Northern Valley Beacon

La Belle Ditz Sans Merci takes a dive. Maybe.

2009-07-05T07:05:00.000-07:00

Sarah Palin's defining moment came when Tina Fey and Amy Poehler recreated her interview with Katie Couric almost verbatim and it produced a sterling moment of comic satire.

The skit defined more importantly what the culture wars were really about: the battle launched by those who militate for provincial ignorance against the more cerebral classes of Americans. After this sketch played on SNL and replayed on the Internet, some of the cerebral members of the Republican Party began to defect and endorse Barack Obama for president. The McCain-Palin campaign had become an offense against the intellect.

Palin's candidacy for the vice president produced some snarky attacks on her and the seamy aspects of her family, but it also produced some sell-documented reviews of her performance as governor of Alaska. The Native American community reported on her dismissive and belittling attitude toward the natives of her state. Both The New York Times and Washington Post did reports on how her administration was characterized by pettiness, deviousness, and vindictiveness. In Alaska, her tactics-- not necessarily her politics--had earned her the enmity of many within her own party.

After her return from the campaign to her duties as governor, she nominated a person for state attorney general who received a soundly bipartisan rejection. Palin's intelligence was called into question by numerous public actions. To many in both parties, Palin was the poster girl for petty squabbles that take on a vicious and juvenile intensity.

Her embarrassing dissembling and posturing in her encounters with the press have called into question her inellectual competence. But there is a significant portion of he electorate who resent intellectual competence, and to them she represents political power.

Palin was the target for derisive humor, such as David Letterman's jokes about her daughter. She also inspired other commentators and bloggers to indulge in trashy snark.

But one need not resort to such sources to get a factual, documented appraisal of Palin's performance in political office.

However, as the GOP demonstrates dailly, competence and integrity are not much of a consideration in the game of politics.

Michael Jackson and the hard-wired churls

2009-07-01T08:00:00.000-07:00

I don't think anyone involved in communications and the arts can escape the presence of Michael Jackson. And I use "presence" in the present tense because it is one that will be with us despite the death of its author.

I know his music and his videos because I have children. My oldest daughter wanted us to name our son Michael Jackson Newquist. I remember hauling my kids to Chicago for a family event and listening to Michael Jackson on the car stereo during most of the drive.

I also was involved in a popular culture class with professors from all of the fine arts leading an analysis of the music video as an art form, and, of course, Michael Jackson dominated the course. He is an astounding creative force whose influence on culture is inestimable.

But that is not why he is such a presence on my mind. A colleague of mine with expertise in photography and lighting and who specialized in musical events worked on Jackson productions a number of times. While he was in the background and by no means close to Michael Jackson, he often talked about what a creative force he was. He recalled how Michael Jackson collaborated with writers to get song lyrics just so, and he recalled that when Jackson thought something would improve a production, no expense and effort would be spared to make it happen. But he also expressed dismay at some of the people who surrounded Jackson. My colleague brought this up many times because it bothered him that so many people gather around a major talent not to support and enjoy its development, but to exploit it and destroy it. He talked about the toxic environment in which Jackson operated and the horrific nature of some of the people who surrounded him.

My colleague's words have come back in full force as I have heard many others remark on Jackson's death using that same term "toxic" to describe the human atmosphere around him.

Michael Jackson was never given a chance to experience boyhood and to be part of the experiments and testing that are a part of it. In adult life, he tried to capture that experience somehow, and it led to charges of child molestation. Although he was found not guilty in a court trial, many people chose to ignore the verdict. In looking at a number of blogs and their comments, I find among the many comments of people who acknowledge Jackson's talent a considerable number who take pleasure in Jackson's problems and humiliations and, apparently, his death. Their words about Jackson are dismissive and more than a little malicious. A growing malignancy in the American character is apparent in our response to Michael Jackson's death.

A poem of Tennyson's, "The Lady of Shalott," speaks of the gathering of the surly village churls who react to the presence of someone of beauty and graceful qualities with crude, ill-bred, and destructive behavior. Those of us who have dealt with people of large talent refer to such treatment as churlishness: the jealousy, resentment, and malicious intentions expressed toward people who seem to have something that others don't and expressed against those who seem to exist on a higher plane.

As a college professor, I think back on the many talented people I have known, and some of those thoughts are not pleasant. They recall some shining talents, but also some of the darkest human tragedies. Among those talented people are stories of suicide, mental anguish, failed relationships, and the struggles to live in a toxic environment.

Michael Jackson was superbly disciplined when it came to creating and performing music. His talent made him a star at the age of five, and all the accounts of his development as a performer verify the professional excellence he brought to his artistry. In other areas of his life, he never had a chance to develop that kind of discipline. Into his adulthood, he was struggling with childhood and adolescence. Genius needs the balance and moderation of a liberal education to allow it to develop without distorting the personality of the genius. Michael Jackson was never given that discipline. Consequently, he was grossly naieve about some of the people around him and what motiviated them.

The personality issues of MIchael Jackson should not be confused with the egotistical displays of some celebrities or would be celebrities. Those of us who have taught and written about talent come to a quick understanding that many of the individuals with humongous egos have the least reason to indulge in such egotism. For them a pretense to talent substitutes for the real tihing. Such was not the case with Michael Jackson.

What was the case was the people who attached to him in order to appropriate some of his fame and fortune, and it was the people whose only response to real talent is the jealousy, resentment, and destructive hatred it inspires in them. Churlishess.

The press fixes on the churlishness and feeds it because it sells newspapers, attracts listeners and viewers, and gives that certain segment of bloggers their orgasmic thrills of defamation that is an essnetial part of churlishness. Entertainment writers who have gone beyond the tabloid gossip have reported that the press accounts had a debilltating effect on Michael Jackson over the years. The press claims it just gives people what they want. The toxic.

The churls are setting the tone of our political discussions and our appraisals of talent. It is hard to find voices with a little class and informed discernment.

As goes Michael Jackson, so goes our culture and our democracy. It is a foolish hope, perhaps, that real talent can prevail.

Obama, the great appeaser? South Dakota, the great parasite?

2009-06-27T08:10:00.000-07:00

Storm clouds on the horizon

If you read past the main stream media's search for conflicts and scandals in the deaths of celebrities, you get past the sound and fury of the surly village churls, there are some serious political undercurrents swirling in America.

One is the apprehension of Obama supporters that he has gone back on the promises that they elected him to carry out.

Another is the growing resentment and condemnation of the agricultural lobby.

Joseph Galloway, the military columnist for McClatchy and former senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder, has unleashed a scalding criticism on what he sees as Obama's failures to carry out the mandate that got him elected. He says there was a golden moment when Obama could have accomplished the changes he promised, but that moment has slipped away.

Obama has called off investigations into past government incidents and into the people and companies that brought down our economy.

In working on the economy, he has reached out and accommodated the very people who created the mess.

He promised we would never use torture as a national policy, but he has accommodated and relieved of responsibility the very people who created and used torture.

He promised transparency in government, but he has adopted the very Bush practices that he promised to eliminate.

Galloway sums it up:

And bit by bit the possibility of change disappeared; bit by bit the hope of a renewed and reinvigorated American democracy and way of government faded away. Those who had held a dream in their hand closed their hand and crushed the dream.

The other complaint that is brewing is against the agriculture lobby and what is seen as the gross entitlements it expects and receives.

Washington Post business columnist Steven Pearlstein notes the stance of the agriculture lobby on the climate change bill:

But, for farmers, it wasn't enough to get a free pass on carbon emissions. They are unhappy that the effect of the caps and pollution permits will be to raise the price of their fuel, fertilizer and electricity. No matter that other Americans will suffer similar effects. In the mind of the entitled American farmer, any increase in costs or reduction in revenue -- whether from natural causes, market forces or government regulation -- must be compensated for by the government. .

In regard to assuming any responsibility for the environment, Pearlstein says,

And they demanded to be paid not just if they do these things in the future, but also if they did them last year or the year before. They demanded the payments even if they are already getting a check from the government to do the same things as part of some other conservation program. And perhaps most notably, they demanded that the job of supervising this offset program be shifted from the Environmental Protection Agency, whose focus would actually be ensuring that the reductions are real, to the Department of Agriculture, which sees its mission as preserving, protecting and defending American farm subsidies.

In regard to the vote on the bill, Pearlstein notes:

Bob Stallman, president of the American Farm Bureau Federation and the self-proclaimed "voice of agriculture," yesterday urged all House members to vote against the climate-change bill, claiming it would "result in a net economic cost to farmers with little or no environmental benefit."

The next time the world's most selfish lobby comes to Washington demanding drought relief, rvvvsomeone ought to have the good sense to tell them to go pound sand.

Pearlstein's attitude is one that is growing throughout the country. South Dakota is the focal point for some of the resentments and disapproval of government programs that subsidize agriculutre. A growing perception of the entire West River economy is of a parasite that subsists toally on government programs and is incapable of surviving on its own.

If people want the government to get out of the auto industry as fast as possible, many people think it should also get out of private agriculure just as quickly. Up to now, agriculuture has been regarded as apart from the corporate economy. It is increasingly identified as part of the corporate structure that rules America and its special privileges and exemptions can not be justified.

For Barack Obama, some serious opposition is building among his most fervent supporters.

And for South Dakota's congressional delegation, there is growing disparity between what their constituents want and what the rest of the country thinks they should have.

Who doesn't have health insurance

2009-06-26T21:50:00.000-07:00

Factcheck. org has tackled the question about there being more that 45 million people in the U.S who do not have health care insurance. Here are the facts they came up with:

The Census Bureau estimates that 45.7 million lacked health insurance at any given time in 2007. But fewer lacked coverage for the full year, and more did without for one or more months during the year. All three numbers are likely to be higher for 2008 due to massive job losses.

Twenty-six percent of the uninsured are eligible for some form of public coverage but do not make use of it, according to The National Institute for Health Care Management Foundation. This is sometimes, but not always, a matter of choice.

Twenty-one percent of the uninsured are immigrants, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. But that figure includes both those who are here legally and those who are not. The number of illegal immigrants who are included in the official statistics is unknown.

Twenty percent of the uninsured have family incomes of greater than $75,000 per year, according to the Census Bureau. But this does not necessarily mean they have access to insurance. Even higher-income jobs don't always offer employer-sponsored insurance, and not everyone who wants private insurance is able to get it.

Forty percent of the uninsured are young, according to KFF. But speculation that they pass up insurance because of their good health is unjustified. KFF reports that many young people lack insurance because it's not available to them, and people who turn down available insurance tend to be in worse health, not better, according to the Institute of Medicine.

Click here to read their full analysis.

Solution for health care costs: buy bricks for gas ovens

2009-06-25T20:07:00.000-07:00

The real issue with health care reform is beginning to clarify. The Democrats believe that health care is something that should be available to everybody. The Republicans believe you should get health care only if you can afford it. The Democrats seem to labor under under some Christian foolery about feeding the poor and healing the sick and that it is better to serve than to be served. The Republicans have a much more realistic view that the real satisfactions of life are found in how many people you can screw over. This principle is constantly demonstrated in their marital lives and their politics and their defense of the bankers and corporate executives whose personal screw-overs have caused the worst recession since The Depression.

The case for health care reform is that almost 50 million people are not insured. Of those who have policies, the premiums, deductibles, and co-pays are major financial burdens. The monthly premium for some family plans has reached $2,000. While the Republicans raise their hysterical cries about socialized medicine, government-run medicine, and the horrendous costs of a public option, they totally avoid addressing if something should be done about the 50 million uninsured, the burgeoning costs of health care and their effect on family budgets.

Their major argument against a public-option is that insurances companies cannot compete with it. The costs of current plans is exactly why two-thirds of the voters in America would like to see a public option or a single-payer system. Few people who have current plans are happy with them, and they are looking for a more reasonable option.

A physician who works for Microsoft has stated the case. He says that we need to face the reality that healthcare is not affordable for many people. He makes no comment on what that fact portends for the people who can't afford it or even if they should be a considearation. He makes no suggestion as to what should be their fate, but he doesn't need to. If they can't afford health care, they can damned well get sick and die.

Humankind has faced this question concerning the care of those who can't afford to care for themselves before. Hitler and his Nazi regime found a solution. A final solution. Hitler called the indigent, the halt, and lame "useless eaters." He said they contributed nothing to society and consumed its resources. So, he ran them through gas ovens. This final solution was used on the ailing before it was widely adopted as a final solution for the Jews and other minorities in concentration camps.

Zyklon-B, the gas, has undergone extensive tests on humans, has been found to end all ailments and pathologies, and has the added virtue of killing lice. What goes around comes around, and here it comes again. Although gas ovens have not been proposed as yet, neither have the opponents of reform offered any plan for health care to those who can't afford it. All the arguments against health care reform are the same arguments used in support of gas ovens as a medical option. So, you poor ladies and gentlemen who find that health care is a luxury you can't afford, this way to the gas ovens. You won't suffer and you sure as hell won't ever vote again. And take your liberalism with you.

Oh.

There are examinations of the problems in health care that might be looked at. Even the Democrats and other liberals might take a look at them. And maybe even the media might take its collective head out that great dark place that is the haunt of proctologists and examine a fact or two. The Columbia Journalism Review is running a series on health care in the hopes that reporters and others might inform and elevate the debate on health care. Even bloggers can go there and read some aspects of health care reform that are not covered.

But the Democrats equivocate and quake and the Republicans deny and obstruct. So, this way to the gas ovens, ladies and gentlemen. Care to buy a brick? With your name on it?

A memory of Ed McMahon's broken hand

2009-06-23T21:15:00.000-07:00

Amid the idiotic partisan cacophony of a desperate GOP trying to make up faults by Obama and then castigating him for things he did not do or say, and the junior senator of South Dakota and his would-be propagandists doing the same thing, it is a relief to reflect on a man who just tried to do his job well. The death of Ed McMahon may mark the passing of a type of personality that seems in danger of extinction.

I never met Ed McMahon, but he figured in a strange episode I was somewhat involved in. It happened at just the time I was preparing to move from Illinois to South Dakota. For some years, the Quad Cities of Illinois and Iowa were struggling to hold a golf tournament. In 1975, Ed McMahon agreed to become the host of the tournament, which was at first called the Ed McMahon Jaycees Quad Cities Open. He bolstered the attendance by bringing in many of his celebrity friends and by being on hand to socialize with the spectators. He was credited with saving a struggling tournament, which is now called the John Deere Classic.

After the 1979 tournament, Ed McMahon gave up his role as host, citing many conflicting commitments with his television career. However, there is a back channel aspect to that decision. I had been one of the principals in a moonlighting organization of writers, artists, and photographers. We specialized in industrial and technical communications. We were all experienced in the news and public information businesses and we found a way to keep our hands in the business and make some extra money, as most of us were professors or news people and could use it. Two of the organization's associates who were golfing addicts were involved in promoting the tournament. They volunteered to do some of the public relations and publicity work. While I was not directly involved, I and other members helped with some routine tasks because our offices were being used to do some of the production work. We had a running conversation going over how McMahon had been enlisted to lend his name and his skills to this tournament.

His efforts attracted an audience that established the tournament and saved it from cancellation. In a community that was undergoing an economic downturn, he brought hope and interest to the tournament and helped encourage some other enterprises. During the 1979 tournament, a strange thing happened. A meeting of our associates in the moonlighting organization was called to provide some advice on an incident. During the tournament, McMahon operated from a hospitality tent where he chatted with people at the tournament, socialized, and generated good will. While he was talking with some people, a woman came up to him and said she wanted him to meet someone. While he tried to finish the conversation he was having with other people, the woman became belligerently impatient and grabbed him by the hand to pull him away. She broke his hand.

That's what the meeting was about. The question was how in the hell to handle the public relations. McMahon had put tremendous effort into making the tournament a success for a community not known for much, and while doing what he did so well, he was mistreated by this woman. What the tournament officials were concerned about was how the incident reflected on the community and its treatment of celebrities.

They were concerned because of an incident that occured up the river in Dubuque, Iowa, two years earlier. While shooting a movie in Dubuque, Sylvester Stallone had set up an event where he would greet and meet the public. During his time in Dubuque, he was mobbed by fans, mostly teen-age girls. A woman wanted his attention to introduce him to some other people, and when she didn't get it, she punched Stallone in the face. Dubuque took a public relations drubbing from the incident. Despite efforts to point out that the incident involved one person, not the community, Dubuque got the reputation of being a rude, inhospitable, and violent town. The golf tournament officials saw that a similar reaction to the breaking of Ed McMahon's hand could color the community and jeopardize the success of the tournament. The meeting of the publicity people produced no real strategies. The only thing to do was to focus on the golf players and the positive aspects of the tournament and minimize reference to Ed McMahon's broken hand. Ed McMahon himself took himself out of the public spotlight and was mostly concerned about getting treatment for his hand and making it back to work on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. No legal actions were pursued that I ever heard.

For the tournament officials, the first night McMahon was back on The Tonight Show was the low point. There sat Ed McMahon with his hand in a cast, and of course Johnny Carson asked him what happened. In very low key, factual terms McMahon related how his hand was broken.

As plans for the 1980 golf tournament got underway, McMahon withdrew as host. He cited too many conflicts with his work schedule as the reason, but my colleagues who had worked at the tournament thought the broken hand played an essential part in the decision. They said that McMahon appeared to lose his enthusiasm for the tournament and; although amiable and gracious, seemed reserved and withdrawn after the incident.

The tournament survived, however, and has become a successful event as the John Deere Classic under the sponsorship of Deere & Co.

And apparently the public relations managers both in Dubuque and the Quad Cities did their jobs well.. If you search the internet, you cannot find mention of either incident. To find the information, you have to go to the newspaper archives.

But for five years, that hand which was broken had been extended in help and good will to the people of the Quad Cities.

Phrizzing up the Ph-bomb, dummying down the gym

2009-06-19T21:10:00.000-07:00

The charge:

Past players and parents have left the program with such a sour taste in their mouths that they have no interest in attending games anymore or if they do attend, their stomach starts to turn when they walk into the gym.

This is a medical problem. It has to do to a lot of sour mouths attached to one churning stomach. There might be a surgical procedure to correct this. Someone really ought to check.

And it might be a matter of bad dietary habits. And if the symptoms strike only when those many mouths attached to one stomach enter the gym, someone should see if the problem emanates from the boys' locker room because some of those nasty boys have not taken their jock straps home to be washed all year.

This was not a description of medical symptoms, however. It is the lead charge in a petition to the Aberdeen School Board to do something about the girls' basketball coach. Presumably, get her fired The Aberdeen American News made it the front page, banner headline story.

Another charge is:

F-bombs fly all the time.

The Airbus company would like to know how to get something to fly all the time, because they and Air France had a bit of a problem with a flight leaving from Brazil that took a break from flying.

I could never be a school board member. I could never sit with a straight face and a posture of concern when presented with a petition like this. The board would be presented with a petition the next week to remove a snickering, smirking, smart-assed member. Maybe that is why the Aberdeen School Board moved to review the matter in closed session under the guise that it is a personnel matter. They need a quiet place to go out of public view so they can snicker a lot.

Oh, and another charge was that after the group of parents made earlier attempts at pushing this issue:

Coaches were mocking what parents' concerns were.

Oh, ding ding. Now the whole phucking adult, literate world is mocking them.

There is good grammatical and stylistic reasons, by the way, to use the word phuck It has certain qualities that arrest the attention for many people. It is like giving a child who is trying to ignore a remonstrating parent a sharp smack on the bottom to get the attention so that they might hear what is being said. For those already paying attention, a well-placed phuck can enhance the rhythm and the emphasis of what is being conveyed. For example, it would be ineffective if the mayor of Hiroshima simply said, "What was that?" It is far more effective that he said, "What the PHUCK was that?" And that Michelangelo said, "You want WHAT painted on the PHUCKING ceiling?"

What appears to the be the case with the Aberdeen Central girls' basketball coach, who has set a record for wins and tournament play, is that when players do not perform well or otherwise phuck up, she tells them. Among some quarters, one never discourages a child by telling them that they could put in more effort and do things a bit differently. That is why there are so many phuck ups on the loose who can't spell, do math, or talk and write in complete, coherent sentences. But, my God, they sure know how to whine

A further matter the petition whined about was that the coach, who I do not know nor have seen in the act of coaching, beat the shit out of a garbage can with a sledge hammer after a game was lost. I admit I am much taken by the imagery. But all I could say, if I were a school board member, is that there goes a garbage can by the grace of God instead of your whining, cretinous daughter. The coach knows how to find harmless release from aggravation.

South Dakotans have a habit of calling any kind of petition for the redress of grievances whining. 911 caller: "Someone is breaking into my home." Operator: "Stop your phucking whining." It is important that when someone has a grievance that it should be documented with specifics and delivered in a factual, intelligent manner so that the problems, if there are any, might be corrected. There is a difference between a valid complaint and petty bitching and whining.

That petition to the Aberdeen School Board was pure, unadulterated juvenile whining. And it was stupid. You can't fix stupid. You can't satisfy stupid. But you can tell people when they are being stupid. That is an essential premise of education.

When the Aberdeen School Board gets done snickering and comes out of its executive session, it will be very interesting to learn what it tells the concerned parents.

Tom Daschle and other former Senate Leaders offer health care reform

2009-06-18T09:30:00.000-07:00

This from Roll Call, which requires a subscription to access:

Former Senate leaders Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), Bob Dole (R-Kan.) and Howard Baker (R-Tenn.) on Wednesday unveiled a blueprint that includes a public plan compromise and a requirement that all Americans must purchase insurance, a plan they’d like to see their one-time colleagues take up.
...
Though all three men represent private-sector clients with a stake in the health care debate, they said they arrived at their ideas through negotiations with each other and based on the efforts of their two staff directors, Democrat Chris Jennings, a health care consultant who served in the Clinton administration, and Republican Mark McClellan, who served as administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services during the recent Bush administration.
The plan, according to its backers, would ensure health care coverage for all U.S. citizens and legal residents. It would include both individual and employer requirements. The measure would not break the bank, its crafters say, because it also calls for savings with new health care information technologies and with such things as a cap to the employer coverage income tax exclusion.
The Daschle-Dole-Baker plan includes a public plan “compromise” that would allow states the option to establish programs of their own, with technical assistance coming from the federal government. The plan would make the states compete on a “level playing field” with private industry, they said.

Washington Post columnist David Broder writes about how Daschle tried to enlist Bob Dole's help in a bi-partisan effort to come up with health care reform during the Clinton administration. With interviews of Daschle and Dole, lhe details why the effort failed. And he tells how the men came to an agreement this time around.

Farting in church and other expressions of intellect

2009-06-18T08:25:00.000-07:00

A Jesuit priest and adjunct professor who had the office next to mine said it took only one fart in church to destroy a service for hundreds of people. He said this in the context of discussing the complexities of communication and how hard it is to establish and maintain substantial and productive dialogues among human beings. A fart can characterize an entire church service to the exclusion of whatever else was the service's purpose and content. His point was that a few molecules of odious gas can so poison the atmosphere that people lose the sense of purpose and process in what is being communicated to them. This was during the time that the protests against the war in Vietnam dominated campus activities, and it was difficult, if not impossible at times, to keep words and minds on the work at hand.

Another way of describing the problem uses metaphors from the broadcast industry. There was so much "static" that the real point and substance of communication was lost in the noise.

And so it is in the "new media" and what the Internet has brought to blogs, discussion boards, and other "interactive" sites of information and discussion. While the odious emanations may come from a very small minority of people, the new media amplifies them into a major and often controlling emphasis in the mental atmosphere. And it is manifestly evident that one political party has devoted itself to the production and emission of foul gas that is injurious and sometimes deadly to the sensibility. During the W. Bush administration, conservatives liked to rail about "liberal hate." Any criticism of the Bush administration was labeled as hate speech. People more thorough in their reading of news who were capable of exercising some modicum of independent thought could easily see that the claims of weapons of mass destruction were contrived as a reason to go to war on Iraq. Reports coming from weapons inspectors and the foreign media made these claims suspect. Yet those who opposed the war were said to be unpatriotic and traitors to America.

When Dick Cheney went into closed door session with energy company executives to formulate energy policy, some people protested the secrecy and total absence of public information. They were dismissed as Bush haters. Still today those who opposed torture as a tactic that will come back and bite us in the throat are dismissed as people who would sell out their country to a few paltry scruples. There was a hatred of dishonesty, of incompetence, and of a total self-serving greed that has damaged and threatened the U.S. more than any outside enemy. There was a derision of Bush's intellectual abilities and his belligerence. What was termed "Bush bashing" was the routine response to a regime that went to war as a ploy to martial an uncritical spirit of patriotism and to the realization that the public was being duped. Some of us called Bush and his supporters fascist. That is because what they did, said, and professed fit the definition of fascism as it has been established by history. They believed in pre-emptive war, torture, government by the rich, and the systematic defamation of those who might not buy into rule by intimidation.

The regressives, the champions of ignorance and mindless meanness, have filled the air with shouts of fascism, socialism, communism, and all the other names they can think of. And plain old racism keeps erupting in some of the opposition comments. Many in the regressive sector are in a furor over the fact that an "n" is in the White House, and an uppity one at that.

New York Times columnist Frank Rich notes the circumstances of the hate campaign against Obama:

What is this fury about? In his scant 145 days in office, the new president has not remotely matched the Bush record in deficit creation. Nor has he repealed the right to bear arms or exacerbated the wars he inherited. He has tried more than his predecessor ever did to reach across the aisle. But none of that seems to matter. A sizable minority of Americans is irrationally fearful of the fast-moving generational, cultural and racial turnover Obama embodies — indeed, of the 21st century itself. That minority is now getting angrier in inverse relationship to his popularity with the vast majority of the country. Change can be frightening and traumatic, especially if it’s not change you can believe in.

We don’t know whether the tiny subset of domestic terrorists in this crowd is egged on by political or media demagogues — though we do tend to assume that foreign jihadists respond like Pavlov’s dogs to the words of their most fanatical leaders and polemicists. But well before the latest murderers struck — well before another “antigovernment” Obama hater went on a cop-killing rampage in Pittsburgh in April — there have been indications that this rage could spiral out of control.

This was evident during the campaign, when hotheads greeted Obama’s name with “Treason!” and “Terrorist!” at G.O.P. rallies. At first the McCain-Palin campaign fed the anger with accusations that Obama was “palling around with terrorists.” But later John McCain thought better of it and defended his opponent’s honor to a town-hall participant who vented her fears of the Democrats’ “Arab” candidate. Although two neo-Nazi skinheads were arrested in an assassination plot against Obama two weeks before Election Day, the fever broke after McCain exercised leadership.

He notes how the hate incitements have created the circumstances in which the wingnutjobs have been moved to committing public murders.

But hyperbole from the usual suspects in the entertainment arena of TV and radio is not the whole story. What’s startling is the spillover of this poison into the conservative political establishment. Saul Anuzis, a former Michigan G.O.P. chairman who ran for the party’s national chairmanship this year, seriously suggested in April that Republicans should stop calling Obama a socialist because “it no longer has the negative connotation it had 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago.” Anuzis pushed “fascism” instead, because “everybody still thinks that’s a bad thing.” He didn’t seem to grasp that “fascism” is nonsensical as a description of the Obama administration or that there might be a risk in slurring a president with a word that most find “bad” because it evokes a mass-murderer like Hitler.

The Anuzis “fascism” solution to the Obama problem has caught fire. The president’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court and his speech in Cairo have only exacerbated the ugliness. The venomous personal attacks on Sotomayor have little to do with the 3,000-plus cases she’s adjudicated in nearly 17 years on the bench or her thoughts about the judgment of “a wise Latina woman.” She has been tarred as a member of “the Latino KKK” (by the former Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo), as well as a racist and a David Duke (by Limbaugh), and portrayed, in a bizarre two-for-one ethnic caricature, as a slant-eyed Asian on the cover of National Review. Uniting all these insults is an aggrieved note of white victimization only a shade less explicit than that in von Brunn’s white supremacist screeds.

The fact that words are expressions of intentions and have consequences has been lost on large segments within the GOP. The results of words can have effects that go far beyond a malodorous detraction in church. They can be the symptom of a deadly malignancy. The smell of rotting morality pervades the environment.

Don't take your blogs to town, son

2009-06-16T08:50:00.000-07:00

South Dakota War College has recently demonstrated and formally announced that its author, the aptly designated PP, wants to replace Jon Lauck, now a Thune staff member, as the state's major character assassin in the blogopotty. The piddling duel has become the S. D. Republicans' strategy of choice and the verbal squirt gun is their weapon.

While Sibby quotes the mindless malice of Rush Limbaugh incessantly, PP faithfully repeats and reproduces all the petty and absurd personal attacks generated by the GOP bladder boys. When it comes to actually addressing issues, PP often makes Sibson look like an Einstein. Character assassination is the only tool he seems to grasp.

His latest effort is to malign a Flandreau Santee Sioux lawsuit effort by making personal accusations against the law firm and one of its members, Scott Heidepriem, that represent the tribe. The post is an exercise in libelous innuendo. It calls for a state Supreme Court investigation of Heidepriem and the relationship of his firm and his role as state senate minority leader. While such an investigation would involve dealing with petty and baseless innuendos and be a waste of time, we wish Heidepriem would insist that it be carried forward. However much PP may wish to malign the character of Scott Heidepriem, he hasn't reached the point where he can spell his target's name correctly.

But the real issue that is obscured by the PP being squirted on it concerns equality and fairness under the law. Tim Giago, of the new Native Sun News and the Huffington Post (as well as a columnist for McClatchy and the founder of other Indian country newspapers) puts the lawsuit issue in an accurate perspective:

Unable to create growth through economic development because of the restrictions placed upon it by the state, the Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe brought a lawsuit against the state to change the law that prevented them from increasing the number of slot machines they could have in their casino. For more than 19 years the FSST has had to operate their casino while restricted to only 250 slot machines. The towns and cities around Flandreau have grown rapidly during this time and, ominously, the state of Iowa is in the process of opening a competing casino just across the border from Sioux Falls, a city that is the main source of revenues for the Flandreau casino. And while growth is happening all around them, the Flandreau tribe has been handcuffed and unable to join that growth.

Giago further explains an important aspect of the lawsuit:

Let's take a closer look at this ridiculous premise. First off, the profits from the casinos operated by corporations or individuals in South Dakota go into the private pockets of those individuals or corporations. The profits from the Indian casinos go to economic development, college scholarships, schools, road and building maintenance and improvement, health care, daycare for children while their parents work, law enforcement and tribal courts.

While the blogospher is filled with much self-adulation in its criticisms of the established media, its notes and commentary about blogs is limited to petty and irrelevant matters of personal animosities and taste, rather than the perfidy and falsifications involved in the character assassinations that some bloggers think is the stuff of political discourse.

As we near the 2010 elections, we promise that dishonesty and stupidity will not go unremarked. Some politicians and their henchmen will be held to account for past transgressions as well.

The latest model in lies about healthcare is ready for your consumption

2009-06-12T09:25:00.000-07:00

Conservatives for Patients Rights is churning out misinformation about the health care reform.
Their latest effort in a television ad says that the proposals before Congress could "crush" your health care options and drive 119 million people off of current insturance plans onto a publically financed plan.

Factcheck.org points out that those statements are not true:

That's misleading. The 119 million figure comes from an analysis of a plan that would mirror Medicare and be open to every individual and business that wanted it. But that's not the type of public plan President Obama has proposed. Nor is such a plan gaining acceptance on Capitol Hill.

The author of the study says that while some have backed the Medicare-like proposal, using the 119 million number "overstates the impact of what now is being considered."

The ad also falsely cites the New York Times as the source of a statement that what's being proposed would leave no consumer choices and "government in control of your health care." The Times didn't say that at all. The newspaper was just quoting claims made by insurance companies and members of Congress.

Read the entire analysis by clicking on this link.

The insane hatred is even scaring Fox News

2009-06-10T16:17:00.000-07:00

See Shepard Smith on the kind of e-mail and postings you find on the South Dakota blogosphere in a most casual survey of it.

Suicide is having nothing to lose at Ft. Campbell and Standing Rock

2009-06-10T15:57:00.000-07:00

Standing Rock Reservation

A few weeks ago, Ft. Campbell, home of the 101st Airborne Division was put on stand down, meaning that all activities were suspended, so that the post could address the epidemic suicide rate it has experienced. During this year, 14 suicides have been reported there. The commanding general exhorted the troops “Don’t take away your tomorrow."

During the same time period, the Standing Rock Reservation in South and North Dakota has experienced 16 suicides. There is no stand down at Standing Rock. The reservation is in a state of perpetual stand down.

Suicide is a continual problem at Standing Rock. In the past, it has received some open attention in the press. This latest epidemic has been suppressed. I am not supposed to say what I have been told because the authorities fear that an open discussion of the suicides will inspire copy cat incidents. However, as some church -related groups have made public pleas for prayers for the people of Standing Rock and have cited the 16 suicides as the reason, I do not think I am constrained by any confidentiality agreements.

Standing Rock has all the problems that are usually associated with poor inner city neighborhoods. A year ago, Standing Rock was one of the reservations to which the Bureau of Indian affairs sent a task force of police officers to augment the tribal and local police. The town of McLaughlin was besieged by gang and drug related crimes. The suicide epidemic is just one of the many problems that beset a demoralized people.

The suicide rate among Native Americans is double that of the general population. But among the native people, the Aberdeen area of the Indian Health Service, as shown in the accompanying chart, has the highest suicide rate in the lower 48 states. The rate is more than 19 deaths by suicide for every 100,000 people. Among the individual reservations, Standing Rock has the highest rate in the Aberdeen region. Most of the suicides are among teenagers.

Many groups and organizations are trying to work on the problems at Standing Rock. One group has established an entrepreneural center, Sitting Bull College has a number of programs that address the economic and social problems, and some church denominations have programs of varying extent and success. Tribal leaders and groups are also working to deal with the constant problems. The harsh fact is that despair has been a prominent feature of the reservation since its inception. When the Sioux bands were forced onto the reservation, under the leadership of Sitting Bull, they tried to adapt to an agricultural way of life. A series of dry years when crops failed emphasized the realization that the land in West River cannot sustain the white man's kind of agriculture. (The whites are coming to that realilzation now.) When Sitting Bull showed interest in the Ghost Dance religion of the 1890s, he was skeptical but saw that it gave his people a glimmer of hope. When the Indian agent and the Army felt that they might lose control of the people to this religious movement, they ordered the arrest of Sitting Bull, which ended in his murder. The reservation has lived under a regime of schemes that don't work and the subsequent hopelessness since that time. The white way is the way of hopelessness.

Whether on a military reservation or an Indian reservation, an epidemic of suicides is the issue of lives that have oppressive presents that bear no hope for the future. When the commander of Ft. Campbell warned his troops not to take away their tomorrows, he seemed to miss the point. People generally commit suicide when they choose not to put up with tomorrows that offer no hope. By giving up their tomorrows, there is nothing to lose and a chance that they can gain some relief from the hopeless present.

Suicide is hard for the survivors to endure. The suicides reject the world we create. And we wonder why. Rather than wonder, we should examine what suicide epidemics tell us. We won't like it, but we just might start to understand what is so terribly wrong.

Objectification

2009-06-09T09:51:00.000-07:00

Lusty dudes.

Revoke the Emancipation Proclamation, repeal the Thirteenth Amendment

2009-06-08T13:50:00.000-07:00

No state is more anti-labor than South Dakota. When workers in the state walk through the doors of their places of employment each day, they step back into the Middle Ages and assume the status of serfs. In the work place, they have no rights. South Dakota is an "at will" state, which means that employers can fire employees at whim and without reason. The only modifying influence on that power is federal anti-discrimination laws, which give employees some recourse if they are fired or discriminated against because of race, gender, or creed. South Dakota is a lousy place to be an employee.

Unless, an employee is a member of a union. Unions give employees a systematic way to bargain for salary and benefit improvements and to establish some basic rights in the workplace. However, in South Dakota the labor laws provide loopholes which allow employers to nullify the collective bargaining process and to dismiss contract provisions. The state upholds the serfdom of employees.

The anti-labor attitude enjoys bi-partisan support in South Dakota. Some Democrats are as anti-worker as their regressive compatriots, who long for the old plantation system of utilizing human work. But the anti-worker attitude is not fundamentally an economic matter of people looking for the cheapest possible source of labor. It is more a matter of regressive social notions which place people who do the work in a status inferior to those who presume to manage any work to be done and to dictate who can do it. The anti-worker sentiment is rooted in the old dog pack mentality through which members of the pack aspire to alpha status by sending their fellows into the omega regions. It is an attitude that reveres inequality as the path to human distinction.

When South Dakota is touted for its "business climate," in addition to paltry taxes on corporations and the lack of worker rights, the studies cite the absence of egalitarianism as a major factor. In open refutation of that silly notion enshrined in the Declaration of Independence that all people are created equal, the South Dakota attitude is that all people may be created equal, but we sure as hell don't have to keep them that way. Especially in the work place.

Nothing has aggravated the anti-worker attitude across the nation more than the proposed Employee Free Choice Act. Groups lobbying for the inferior status of workers have launched an astounding campaign of disinformation, misinformation, and outright lies about this act.

They claim that the act will take away the employees right to a secret ballot in deciding whether to unionize their workplace. The fact is that the Act would give the employees the right to decide what kind of election they can have. Now, the union election process is under the control of the employers. The EFCA would give employees the right to either indicate their willingness to unionize by signing a card or to choose an election. What rankles South Dakota is that the EFCA would give workers the right to decide their future affiliations, not leave it up to employers to stall and set up obstacles that is the historic pattern.

The South Dakota business community has launched a vigorous opposition to the EFCA. Their main argument is that it would take away workers' rights to a secret ballot, as if the South Dakota business community ever gave a rat's rinktum about workers' rights or well-being.

Their second argument is that it would be bad for business. This is based solely upon the assumption that any worker rights is considered bad for business in South Dakota.

The Rapid City Journal takes up the vapid argument in an editorial that chides Sen. Tim Johnson for saying that he will vote for cloture on the EFCA bill and send to the Senate floor for debate. As expressed in the editorial, even debate on the bill violates South Dakota sentiments. Giving workers any kind of v oice is a taboo in the plantation culure of South Dakota business. There are, of course, some businesses which show some respect and regard for their workers, but such is not the official business attitude reflected by the South Dakota chamber of commerce and its allies. Or its mouthpiece, The Rapid City Journal.

During this recession, workers have been shown a warlike opposition by the corporate fascists. While the bailouts and the stimulus package are predicated for the benefit of saving the working class from disasters, the petit-fascists yell socialism, communism, and all the epithets that have always accompanied the subjugation of the worker class by the fascisti. It remains to be seen whether the American working middle class is revived or suppressed.

In South Dakota, the message, as trumpeted by The Rapid City Journal and the regressive bloggers is clear:

South Dakota is a lousy place to be a worker.

The Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment, like the EFCA, are considered a nuisance in this state. The notion of equality is just more liberal claptrap.

Accused spy is from Aberdeen

2009-06-07T18:34:00.000-07:00

The Washington Post states that Aberdeen was the place where retired State Department official Kendall Myers became associated with his wife Gwendolyn who have been charged with spying for Cuba.

The following year [1979], Myers moved to South Dakota, apparently to teach, friends said. He lived with a woman who would soon become his second wife, Gwendolyn Trebilcock, a legislative aide for then-Sen. John Abourezk (D) in her home town of Aberdeen.

Abourezk said in an interview yesterday that he liked both of them. "She is a very good woman," he said. "And I always thought he was a decent human being."

The Myers have entered not guilty pleas to the charge.

Update note: Mrs. Myers maiden name is Steingraber. Trebilcock, a name well-known in Aberdeen, is from lher first marriage.

Dachau on a beautiful spring day

2009-06-07T17:26:00.000-07:00

It had to have been in 1958 during the month of May. I remember driving through some Alpine meadows sparkling with spring flowers. And I remember the acrid sooty smell of the barracks buildings at Dachau that has lingered on my mind ever since.

It was a short visit, but that was sufficient. The images left a permanent stain on the memory.

I was a surface-to-air guided missile crewman and instructor stationed at a little town on the Rhine. My brief visit to Dachau was not planned. In fact, to us soldiers it was an annoyance imposed on us by the convoy commander. I was not selected to make the trip to Bavaria. The truck I was assigned was chosen. In a guided missile battery, every soldier is assigned to a truck. If it is necessary to move the missile battery, the truck will haul the missile equipment you work on. I worked in the launching control trailer, so I, along with the other launching control specialists, was assigned to maintain and operate a 5-ton truck that would pull the launching control trailer and haul one of the generators that supplied the power to the launching area. In the time I was in Germany, that trip was one of the few times we actually operated the truck. Mostly we washed and maintained the truck during the weekly motor pool duty.

On this occasion, there was some equipment stored at our post that was needed at a post in the Bavarian Alps. The truck that the launching control crew maintained was assigned to haul it. And as the trip was scheduled for a day that I was not scheduled to be on the missile equipment, I was assigned to drive the trip. There was a certain air of mystery about the trip, but it was a very low-key assignment.

A senior non-commissioned officer came to our post to supervise the loading of the equipment and rode with me to Karlsruhe where we picked up a jeep and another truck and some more personnel who were acting as guards and relief drivers.

The trip to the post in the Alps was about 300 miles, but it was an all-day affair. Driving the 5-ton trucks in the German traffic--Comrades were not known to be the best drivers in the world--required vigilance and we had to traverse some mountain roads. The NCO in charge would sometimes switch places with the relief drivers and ride in the truck cabs instead of the jeep. He was a very competent and conscientious man.

His history was similar to that of a number of the NCOs in my battery. They were World War II veterans who participated in the invasion of Germany and met and married German women during the occupation. This NCO from the headquarters spoke fluent and flawless German and knew where we were going without having to use a map. I, with a couple of years of college German, was struggling to use the language and our conversation while he was riding with me was about learning the language and the GI presence in the country.

We made it to the station where we delivered the equpment, spent the night in transient barracks, and left early the next morning for our return trip. At that time, the NCO said we would be making a short detour to Dachau. I did not understand if this detour was part of the official trip or if the NCO had some personal reason for it. While there seemed to be some official task to be completed, the NCO had also indicated that he was involved in the liberation of Dachau.

The mountains were lush and the flowers were in bloom on the drive to Dachau. When we arrived, we found that the concentration camp was being used to house refugees. However, one of the barracks buildings was being used as a memorial. The NCO told us we would find it interesting to look at the displays, which were largely a collection of photographs taken during the liberation of piles of bodies and emaciated prisoners. But what struck me and the other members of the detail was that pungent acrid, sooty smell. We wondered if we were smelling the residual smoke from the crematorium where the bodies of the dead prisoners were disposed of.

Shortly, the NCO returned from wherever he went and we got into our trucks to return to our respective posts. While the NCO was riding in the cab of my truck I mentioned that disturbing odor. He said our assumption was correct. The oily smoke of burning human flesh had penetrated the wood of the barracks and left that reminder of what took place at the concentration camp. Then he said that the horrors of what the liberating troops confronted caused overreactions in some of the them. They killed German guards after they had surrendered. The NCO commented that the violence and atrocities of the concentration camps were "a contagious cancer on the minds and morale" of all who came into contact with it. We can't let this happen ever again, he said. And said no more.

I found out later from one of my NCOs that the shooting of guards by Americans at Dachau was called the Dachau Massacre and some soldiers were cited for discipline. The number of guards killed was put at more than a hundred. When the men were brought in front of Gen. Patton, he said they were trained to kill, that's what they did, and he dismissed the charges.

Many years later, one of the medical officers who was at Dachau the day of its liberation published a book which put the number of German guards killed at 560. He claimed that more than 400 were lined up against a wall and machine-gunned down. However, an official report by an officer who commanded the liberating force disputed that number and said about 120 guards were shot.

President Obama's appearance at Buchenwald and the commemoration of D-Day recalled these events. At the time I was stationed in Germany, Buchenwald was in East Germany, behind the Iron Curtain, and it was not a place tourists could go to visit at that time. However, about a year after my visit to Dachau, it was established as an official memorial site. I often thought that the NCO who led us on the visit was somehow involved in the establishment of Dachau as a monument to what should never be allowed to happen again.

The horrors committed upon the inmates there pushed good men over the edge into hateful violence. That NCO did not say so outright, but his concerned attitude made it clear that the reactions of the G.I.s were included in what should never happen again.

I for one can still smell that sick sooty odor of death by atrocity.

A lesson on how to misquote sources and influence idiots

2009-06-02T20:07:00.000-07:00

Fairness in Accuracy & Reporting has compiled a detailed analysis of how Sonia Sotomayor has been misquoted deliberately by her critics and carelessly by the media. Their account follows:

At this point, the confirmation battle over Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor will hinge in part on whether the media want to fact-check her critics. So far, the press is largely failing.

Right-wing critics and politicians have been circulating comments Sotomayor made in 2001 at UC Berkeley. One quote has been replayed endlessly: "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life." (Sometimes the quote is replayed without the "I would hope that" qualifier--e.g., NBC Nightly News, 5/31/09.)

Does Sotomayor believe that Latina judges are wiser than white judges? That's what her right-wing critics want the quote to mean. Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer characterized (5/28/09) her views as "the superior wisdom she believes her Latina physiology, culture and background grant her over a white male judge." And as CNN host Lou Dobbs put it (6/1/09), "She said more often than not a Latino judge would reach a better decision than a white male." That message has been carried mostly uncritically in much of the corporate media, thanks largely to a willingness to let right-wing pundits frame the discussion--often with little in the way of rebuttal from Sotomayor's defenders.

In the May 27 Washington Post, Howard Kurtz quoted that sentence along with a Fox News host calling Sotomayor a reverse racist. On May 28, the New York Times ran a story headlined "Sotomayor's Opponents and Allies Prepare Strategies." The piece recounted the controversial sentence, followed by the reaction of Newt Gingrich--he thinks she's a racist who should withdraw her name--and Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch, who doesn't think she should withdraw, but was nonetheless troubled by some of Sotomayor's views.

But anyone who reads Sotomayor's 2001 speech can see that the prevailing media discussion is totally misleading. Her point was that people's backgrounds affect how they see the world. This would seem to be a rather uncontroversial fact of life; justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Samuel Alito made similar statements about their own backgrounds to no great controversy.

In regards to cases involving race and gender discrimination, which was the topic under discussion, Sotomayor was arguing that the experience of facing discrimination may help in judging such cases--pointing out that despite the presumption that "a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases," such wise old men as Oliver Wendell Holmes and Benjamin Cardozo "voted on cases which upheld both sex and race discrimination in our society." She added: "Let us not forget that until 1972, no Supreme Court case ever upheld the claim of a woman in a gender discrimination case."

It's not so hard to explain the context, but NBC's Meet the Press host David Gregory bungled his attempt to do so on May 31, excerpting primarily the lines from Sotomayor's address that buttress the claims of her right-wing critics, while leaving out the lines that make it clear that Sotomayor was advocating that judges strive to put aside their prejudices. His excerpt closed with this line: "Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see. My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what the difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage." But Gregory left out her conclusion:

I am reminded each day that I render decisions that affect people concretely and that I owe them constant and complete vigilance in checking my assumptions, presumptions and perspectives and ensuring that to the extent that my limited abilities and capabilities permit me, that I reevaluate them and change as circumstances and cases before me requires. I can and do aspire to be greater than the sum total of my experiences but I accept my limitations. I willingly accept that we who judge must not deny the differences resulting from experience and heritage but attempt, as the Supreme Court suggests, continuously to judge when those opinions, sympathies and prejudices are appropriate.

Read the entire analysis here.

Guns come to the sanctuary

2009-06-02T13:09:00.000-07:00

The Shepardsons and Grangerfords were dedicated to killing each other. They were in a feud. They had long forgotten the reasons they killed each other, but it was what they did. They took their guns to church.

Here is how Huckleberry Finn describes the experience:

Next Sunday we all went to church, about three
mile, everybody a-horseback. The men took their
guns along, so did Buck, and kept them between their
knees or stood them handy against the wall. The
Shepherdsons done the same. It was pretty ornery
preaching -- all about brotherly love, and such-like
tiresomeness; but everybody said it was a good ser-
mon, and they all talked it over going home, and had
such a powerful lot to say about faith and good works
and free grace and preforeordestination, and I don't
know what all, that it did seem to me to be one of the
roughest Sundays I had run across yet.

In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain satirizes the customs Americans clung to from the feudal past. They include slavery and the tradition of violence. The feud was a tradition of violence. The Grangefords and Shepherdsons went to the same church, but as Twain portrays in the passage above, the teachings of the church had little influence on the cherished traditon of violence and lethal force. As demonstrated by the guns resting against the sanctuary walls or between the legs of the worshippers, the violence was with them. But they did not open fire on each other while in church.

Such was not the case Sunday in Wichita. Dr. George Tiller was killed in a church, The Reformation Lutheran Church.. A church is a sanctuary, a place of refuge, asylum, protection. But no more.

I, too, am a Lutheran of the same denomination as Dr. Tiller. I am not a very good one. I once was. I was a deacon and did all those things deacons do like usher, help dispense the sacraments, and sit on the church board, conduct adult education classes. I became a Lutheran after I attended a Lutheran College at which I later taught. The church at which I was a deacon is in the core area of Rock Island, Illinois. The neighborhood had its problems as minority populations lived there and struggled with all those things that the poor and excluded struggle with. A major project of the church was to make it a sanctuary where children could go after school, adults could go when families erupted into anger and violence, where anybody could go if they were hungry or ill and needed help. The church tried to be all those things that Jesus ordained as the principle objectives of what was to become Christianity.

I was raised in a fundamentalist church which I rejected as a young teenager. When I was a child my mother took me with her as she went about the mission of feeding the hungry and ministering to the sick. I recall an endless succession of hobos and homeless sitting on our back porch steps eating scrambled eggs and toast and bacon that my mother prepared for anyone who appeared at our door and was in need. That part of what I learned through the church seemed consistent with the teaching of Christ. But as a child I could not reconcile some prejudices and condemnations practiced by church members with what was professed as the teaching of Christ.

I found the same problem in recent times. My spouse was a staff member for Sen. Tom Daschle. When he lost the election, some people in the church we attended saw fit to make gloating comments. My wife had lost her job, and some people seemed elated. We wondered, why go to church to experience petty hatreds and expressions of ill will? We found at the same time that one of our children was experiencing a full dose of pubescent discrimination in church. She detests church.

The sanctuary had been compromised. No longer was church a place to come for peaceful contemplation of the angers that beset the world outside. The message of good will and peace was negated.

Like most people, I have grave conflicts about abortion. It has been an issue among the students when some young women found unintended, unwanted pregnancies to deal with. All the stories were sad, whether they involved abortion, giving up newborn infants to adoption, or giving up planned lives to provide for unplanned children.

One of the greatest tragedies involved with the abortion question is that churches gave up their status as sanctuaries. Instead, they became hostile camps. The words that have led to lethal force have often originated in churches. Rather than being sanctuaries of good will and peace, churches became the incubator of open hatred and violence. Words, like guns, have consequences.

There is a deadly symbolism in Dr. Tiller being shot down in the vestibule of a church. The church can no longer claim to be a sanctuary, a house of Christ. It is a place where people go for the Word. And they have received it. With lethal force.

Justice Roberts, wingnut, comes out of the closet

2009-05-28T10:05:00.000-07:00

The American right wing nuts rage about the racial identities of the President and his Supreme Court nominee, but the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court is on the attack against efforts to correct the legacy of racial discrimination.

While during his confirmation hearings Justice Roberts pledged moderation in his deliberations, he has in fact become a right wing ideologue. Jeffrey Toobin of The New Yorker and CNN details how Roberts actually performs on the bench:

After four years on the Court, however, Roberts’s record is not that of a humble moderate but, rather, that of a doctrinaire conservative. The kind of humility that Roberts favors reflects a view that the Court should almost always defer to the existing power relationships in society. In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party.

A world series of belligerence?

2009-05-27T15:24:00.000-07:00

Are the GOP and North Korea locked in a battle for the world belligerence championship?

Empathy and dumb

2009-05-27T08:54:00.000-07:00

When the Supreme Court annointed George W. Bush president in 2000, I was dismayed. It was done in the context of a Republican lie-and-hate blitz that branded any Democrats who were seeking a fair recount in Florida as election thieves and anti-Americans. Bush 43 became president in a way that sppeared to be the political hijacking of an election. While 9/11 gave Bush a respite from the cloud of doubt and suspicion in which his presidency started, the cloud got darker and smellier during the course of his presidency.

There were people who took his verbal infacility as evidence of stupidity. In the early years of W's presidency, I was among those who objected to the gratuitous charges of dumbness hurled at Bush. Attributing mental disability and malfunction had become the favorite propagandic ploy of some in the right wing, and I cautioned progressives against being drawn into that kind of degraded exchange. Bush was overshadowed by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and he had Karl Rove as his major poltical adviser. They were not dumb. But they were routinely devious and deceptive, and these qualities began to characterize the moral and intellectual nature of the Bush presidency.

Eventually, it was George Bush himself who convinced me that he was truly dumb at times. His constant inarticulation seemed to come from a mind that was stuck in a groove. Despite the evidence building up that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and that Saddam Hussein had not stockpiled weapons of mass destruction, Bush seemed incapable of addressing that evidence. He deferred to those forces of coporate fascism that eventually brought the economy down. Bush seemed not to have any mental grasp of his own on the events taking place in the nation and the world. Rather, he kept up the stolid recitation of notions that almost everyone in the nation knew were not true, except for him.

In the books Bob Woodward wrote about George W. , he charts what started out to be a presidency that began with resolution and descended into an obstinate defense of the indefensible. Like most of the nation, I conduded that Bush was less than bright. Many people from his administration, including former press secretaries, have expressed exasperation with his inabiity to get control of the facts and of the people in his administration who distorted and falsified the facts.

Bush's struggles with language appeared more and more to emanate from struggles with the thought process. As an old professor, I have long recognized that the most ponderous thinkers are often the deepest and most thoroough thinkers. Bush never provided indications that such was the case with him.

There is a diffference between wrong and being stupid. It became impossible to make the distinction in George W. Bush.

A hallmark of stupidity is the mishandlling of language. It has become a custom, particurly in the conservative blogosphere, to insist on a meaning of a word that is not what the word historically has come to mean. And then to launch some kind of an attack on others based upon a narrow, even erroneous, meaning of the word.

Such is occuring around the word empathy. President Obama has said he wants a Supreme Court justice with empathy. When George H.W. Bush introduced Clarence Thomas for the Supreme Court, he said he was a man of "great empathy." But when the word comes from Obama's mouth, the Republicans have chosen to make the word mean biased. Most people know that empathy means to be able to see what it is like to stand in another's shoes, a matter of being able to perceive from a different perspective. So, as in 1984, the Ministry of Truth is revising the dictionary.

Using that kind of ploy to change the meaning of a word in order to attack another person is, well, dumb.

If Souter would stay on a while

2009-05-27T07:26:00.000-07:00

he'd spare the nation something as bad as a swine flu pandemic. He could put off the spectacle of watching the Republicans get even more frenzied in their hate fests than they are from Obama.

In fact, I was among some people who actually drafted a letter a month or so ago asking Souter to stay on. As soon as he announced his retirement and people began to speculate who would replace him, the Republicans announced that they would obstruct and malign the nominee, no matter who it was. As names were suggested, the Republicans did the one thing that they do with any effect: they started their defamation machinery. One thing our culture and country does not need at this time is any more of the mean and nasty degradation that is the only Republican contribution to our country. An honest and thoughtful disagreement would be like opening the windows in a diarrhea ward. But the GOP seems to have outlawed anything that remotely resembles intelligence and good purpose.

Prominent among the names brought up as a Supreme Court nominee was Sonia Sotomayor. Talking Points Memo has traced a whispering campaign against her that emerged in an article by The New Republic's legal correspondent, Jeffrey Rosen. Some anonymous lawyers and clerks approached him and said that she lacked "the intellectual heft and good manners" to sit on the Supreme Court. The conservative hate machine seized upon the article and The National Review's Mark Hemingway reduced the article to the conclusion that Sotomayor was "dumb and obnoxious." Rosen answered back with the statement that Sotomayor was an able and qualified candidate, at least as much as some of the sitting justices on the Supreme Court.

The charges that Sotomayor, who has a record of the highest intellectual achievements, is mentally challenged found its way to the nation's intellectual barrens when Mt. Blogmore's Kevin Woster said he had characterized Sotomayor as moderate on public radio but found that his assessment, derived from Associated Press stories, had been superseded by one advanced by the Mother Superior of Unmerciful Malice from NSU who determined her to be liberal. You can't go against GOP Gospel. The charge of mental deficiency got picked up by a commenter, Aldo, on Mt. Blogmore who said he was concerned about a nominee who is described as “not that smart and kind of a bully on the bench,” Of course, Aldo made no effort to determine who made that characterization or what it is based on. In the South Dakota moral barrens, hatefulness and defamation need no justification.

It would be so nice if Justice Souter could be persuaded to stay on for another year. Even though Obama was elected to lift the nation out of the morass of mindless hate and abuse into which the nation has fallen, the communicative apparatus has been so damaged as to be unusable for any profitable discussion. A friend of mine recently retired as a professor and provost of a university program in communications says the state of communications in the U.S. has prompted him to live with one foot in Canada. He planned to maintain a summer residence during his retirement in the Detroit Lakes area. But after spending a year on a project that examined the state of the media on the upper plains, he sold his property and is looking at places in Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec. He says you can't live, physically or intellectual, in a poisoned environment. He is among those who believe that the intellectual failures in America are insurmountable.

So, we head into a Supreme Court confirmation process that is certain to erupt in a profusion of malice and falsehood.

I for one think that Sonia Sotomayor should be carefully examined and questioned. Just as Alito and Roberts were. If documentable deficiencies in her record could be found, they should be brought to light. But we do not need another inquisition borne of racial and sexual hatred carried out through falsehood and defamation.

I have my doubts that the country can surmount the politics of malice. Justice Souter, it would have been nice for a year of respite on the Supreme Court front from the defamations that have become our national anthem for some people.

The Republican Putsch and the Swiftboating of Nancy Pelosi

2009-05-25T18:27:00.000-07:00

Despite the record established by members of both political parties, as detailed by Factcheck.org, that the CIA has covered up, misled, and misinformed members of Congress regarding the use of torture on detainees, the Republicans are seizing upon the lack of a documented record to accuse House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of lying and demanding her resignation.

Pelosi has advocated the establishment of Congressional investigations into the torture matter, and current CIA Director Leon Panetta formally stated that the truth in the conflicting statements will have to be determined by Congress.

But the fact-checkng and analysis will probably not be done. It could cause impediments and obstacles to the hate incitement and scurrilous accusations that now appear to form the total contribution of the Republican Party to the national dialogue. We live in an age that is overloading communication mediums with contrived and demented verbal confrontations. Cable television has displaced competent news reports with bickering and shouting sessions in which there are no attempts by anyone to establish facts or apply the rules of expository integrity.

The reactions to Nancy Pelosi range from the inane demands for resignation by Newt Gingrich to the sulky petulance of John Boehner and Dick Cheney. Pelosi's comments are a response to the abandonment of decency and due process and the adoption of torture as a national policy. The attacks against Pelosi are attempts by people incompetent in the arts of addressing issues to divert attention away from the central issue.

The encouraging sign in all this is that the press and the Internet sites run by actual brain power are fact-checking and analyzing the materials being presented to the public. A good example is that after Dick Cheney's speech denouncing Barack Obama and his policies, McClatchy newspapers fact-checked the content of his speech and found numerous errors of fact.

Add to that the refutation of Cheney's argument by the former lead interrogator in Iraq. Cheney said that prison abuse and torture played no role in the escalation of violence against America. The interrogator said that when news of the torture and prison mistreatment got out, that is precisely when militants flocked to Iraq to fight against America. And it is because of that kind of incitement that President Obama has decided not release more prison abuse photographs.

Increasingly, competent, responsible reporters are challenging the devious and incompetent, whether news organizations or citizen journalists. As said many times before, people have the right to exercise their First Amendment in expressing what is on their minds. But other people have the equal right to expose falsehoods. dishonesty, malice, and outright idiocy.

The South Dakota idiosphere echoes the worst of what finds its way into the national media and what seems to have become the Republican strategy of personal attack and destruction. Just as the insurgents in Iraq have found the Improvised Explosive Device to be the ultimate expression of their value of disfigurement and death, the Republican "base" has adopted the propagandic equivalent in the profusion of falsehood and defamation it explodes into the atmosphere. The American dialogue has degraded to a point that its objective is disfigurement-defamation and character assassination-death. In order to obtain information is that possesses the potential for intelligent thought and analysis, a citizen has to strenuously search out sources of information not given over to idiotic sound and fury. That means that people have to be alert and make others aware of where the malignant brain cells dwell. Just as the people of Mexico City wore masks a few weeks ago to ward off the swine flu virus, literate people of good will and purpose have to constantly filter out the mental contaminants that so pollute the communication atmosphere.

The cult of personal disfigurement and character assassination can be seen in constant operation in the idiosphere. South Dakota War College has become a devotee of those rituals of personal destruction. A recent example concerns Tom Daschle. The techniques of malicious misrepresention are evident in a posting which purports to call attention to a story on Daschle and contort it in such a way as to give it a defamatory appearance. The post links to a story from the Argus Leader which was reprinted from USA Today. The story is about Daschle's continued power and influence in the planning and shaping of a new health care policy. It is 15 paragraphs long and is largely a citation of Daschle's continued work and influence in reforming healthcare. One of the paragraphs cites an executive from a public watchdog agency who thinks that Daschle may still be playing the role of senator even though he does not hold that office. However, the rest of the story is about the continued respect and influence he commands.

War College presents that one paragraph in such a way as to suggest that it represents the whole of the story. By any standard, journalistic or academic, this is a blatant misrepresentation of the story in an obvioius attempt to malign Daschle.

Daschle made a serious mistake when he failed to include the services of a car and driver as income on his tax forms. He corrected the error, paid the back taxes, and withdrew from the nomination to Secretary of Human Services. Daschle is far removed at this time from any political connections with South Dakota. The continued respect and prominence he garners is a measure of the work he has done, still does, and the kind of person he is beyond the problem he had with tax payments. The question, then, is why does SD War College go to such extremes to distort a factual story about Daschle's continuing role into a defamation? For what motive do opponents of Daschle try to create the impression that he is engaged in continuous nefarious activities that violate some rule or law?

The answer is in the Republican mentality that prevails right now. In that segment of the Republican Party, like children who will destroy the world if they can't have their way, personal destruction is the sum total of their politics.

The response to pointing out that the display of the story on Daschle is a totally dishonest attempt at misrepresentation and deception will be that a link to the original story was provided. However, War College went after the Prince of Dementia, Steve Sibson, when he did precisely the kind of thing War College is trying to do to Daschle. Sibson wrote a headline suggesting that a member of the Public Utilities Commission was engaging in graft and claimed that no asperion was cast because he put a question mark after the headline. The supplying of a link to a story display that totally misrepresents the story is the same as that question mark. It does not mitigate the malicious intent behind the display.

Whether made against Nancy Pelosi by national figures or against Tom Daschle by residents of the barren backwaters, such words of falseness and hatred are the stuff out of which gas ovens are built.

And the public needs to be reminded of their intent.

A truth commission is our last best hope

2009-05-16T05:37:00.001-07:00

Barack Obama is not doing his most hopeful and loyal constituents any favors by making concessions that return us to rule by the Bush-Cheney doctrines. From the time his presidential run was still in the exploratory stages, he received support from people who saw a need to move the country as far away as possible from the assaults against civil liberties, against contriving war on deceptions and attitudes of bully-boy belligerence, and against demoting the military services to IED-fodder.

In not releasing the photos of the treatment of detainees, Obama may be deferring to the warnings of his generals that such photos would inflame America's enemies into a an intensive assault against our troops and our homeland, but he is also affirming the Bush legacy to which he seemed to be a dramatic alternative. He is missing the opportunity to emphasize that the photographs represent what America was under Bush and not what it intends to be under Obama. Establishing the reference points that need to be refuted is not dwelling on the past. It is giving substance to the changes that need to be made.

Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on Law and Security at New York University, states the case this way:

It is one thing to wait to release the photographs in a way that satisfies the U.S. military, which has sacrificed so much in the fight against terrorism. But it is another thing to commingle the call to protect our troops with the politically shrewd reluctance to investigate out of fear that prosecutions might follow. If Obama does nothing else as president, he needs to stand up for the integrity of factual truth and clear thinking rather than the convenience of government-led obfuscation. Not releasing the pictures to reduce public pressure for an investigation of Bush administration officials should not be confused with genuinely protecting the safety of our troops. If it is, Obama cedes the one power he was elected to exercise: the power of leadership in the name of candor, lawfulness and clarity rather than deceit, secrecy and spin.

In merely modifying rather than rejecting military tribunals as a way to demonstrate justice even for those accused of attacking America, rather than totally rejecting the phony due process of the tribunals, Obama is compromising away the support that got him elected. He is trying to be pragmatic and reasonable, but just as there is no reasoning with Al Qaeda and the Taliban, there is no reasoning with the American regressive movement. He was elected to change policy and practice, not piddle away real change with unproductive conciliation.

John Cusack states the nervous restlessness among those who want to restore America to honesty and moral integrity:

Only now is the knowledge starting to give rise to the widespread outrage and calls for accountability that such crimes against humanity deserve. Growing numbers of citizens are demanding the independent investigation and prosecution of the members of the Bush administration responsible for the vitiation of fundamental legal principles like habeas corpus and the flagrant violation of both international and domestic laws against torture. The pundits, hacks and shills who dismiss these calls for investigation and prosecution -- integral to any serious definition of accountability -- disgrace themselves and their country.

Right now Nancy Pelosi is providing a diversion from the real matters at issue. The rabid, regressive right is using what she knew about waterboarding and when she knew it to divert attention away from the "deceit, secrecy and spin" that is the basis for their anti-terrorism policies. Her statement that she was misled by the CIA in a Congressional briefing is being used as an example of mendacity on her part. This is despite the fact that Sen. Bob Graham has shown that the CIA did not, in fact, give the Senate intelligence committee the briefings it claimed it had.

The New York Times emphasizes that the attacks on Pelosi misdirect attention away from the essential matters at issue:

The furor surrounding Ms. Pelosi’s claim that she was misled has obscured one undisputed fact about the briefings. The Sept. 4, 2002, session, the first given to anyone in Congress on the so-called enhanced interrogation methods, came weeks after the C.I.A. had started to use the methods. Even if Ms. Pelosi had taken action, it is doubtful it would have averted the firestorm about torture that was to come.

Even though Leon Panetta issued a statement that the CIA, the agency he now heads, does not mislead Congress, he did not address the specifics of the issue. In his statement, he implied that a truth commission established by Congress is the way to address the matter: "Ultimately, it is up to Congress to evaluate all the evidence and reach its own conclusions about what happened."

Although President Obama does not want an extensive inquiry into torture and the controversy surrounding it to detract from his agenda to deal with the recession, health care, and his revamping of foreign policy, Congress may have to override him and defer to the people who elected him.