are. Most, upon examination, seem like a tattered gossamer sail puffed out with a gale of wishful patriotic hot air. If you identify yourself via a myth, you stop looking for what is really going on and what will really make things better. I am not saying "myth" and meaning "necessarily false", I am not one of those dreaded America hating liberals. I am a stupidity hating liberal and I am saying the price we pay for labels and intellectual shortcuts and crutches for our collective egos is too high. I am saying "myth" and meaning "beliefs we use without proof or examination".

If my despondency shows in my choice of words, I beg you note that I am still hopeful my country will come to its senses. It is only that just now, I am depressed by watching a train wreck in slow motion.

Some myths even I believe: American democracy as it has grown up from the fertile ground of the US Constitution has, for all the inequities of our history, been a better form of government for more people than most of the schemes of government the other nations of the world have produced.

Some myths I have grown doubtful of: unbridled free enterprise, if you strip away the contribution of plundered natural resources and technology per se, may not account for the entirety of the explosive advance of the American standard of living over the last two centuries. Are we still in front of the crowd in technology? Do we still have resources to burn? How is our prosperity trending NOW?

Some myths I do not buy at all. Bush campaign speeches dripped with them, were hewn from them, were just a Bush/Cheney bumper sticker pasted on top of them. This is a Rovian form of persuasion in which Rove promises the media on the eve of the 2000 campaign:

Well, we're going to have to run a campaign that's based upon the issues. We're going to have to lay out a bold agenda to the American people, which we have been doing. I mean, every delegate is leaving here tonight with a 476- page book of the governor's policy speeches and white papers. We're going to run a campaign on the issues, these five big issues that we talked about a moment ago: Education, Social Security, Medicare, defense, poverty, and tax cuts. And we're going to be talking about that endlessly for the next 12 weeks.

But his boy Dubya plays to our myths thusly:
Its a Christian country or at least a country with theocratic leanings and that means we want "faith" to take over some jobs more typically considered as roles for government. From a Bush campaign speech in August 2000:

I'll work to triple the amount of money available for character education, expand the after-school programs that will encourage the involvement of faith-based programs and charitable organizations, all aimed at teaching children the difference between right and wrong; all aimed at mentoring children that says somebody cares for you, somebody loves you in society.

The American dream has some mysterious connection to "values" What did he mean when he said:

...making sure every child has a chance to access the American dream. You see, this American dream shouldn't be limited to a few. The ability to own your own business, the ability to raise a family in a safe neighborhood; the ability to grow up in a place where values are taught -- it shouldn't be limited to a few.

I too once held with some pride the notion that this was as good a country as any in which to aspire to financial success but its seriously tarnished these days.

The terrorism of 9/11 changed everything. In a campaign speech of Oct 20 2004, Bush milks fear before an audience that is suffering far more from economic conditions than terrorism. [mostly what has changed is how much the neocons think they can now get away with]

This is America's first presidential election since Sept. 11, 2001. The security of our country is at risk in ways different from any we have before faced.

We are in the midst of a global war against a well-trained, highly motivated enemy, an enemy who hates America for the very freedoms and values we cherish most.

The next commander-in-chief must lead us to victory in this war, and you cannot win a war when you don't believe you're fighting one. (Applause) Sen. Kerry was recently asked how Sept. 11 had changed him. He replied, "it didn't change me much at all."

And this unchanged world-view becomes obvious when he calls the war against terror primarily an intelligence and law enforcement operation, rather than what I believe: A war which requires the full use of American power to keep us secure.

All of America's wars are great and just struggles for freedom, fought by selfless heroes. Addressing the American Legion on the eve of the 2004 Republican convention, Bush said:

In Afghanistan and Iraq and other fronts in the war on terror today, service men and women are carrying on your legacy of selfless service and courage under fire.

I know you share America's pride in them. They are serving our country with pride and they are bringing honor to the uniform.

Our fighting men and women are serving America under a proud flag, and that flag should be cherished and protected.

When John [McCain] and your national adjutant general, Bob, have come by the Oval Office, they always remind me about the Citizens Flag Alliance. I appreciate your leadership in that important alliance.

Like you, I support a constitutional amendment to protect the flag from desecration.

I admit to a bit of quote mining there. Anyone doubting Bush did not shamelessly promote jingoism as an alternative to intelligent defense measures can call me on it...it would double the length of this post just to sample his more blatant appeals to emotional myths about American military goodness. The shame of it is that we really do have brave soldiers but, almost peculiar to the role of the soldier, they do not operate with the independence of conscience most liberals could demonstrate any day of the week. By the way, the Bush league have scored a major victory in making an independent conscience a dangerous thing for a government employee to exercise. I used this quote because I wanted to capture the shameful irony of that particular speech. He went on at length about how the administration had supported and was going to support veterans. Six months later, it was the ruckus raised by an embattled Sen. Byrd that actually restored almost a billion dollars the administration had cut from VA benefit programs. That is another, particularly sick American myth: we love our veterans...I think it is only true for about a week after the parades when they return from duty and it depends on whether we won the war or not...that short and conditional attention span is humiliating to me. The flag thing also underscores the political ploy, very similar to myth-milking, of substituting symbol for substance to forge political will.

I prefer the more factual if pedantic persuasion of someone like Gore.

Are there any objectively measurable differences between the use of myth by the left and by the right? Oh yes.

Google provides 15,700 pages if you query "liberal myths". The first screenful of links was material all about as thoughtful and informed as this sample from an article by Ray Thomas titled "Liberal Myths Part 3":

Why do the liberals fail at everything they try? Because they operate on a completely wrong premise. They think Americans are stupid, and that only they, the "elites" of the world, know what's good for us.

Who would you say has mythed the point in that typical passage, the author or his target? It was page after page of the same thing. The nearest approach to decent debate was a piece by Bruce Bartlett complaining that liberals think money for raised minimum wages must come from the tooth fairy. Lately the stingy gentleman has had to face the fact that dear leader was the guy who has been kiting checks on the tooth fairy's account.

The most interesting piece among the right wing debunking squad was by Fred Hutchinson. He tries to examine political myth making on his way to trashing Moore's sloppy "Farhenheit 9/11". Along with an imaginative description of the "myth making process of the left", Hutchinson provides one of the most tragically confused paragraphs the English language has ever had to bear:

Good Myths and Bad

The creation of myths and the delight in myths is a human trait. Myths can be good or bad. They can be good if they embody high ideals, give moral guidance, or tell essential truths about the nature of life. Myths can be evil if they call evil good and call good evil. Myths are evil when they tell lies, or put forward an image of life which is essentially false. Myths, like those told by Karl Marx and Hitler, are destructive because they breed devotion to wrong-headed causes leading to wars and revolutions and promote the rise of dictatorships. But the crowds cheered for the myths put forward by Lenin, Stalin, Hitler and Mao.

No, Fred, its not quite like that. Read the newspapers. We are playing out policies and suffering the reality-gaps for those "good" myths about our high ideals. NO myth is good if it lets you stop thinking. Fred Hutchinson does not know me or, apparently, anyone like me.

• Our family's yearly check to the IRS exceeds the median household income in our state,
• I grew up Republican,
• I have written a fair amount of software for the defense contractors,
• I demand a damn good reason for taking up arms,
  
• I want my vote to count as much as Ken Lay's [when he could vote],
  
• I balance my checkbook every month and I don't think my government should be less fiscally accountable,
• I have no debt,
  
• I am actually capable of recognizing, without a preachers help, my interdependence with the rich and the poor, near and far who share this world with me while simultaneously being proud of and manifestly capable of taking care of myself and my family with no help from anyone else.

...and I cannot express how much I loath being lumped in with some failed dictators by a Republican paper pecker just because I don't buy Republican slogans. It is bone headed to speak as if anybody ever sold a "wrong headed cause" via wrong headed myths! Wars are always sold to us by appeal to the positive myths about ourselves.

Googling "conservative myths" only brought up 591 hits, the first of which cited more statistics and factual support than any of the conservative attacks except for a congressional memo. It might be subject for another post to analyze the difference in tone and content of right and left on the web...there do seem to be differences and I doubt that the radically larger amount of comparable right wing rhetoric reflects the difference in, say, voter registration between democrats and republicans. Red necks type faster? Astrosurf? I'll get back to you on that.

I cite these Googlings to illustrate what I am not talking about: myth as a code word for the other guy's lies, a propagandist's rhetoric. I am talking about ideas we all share more often than not and examine less often than we should...even the myth that there are "conservatives" and "liberals".

The seed for this post was my suspicion that conservatives are far more likely to be swayed by appeal to myths. Anyone who, for some combination of emotional and intellectual befuddlement, thinks nothing is broken or that we have to return to a time when things were not broken, has already got one leg firmly planted on a cloud of myth. I figured I was not the first to reach such a conclusion and that the problem is not particularly modern. Not that there aren't abundant contemporary examples of myths the conservatives favor, or even author. But I was a little surprised at just how unoriginal that thought is. The connection between myth and conservatism was identified 2400 years ago when Plato imagined the "Statesman" as a herder of people. Attempts to bring that connection out of the philosophy departments and into the light have not been great political or commercial successes. And, of course, attacking our political follies at their mythic roots is an abusable enterprise. I would pick less Jungian, less academic myths, and dismantle the everyday myths about ourselves because our politicians desperately need to liberalize our world views before we all kill each other.

Resistance to myth and manipulation is an obligation of citizenship.

People I know and care about are on that train.

Free and personal speech is different from paid and public speech.

The coarseness of politics festers and hardens in the hands of right wing bigmouths who have media reach out of all proportion to either the number of minds they have changed or the positive accomplishments their ideologies can claim. The excesses lately got so blatant that my local NBC nightly news gave almost a minute of (bleeped) coverage to incredible slurs against John Edwards [among others] spewed by the guest pundit that Mitt Romney introduced to warm applause at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

I have misgivings about doing this horrid creature-with-no-conscience the favor of denouncing her vomit. But even Mitt Romney and Senator John McCandidate have denounced her words so as to be able to claim they have not stepped in it. My, haven't we come to a low point for me to be in the same company with those two on any matter! She definitely operates in the strata where "any publicity is good publicity" holds. That is how she eats.

So I sent my $50 off to Edwards' "Coulter Cash" fund. You could do the same. And I announce this fact here to any who might read it because I want it known that the desperate derogation, whatever its sick motive, has backfired completely. She is now a more potent indicator of what liberals should support than what, let alone how, conservatives should attack. But I do not thank her for this service. When my money talks, it speaks against hatred and manufactured ignorant animosity.

Sexual and personal slurs against decent candidates are certainly bad enough but I quote other recent idiocy of Coulter's here because it slanders whole causes and classes of good people whom she finds it profitable to hate:

But global warming is the most insane, psychotic idea liberals have ever concocted to kill off "useless eaters." If we have to live in a pure "natural" environment like the Indians, then our entire transcontinental nation can only support about 1 million human beings. Sorry, fellas -- 299 million of you are going to have to go.

Fighting with the likes of her is a distraction from real problems whose solutions are being delayed by that handful of political junk dealers. Upsetting greens is clearly one of her aims and I admit she has succeeded in that pointless and purely negative objective. Who is she pleasing with these lies? She has not been reclassified as a comedienne. If you know which rock to turn over, you can find the parties who see Coulter as "hilarious" In the selection of conservative blogging about Coulter's CPAC crack, the rebuke is portrayed there as muffled and they glibly equate broadcast speeches at a political convention with blogging:

Conservative bloggers should get credit for roundly denouncing "Just Ann's" statement, unlike the majority of liberal bloggers who refused to denounce the anti-Christian comments of the Edwards' bloggers. The current demands from liberal bloggers for condemnation of Ann seem sort of silly compared to the way they dug in their heels to defend the offensive and disgusting comments about Christianity made by Amanda Marcotte.

Nuagle who sampled a variety of blogged conservative opinions into that post in humane vents seems to have picked the paragraphs to the benefit of a fellow columnist: in the preceding paragraph of Powers' post in fact, she demolished Coulter for the abusive attention whore she is.

Whenever one of the right-wing hosts does the evergreen segment about the crazy left wing loonies who are running the Democrat [sic] Party, inevitably the Democrat on the set will bring up Ann Coulter as evidence of hateful speech on the right. The response is always the same: oh, that's "just Ann." It's a bizarre world where Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage are not representative of conservatives, but anonymous posts on a blog are representative of liberals.

Who is benefited by such "punditry"? Getting back to global calamity and class calumny, who benefits from claiming greens are bent on genocide? The under-reported fact is that ignoring the problems of sustainability is already causing mass migrations, drownings and starvations. When do we start ignoring her? When has her audience shrunk back into the the closets and truck stops where half sane, hardly informed hatred was marginalized before the sick tilt that also gave us Reagan, Bush I, Newt and Bush II? Perhaps it may be that Academy Awards and IPCC publishing the nearly unanimous findings of the world scientific community about humans wrecking the the only climate we've got have all finally soaked in to a sufficient portion of her dimwitted audience that to a working approximation, they will just STFU and at least stand back if not help us right the climate.

Perhaps, but if not...then the most positive outcome of this most negative political proxy for the Bush league might be to goad us into a bit of research: Let's learn enough to make sure we aren't inadvertent enablers of the degeneration of America's public conversations about political topics.

The staged outrage of A.C. is done for money. There are ignorant skin heads and sociopaths at the back table in barrooms, tongues loosened by drink, who say things equally vile and distant from reality...but they are not syndicated and paid to spew. They pant their mistakes into a few nearby ears where only similarly disposed minds would leave ears downwind of such stink. But hate speech, categorical denigration and lies as big as "those people want to kill you" are the poorest case you can bring before us in the name of free speech. Systematically offending large segments of society is this woman's chosen career. It pays her well enough to set one demographic at the throats of another that Ms. Coulter gets books contracts and syndication deals. Here is one way she gets paid:

uclick, LLC , an Andrews McMeel Universal company
4520 Main St., Suite 500,
Kansas City, Missouri 64111

Liberal bloggers have recently had stark reminders that the extreme right only accords complete freedom of speech for liberal viewpoints if the speaker can hardly be heard...what was said, for how long and how consistently matter little compared to the size of the pulpit. I find my self saying the same things as commenters well to the right and well to the left of political center: quit buying her a podium. I looked for advertisers. These three were in paid locations on web pages that offer A.C.'s fine sensitive words:

• Lincoln Continental,
• Audible.com
• Norwich University

These four advertisers seemed accidentally present on the page via the insensitivity of Google's AdSense and the desire of the agency, Uclick.com, for traffic for its products.

• Dish
• Lowermybills.com
• bowflex
• t-mobile

Uclick plays both sides of the street with a stable of "conservative" and "liberal" columnists...I can not fairly say to Dish or LowerMyBills.com "why do you sponsor inflammatory lying?" In this case, the worst fault lies with the syndicator themselves, so hungry for a dollar they are blind to the pollution of political discourse. The rest of uclick's list of conservative columnists, though I may fault their criteria, their choice of facts or their logic, are all readable. WF Buckley is one writer in particular whom I still delight in reading just for the diction. It was his "Firing Line" where, in my youth, I developed my ear for political speech. I cannot imagine he much cares to be electronically funneled through a cash-for-clicks cloaca that has Coulter's incurable spewage in it. Taking out Innocent bystanders in the search for a bit of justice and self restraint in media would not be acceptable to me...so I don't know if we can solve this problem anytime soon.

Flame throwers aimed at the far left by the far right only scorch the politics of the middle.

And don't give me crap like "Hey! the poor gal has a right to make a living!". Other, more traditional, forms of prostitution are vastly easier to defend on the moral grounds that there are no victims made in the process of earning the buck.

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Yes, some people are so twisted they drive thought on the right and the left to similar conclusions. Kirsten Powers sees right through Coulter:

Everyone is in a lather about it, which of course is exactly what she wanted.

I have long been an advocate of ignoring her, but nobody seems willing to take me up on that idea. Can you imagine the epic depression that would engulf her if she made one of her pre-fab attacks and all she got was a collective yawn? What happens to the caricature when the audience disappears? A few cackles at a conservative conference isn't going to satiate whatever drives her -- the drive that forces her to hike up her skirt, drape her cleavage with a cross and insist repeatedly that she is a devout Christian as she spews her famous brand of hateful rhetoric. No, she needs the world to react to her.

And Scott Galindez, editor at Truthout.org concludes:

... she has the right to say whatever she wants, but at some point responsible media and political organizations should stop giving her the megaphone that ensures that the rest of us have to hear her hate.

If creating jobs works so well in Iraq....

As the drama over whether it will be Clinton or Obama for president recedes, the groundswell that has been there in the polling numbers and approval ratings all along ought to be weighing on minds in Washington. [uh, there are some minds in Washington, right?] The nation looks in a foul mood, restless and ready to route the Republicans [those not among the 50 or so that are abandoning congressional careers this year] so you would think Bush League might try to pacify its own citizens with the same enlightened programs portrayed as effective in mollifying a different hostile population. If it works in a place as screwed up as Iraq, it ought to work like a charm here. Why can't US citizens get some government investment in jobs and infrastructure? Are we less important to the republicans and the Bush administration than those poor Iraqis? And I am not talking about jobs building more tanks and bombs...the only way you can waste more of the threadbare reserves of money and good will that our future depends upon than pissing it away on arms is to piss it away on arms and then use those arms on people. [Since you will then be obliged to stabilize the damaged foreign country and rehabilitate ate your own broken soldiers that return when your bombs and tanks are all used up.] This whole administration has been a national slide toward madness and self destruction. By comparison, what do you think would be the gains in political stability in Iraq if we just gave every tax paying family a check for $600? I think they would buy more bullets.

DoJ Operated as Political Enforcement Unit: its worse than you imagined

You just can't get by on headlines alone. When Paul Keil at TPM wrote a call for investigation in to the un-fired prosecuting attorneys at DOJ I did not understand. It seemed a bit vindictive when we already have Gonzales on the ropes with the Congress. But a myDD diary pointed to the gruesome clue that had Kiel upset and...

OMG.

The indictments and convictions that were making all the news in the run-up to Nov. elections were almost entirely [Jefferson was the exception] against republicans. It seems unsurprising in hindsight: the administration knew full well at the outset that it had a boatload of scumbags among its own ranks and gave DoJ marching orders to drum up counter examples among the Dems or at least distractions. I had no clue. Where was there a word in the news about this ratio of investigations?

Even more damning, and in a way that amuses the heck out of me: given the yield of indictable cases from this investigatory blitz, the paucity of prosecutable findings against Democratic office holders means one of two things: Democrats really don't suffer from the "culture of corruption" or the DoJ, like just about any other administrative branch the bush league tamper with, was as incompetent as the Three Stooges in 3-piece suits.

Its beyond disgrace, its more than alarming, its barely believable. In any other administration, I would seriously question the source of such news! This needs to be blogged and otherwise shouted far more widely. Blinking at the TPM headline about Paul Kiel raising questions won't serve. Dig for the facts or read those who have because the facts about the ratio of investigations make this story explode. From epluribusmedia:

Data* indicate that the offices of the U.S. Attorneys across the nation investigate seven (7) times as many Democratic officials as they investigate Republican officials, a number that exceeds even the racial profiling of African Americans in traffic stops.

Our paper explores the role of the fourth estate and others in detecting such profiling and concludes that what is really needed is transparency, the highlights of which are noted below.

The current Bush Republican Administration appears to be the first to have engaged in political profiling. ...

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Like I said...you can't get by on headlines: I now notice that me and my alarm are late to the party. While Keil was on the case days earlier, this scandle is exactly what Andrew Sullivan and, (far too visible for me to excuse not knowing), Paul Krugman were talking about. And, as I find my self saying more often lately, how bad does the administration have to be to have those two writers in agreement?

A yardstick with which to beat yourself

A good measure of the extent to which you control your own life is how infrequently you feel obliged to lie.

I wince but I still apply that yardstick. It is actually measuring several things. It tells me about the level of duress, peer pressure etc. that thwarts my wishes [i.e. when people block my needs and greeds]. But also, assuming I can be honest with myself, it measures my mettle on matters of taking my medicine and what confrontations I will risk.

I hope I don't presume too much to suppose my workings are not that different from yours, dear readers. This metric works until you are so screwed up you no longer know when you are lying. It measures an aspect of what we casually refer to as character. You know, the stuff Kerry was said to lack and Dubya was said to possess. Yeah, right, character. Who couldn't use a little more character? Turns out having the courage to face consequences, the balls to earn the respect you need and the intelligence to see all the way to the second and third order consequences of a lie all add up to a personality nearly as effective as one who is utterly unconcerned with what others think, or perhaps an absolute naif who is also insensitive to pain. A liar, mind you, is desperately concerned with what others think. A simple person might always tell the truth, a stupid person often thinks just enough to suppose they would get away with a lie. I observe that being courageous is not a guarantee of being in control of your own life but is a necessary precondition more than wealth. Whether it is courage or a detachment from the opinions of others, this trait that helps put one in control seems to fit well in the personality profile Maslow describes as the reality centered self actualizer. Yes, "reality centered". The term must be nearly 50 years old. It is more than coincidence that it is echoed by the label "reality based" with which our bush league administration, oozing character as it does, has labeled some of its annoying citizens and press. The term, an unwitting gift, does emphasize a serious difference and distinction between the Bush administration and a profile of psychological health and maturity. It may only be an old theory of personality but the characteristics of Maslow's self actualizer are not well represented in the publicly visible levels of our executive branch today.

You can lose control of your life on all of Maslow's five levels. You can have control pried out of your hands or you might never have had it. It has been the executioner's experience that one almost gives away control by choosing the unknown future of a fib over the known immediate discomfort of being honest. If you were the last person on earth, would you still bend the facts from time to time? Its odd we lie to control other because I suspect that beyond lying as a measure of feeling we are not in control we might find truth telling is a tool to regain control in areas of our lives where we have an innate or earned right to be in control...but that is a topic for another post.

Given the pernicious dysfunction of the current administration in regard to getting its facts straight and giving the straight facts, I thought it worthwhile to try yet another examination of the nature of truth telling. Lying became a universally human occupation once our language faculties evolved to include "yes" and "no". On the shaky ssumption that Rummy, Rice, Rove and the rest are only human, I suggest we will understand the administration sooner by remembering human weakness is at work here and we will get them headed out of the dark woods of their self serving myths sooner if we cut them a bit of slack for being stuck trying to fill their level three and four needs. I don't know if Maslow would have agreed but I think institutions and ensembles of personalities always function a level below the level at which the constituent individuals are working. This means that lies the administration as a whole subscribes to are embraced to achieve advertised "security" needs (level 2). My hunch is that the ease and uniformity with which Whitehouse group-think descends to the lower common denominator [and the psychological hand writing on the wall "Colin will depart"] is just a symptom of how needy these people each were on their own. How this bunch ever styled themselves as Vulcans is beyond me, Ferengi would fit them a lot better. I am not the best informed examiner you could be reading but if I have reminded you that is not satisfactory to tackle honesty issues by only looking at the other guy, I hope I have helped.