I took the liberty of drawing those blue intersecting lines on Professor Saez' chart to focus on a specific year: 1964. That was a milestone year in so many ways:

n Politically - post JFK period, expansion of Viet Nam conflict, Khrushchev steps down as head of Russia, Egypt/Iraq/Jordan/Kuwait/Syria form common market, Free Speech Movement launched at University of California, Berkeley

n Culturally - The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove," Cassius Clay defeated Sonny Liston and changed his name to Muhammad Ali, 86% of black students boycott Cleveland schools, "Fiddler on the Roof" with Zero Mostel premieres in New York City

n Societally - Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine campaigns for the Republican nomination for President, Nobel awarded to Martin Luther King, Jr., Civil Rights Act passed after Republican filibuster

n Technologically - Unmanned Apollo 1 Saturn launcher test attains Earth orbit, Ford Mustang formally introduced

Those intersecting blue lines allow us to look at the relative growth of income during the 50 years preceding 1964 and the 40 years following, which looks like this chart below:

There are two things to note about this dissected chart:

n The changing value of the U.S. dollar is pegged to its 2006 value, so the elevation of the salmon and pink sections can be viewed as "relative gains" from "point zero," or the point from which we started in any year. Forget the rising income totals, we are looking at relative gains, which over the last 40 years have been 25 to 50% of what they had been in the preceding 50.

At http://www.measuringworth.com/ppowerus/result.php there is a handy tool for determining relative values of the dollar, adjusted for inflation. That shows that your 1964 US$1 bill is now worth only 15 cents. That means that if your Dad was making $15,000 a year in 1964, you would need to make a little more than $100,000 a year in 2008 to have purchasing power similar to that enjoyed by "the old man" back in '64.

To put this further into perspective, the U.S. Census Bureau reported in 2007 that the average per capita income in the U.S. in 2006 was $48,200. The 2007 report also included this nugget: "Real median household income of white households rose 1.1 percent between 2005 and 2006 (from $50,100 to $50,700), the first real increase in annual household income for this group since 1999. Asian households had the highest median income at $64,200, followed by non-Hispanic white ($52,400), Hispanic ($37,800) and black ($32,000) households. Income levels remained statistically unchanged between 2005 and 2006 for each of these groups."

No matter how you cut it, our Dads were a lot "wealthier" making $15,000 a year in 1964 than most of us are now, though the numbers we bank are vastly "greater."

And here is another bit of perspective from that same report: "In 2006, women earned 77 cents for each dollar earned by men, statistically unchanged from 2005. Real median earnings of both men and women who worked full time, year-round declined between 2005 and 2006. The median earnings for men fell 1.1 percent to $42,300; for women, the corresponding numbers were 1.2 percent and $32,500."

n Economic prosperity pretty much peaked in the U.S. in 1973-74, a pivotal period in history that saw the resignation of Richard Nixon, the end of the Viet Nam War, and George Steinbrenner's purchase of the New York Yankees (from CBS) for $12 million (or about $56 million in 2008 US$, and the steal of a lifetime). It marked the emergence of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) as an independent force able to impact world economies through embargoes and pricing.

It was also a period in which U.S. domestic policy began to veer away from regulation and taxation and toward an era of smaller government and "supply side economics" (which translates into "protect the gains of the already wealthy and hope to be benefitted in some way"). That nature of the "benefit" is always defined in an ethereal, or possibly murky way, because the wealthy tend to move their investments around to the benefit of their own portfolios, which impacts yours in unpredictable ways.

In fact, the only predictable effect of a tax cut is that things will remain just fine for the already wealthy, who are more or less immune to the economic impacts that vex most of us. For "us" reductions in tax revenues have typically been catastrophic.

For instance: In 1978 California passed Howard Jarvis' Proposition 13, which capped the property taxes to the value a home was assessed at when it was purchased, freezing tax rates on existing homes at 1975-76 values. For all the good that did to save home owners from losing their properties, as California real estate values went through the roof over the past 30 years, Prop 13 also created a Republican model for starving government programs to death, pinching their stems between the jaws of anti-tax sentiments and rising costs of service delivery. Expenses were growing out of control and "our" response, at a public policy level, was to simply refuse to fund them through "wasteful" taxation.

As communities in California realized lower tax revenues, investment in public services came to a dead stop. The result 30 years later has been crumbling infrastructure (highways, utilities), including a once exemplary public schools system that has fallen to 35th among states in per pupil spending (http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2000/stateprofiles/pdf/ranking_of_the_states.pdf).

The U.S. absolutely relies on this crucial infrastructure to remain competitive in our new global economy - we need educated people and efficient systems of commerce unfettered by degradation of support systems.

Do you hear anything from either McCain or Obama, however, that goes beyond the pandering call to reduce the tax burden? Any new ideas? Innovative approaches for turning an essentially regressive income tax concept into an incentive for public investment?

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TREASON

Pronunciation: \'trē-zən\
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English tresoun, from Anglo-French traisun, from Latin tradition-, traditio act of handing over, from tradere to hand over, betray — more at traitor
Date: 13th century
1 : the betrayal of a trust : treachery
2 : the offense of attempting by overt acts to overthrow the government of the state to which the offender owes allegiance or to kill or personally injure the sovereign or the sovereign's family

from Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary

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According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the tax burden on individuals is expected to climb from $1.16 trillion in 2007 to $1.21 trillion this year, while corporate tax receipts are expected to decline from $370 billion to $364 billion. The CBO expects those numbers to spread further by 2013, when the taxpayer burden, based on the national debt, will rise to $1.86 trillion, while corporate taxation is expected to drop further to $327 billion.

PAYROLL TAX CAP: The wingers of the Right always position their anti-tax argument around the small, entrepreneurial businesses that create most of the jobs in this country. Businesses get taxed in a variety of ways, including a 12.4% payroll tax that goes to the Social Security Administration's Old Age and Survivors and Disability Insurance programs (OASDI). This tax burden, shared by employees and employers, is capped (payroll tax cap) at a level that is indexed to the growth of real wages in the economy. In 2007 it was $97,500, meaning that workers and businesses paid taxes on the first $97,500 of individual income. Only 6.5 percent of the working population makes more than that amount in annual wage.

The "payroll tax cap" is something you will continue to hear a great deal about this election year. Democrats lean toward eliminating the tax cap on the employer side, which would make businesses pay Social Security taxes on all of the income of the highest paid (those over the $97,500 current cap) employees. Republicans call this backwards, saying that eliminating the tax cap would increase taxes for 3 million small business owners by as much as $242 billion over the next five years, from 2005 to 2009. They cite figures like $242 billion less in the small business sector to hire and pay workers, purchase equipment, and expand businesses.

But I ask you, does that really square with your experience in the real working world? Do you look around your office and see that your employer's business is just not making the investments they need to make to maintain competitiveness?

If that is happening at your place of business it means you are not in a stable company and need to be looking around for better opportunities.

In the real businesses of America, where corporate owners "launder" their incomes through "S Corporations" that tax them at personal income, rather than corporate rates - Bechtel is a perfect example of a privately owned firm doing this currently - you aren't seeing companies shut down by tax burdens. What you are seeing is:

n Reductions in employer-provided benefits

n Stagnant growth in worker wages

n Widening disparity in the incomes of executive level business leaders and those who work for them

Business owners are not, by and large, financing the burdens of capitalistic enterprise from their own hides, when confronted with such economic challenges as the corporate tax burden and the payroll tax. They are taking it out of yours.

And who, between McCain and Obama, is going to reframe the conversation from anti-tax to pro-investment initiatives? Which one of these knuckleheads will show initiative on this issue and bring about real change? - RAR

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* As far as I can tell, the OECD only has 30 member nations, but they include the industrialized heavyweights with the exception of Russia and China. Go to http://www.oecd.org/countrieslist/0,3351,en_33873108_33844430_1_1_1_1_1,00.html for a look at the participating nations.

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S Corporation (Subchapter S of the U.S. Tax Code): An incorporated business that is a "pass-through" entity for tax considerations. S Corporations have similar legal status to C corporations: limited liability, avoidance of double taxation, and continuity of business in succession transfers. However, the maximum number of shareholders may only by 75.

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Published August 11, 2008ar

The Energy Crunch: Where Is the Leadership of Either Candidate?

I am despondent over the situation with the presidential elections in the U.S., disappointed with Obama and McCain for making "change" a theme of the general campaign but showing no real program beyond more of the same.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in their fallback responses for responding to economy-crippling crude oil prices; "crippling" that is except for that part of the economy belonging to those who refine black gold into fuel. They are doing extraordinarily well. Chevron posted a profit of $18.7 billion in 2007, Exxon $40.61 billion, just to cite two examples.

It is depressing how quickly all we consumers of their petroleum products readjust our perspectives in the face of involuntary change. Until as recently as 2004, the notion of $2 per gallon gas seemed so "Europeanish," a threshold we Americans could hardly imagine crossing. Now at the end of the Bush administration, a glance at a gas station posting of $4.39 per gallon for 89 octane makes me think things are getting a little better!

If I have unconsciously lowered my expectations and acclimated myself to the worst, then what to make of the energy plans of Obama and McCain? What exactly are they acclimated to?

n Both want to invest in clean coal technology.

n McCain wants to expand the nuclear power industry and Obama accepts that nuclear power will be "part of the mix."

n McCain wants to "drill here, drill now" to tap U.S. oil reserves, including offshore capacities. Obama wants to tap the Strategic Oil Reserve and tax the profits of the oil companies, who threaten to feel dis-incented to explore if they are forced to pay additional taxes on their big profits.

n Obama wants to invest significantly in alternative energy resources, like wind and solar power.

THE CHANGE METER: Using the "Change Meter," specially calibrated to chart change proposals against historic timelines, and making some fancy hand movements to make it appear that actual cogitation is taking place, I see that:

1. Both progressive candidates are married to energy production through the use of coal-burning generation plants for generating electrical energy.

Coal, as we all know, "is a fossil fuel formed in ecosystems where plant remains were preserved by water and mud from oxidization and biodegradation, thus sequestering atmospheric carbon" (Wikipedia).

People started using coal for fuel 10,000 years ago in the Neolithic Era and today it is the largest source of fuel for generation of electricity world-wide. It is also the largest contributor world-wide to carbon dioxide emissions, really good for changing the world's climate and warming the globe.

2. Both progressives are more or less committed to the internal combustion engine.

The gasoline powered internal combustion engine is another relatively recent innovation, debuting in 1856 when a company in Florence, Italy, Fonderia del Pignone (now Nuovo Pignone, a subsidiary of General Electric) offered up a 5 horsepower working prototype of a concept developed a few years earlier known as the Barsanti-Matteucci engine. By 1875 the internal combustion technology looked like this detailed drawing at the right.

This mid-19th Century breakthrough spelled the end of the steam engine, which was getting things all wet anyway even while belching smoke from wood and coal furnaces. Too messy, too slow.

A few entrepreneurial operations stepped in to assist America and the world with the faster, sleeker opportunities afforded by gas burning technology, to wit the following company start-ups. I have provided historic context for the founding dates of each company through notes on other events taking place at the same time.

1866	Founded the year following the end of the United States Civil War.	1887	To avoid disputed national elections, U.S. Congress creates Electoral Count Act. Charles Dickens' 1st public reading in U.S. (New York City)
1870	Construction begins on the Brooklyn Bridge in NYC.	1889	1st Computer patented and Dr. Herman Hollerith receives 1st U.S. patent for a tabulating machine. Kansas passes 1st U.S. antitrust. George Washington Bridge linking New York City and New Jersey opens. Union Pacific begins daily through service, Chicago-Portland and San Francisco.
1875	Snooker is "invented" by Sir Neville Chamberlain and the Pacific Stock Exchange is opened.	1890	Mormon Church renounces polygamy, Oklahoma Territory established. Congress establishes Yosemite National Park. U.S. Congress creates the National Weather Bureau. US 7th Cavalry massacre 200+ captive Sioux at Wounded Knee, SD and Ellis Island (New York City) opens as a U.S. immigration depot.
1879	1st electric railway opens at Berlin Trades Exposition and Gilmore Garden in NYC is renamed "Madison Square Garden."	1897	Automobile Club of Great Britain established (now Royal Auto Club). W B Purvis patents electric railway switch. 1st electric taxi's drive in London. Oldsmobile begins operation as a General Motors Corp division.
1882	To skirt anti-monopoly laws, Standard Oil is re-organized as a "trust." New York City's 24 hour race begins, $100 going to the winner who racks up the most mileage in 24 hours. Cincinnati beats Chicago 4-0 in the First World Series Game and Thomas Edison creates the first string of Christmas lights.	1901	Australia declares independence from federation of U.K. colonies. Oil discovered in Texas. U.S. Steel Corp organized under J. P. Morgan. Congress creates National Bureau of Standards, in Department of Commerce. Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid rob train of $40,000 at Wagner Montana. Baseball pitcher Cy Young wins his 300th game.
1886	Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena, California is created. Chemist John Pemberton begins to advertise for "Coca-Coke." Sigmund Freud opens practice in Vienna. 1st commercially successful AC electric power plant opens, Buffalo. New York. .	1905	1st auto to exceed 100 mph (161 kph), A G MacDonald, Daytona Beach. U.S. Supreme Court judges maximum work day unconstitutional. Las Vegas, Nevada founded. Penns Railroad debuts fastest train in world (NY-Chicago in 18 hrs).

3. Both progressives believe the use of nuclear power for producing electricity is part of the solution.

McCain is a strong advocate for nuclear power and sees it as essential to combating global warming. He calls it "one of the cleanest, safest and most reliable energy sources on Earth." (NPR).

Obama stops short of endorsing nuclear power, saying — when asked — that he thinks it shouldn't be taken off the table. He has said he would only support building more reactors if four issues can be resolved: safety, waste storage, vulnerability to terrorist attack, and weapons proliferation concerns. "I actually think we should explore nuclear power as part of the mix..." said Obama. (NPR)

Both of these scientists may not fully appreciate the "cons" of nuclear power, which are powerful enough in themselves to influence the fact that no new nuclear power plant construction has been done in the United States since 1977. The last to go on line was in 1996.

n Radioactive waste from nuclear energy is extremely dangerous and each unit produced will need to be carefully managed for its 10,000 year life according to United States Environmental Protection Agency standards.

n Nuclear power plants and the waste they generate are likely objectives for terrorist attacks.

n Nuclear power plants present huge risks for a short-term fix two decades out, at least. They rely on Uranium, which is a scarce resource that may last only for 30 to 60 more years, and that seems particularly limited given the 20 to 30 year planning, permitting, design and construction timeline to build a new nuclear power plant.

CONCLUSIONS REACHED: Throw the Bums Overboard!

Neither one of these knuckleheads has any business being put in charge of U.S. energy policy until they stop talking about stuff the major corporate interests want them to talk about and start thinking in terms of actual change.

Don't hold your breath.

Obama, for all his windiness, voted for the 2005 Energy Bill, developed by V.P. Dick Cheney to hear Obama tell it. That bill was a huge handout to the oil companies and energy producers, offering incentives for production and exploration. McCain was on board with that too.

Both Obama and McCain talk up solar and wind power, and they imagine electric cars helping to "save" the environment, and Obama imagines fields of solar panels feeding the U.S. electrical grid. Both are paying lip service to investing taxpayer funds for investments in innovative green technologies.

Neither shows any actual leadership on this issue.

A leader putting the public first, instead of imagining ways to incent corporate masters, would first utilize the resources at hand to reduce the public burden. I would count those resources to include:

n Internet technology

n A culture that has evolved naturally to embrace telephonic, online and web-based communications

n Performance-based management technology that provides metric analysis of work performance

What we need is a leader who would change "work culture" to leverage existing computer technology; which coincidentally has kept the U.S. economy afloat for the last 20 years while we systematically dismantled our manufacturing base, surrendering it to low overhead shops in Asia.

Now that we are a service, as opposed to a manufacturing-based economy, it is estimated that 53 percent of all U.S. workers could do their jobs from their homes using network or web-based office technologies. I make my living this way now, working on projects all over the world while rarely leaving my house.

Think of the advantages of taking that much commuter traffic off the streets and highways:

n Energy savings as great as 25 percent according to some experts

Sun Microsystems and Cisco Systems are companies that have embraced remote work arrangements, for obvious reasons. Sun even argues that remote work is "green" after doing a study that showed that workers use far less energy in their homes than would be used to provide for them in offices.

n Reduction in exhaust emissions, benefitting the environment

n Reduction in wastes

n Incentive to the U.S. technology sector

n Improvements in quality of life

The gas crisis could be hugely beneficial to us in a way that a leader might recognize, but Obama and McCain apparently don't. In reassessing the way we do business, we may find an opportunity to add additional time to peoples' lives that could at least potentially be used to advance the quality of their family and community relationships, and add to the richness of their life experiences.

And it wouldn't cost anyone anything. The technology already is in place. We just need a President committed to encouraging its use at the expense of technology that is from a time 150 years ago. Or, in the case of burning coal, really belongs back in the Neolithic period.

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Published July 25, 2008ar

Pulling Obama's Tale

Has the New York Times Profiled the Devil?

I suppose it is possible that I have seen "The Omen" a few too many times, not that I buy into any of that supernatural stuff. I don't believe that there is a God, so I'm not so much scared of Satan. I don't believe in "Him" either.

That said, I am spooky these days about Obama.

I am frankly baffled as to what it is that people see in him; what they see that is positive, that is. What I see is a manipulative opportunist with an extraordinary sense of self who exhibits an ironically well-practiced skill at avoidance of self revelation. Add that to his cultish appeal and it feels to me like you have something weird there.

Or is it just in how one reads it?

As an exhibit, I offer the July 30, 2008 Jodi Kantor New York Times piece "As a law professor, Obama stood apart," lower cased in the fashion of the Times.

If you haven't read the piece, click here to bring up a copy. I would like to compare notes.

Here is what caught my eye about the piece:

Excerpt from The New York Times Article on Barack Obama	My Read on Obama
"The young law professor stood apart in too many ways to count...At a formal institution, Barack Obama was a loose presence, joking with students about their romantic prospects, using first names, referring to case law one moment and 'The Godfather' the next. He was also an enigmatic one, often leaving fellow faculty members guessing about his precise views."	Colors outside the lines and doesn't care to fit in.
"Mr. Obama spent 12 years at the University of Chicago Law School... Mr. Obama planted a foot in each, splitting his weeks between an elite law school and the far less rarefied atmosphere of the Illinois Senate."	I have been incorrect (see Obama facts) in my understanding of the length of time he spent teaching law in Chicago, longer than I thought.
"He helped redraw his own State Senate district, making it whiter and wealthier, he taught districting as a racially fraught study in how power is secured. And before he posed what may be the ultimate test of racial equality — whether Americans will elect a black president — he led students through African-Americans’ long fight for equal status... 'He tested his ideas in classrooms,' said Dennis Hutchinson, a colleague. Every seminar hour brought a new round of, 'Is affirmative action justified? Under what circumstances?' "	Used his classroom and state senate experience to test ideas and learn how to navigate the political system.
"Richard Epstein, a libertarian colleague who says he longed for Mr. Obama to venture beyond his ideological and topical comfort zones. 'His entire life, as best I can tell, is one in which he’s always been a thoughtful listener and questioner, but he’s never stepped up to the plate and taken full swings.'”	For whatever reason, won't reveal himself, won't commit. Is he hiding a precious agenda? Or is he secretly paralyzed with fear of making a mistake?
"Mr. Obama had other business on his mind, embarking on five political races during his 12 years at the school. Teaching gave him satisfaction, along with a perch and a paycheck, but he was impatient with academic debates..."	His one purpose is to advance his political career.
"Mr. Obama arrived at the law school in 1991 thanks to Michael W. McConnell, a conservative scholar who is now a federal appellate judge. As president of The Harvard Law Review, Mr. Obama had impressed Mr. McConnell with editing suggestions on an article; on little more than that, the law school gave him a fellowship, which amounted to an office and a computer, which he used to write his memoir, 'Dreams From My Father.'"	Friends in the right places and a knack for getting more mileage out of marginal achievements than most people
"Mr. Obama was especially eager for his charges to understand the horrors of the past, students say. He assigned a 1919 catalog of lynching victims, including some who were first raped or stripped of their ears and fingers, others who were pregnant or lynched with their children, and some whose charred bodies were sold off, bone fragment by bone fragment, to gawkers. 'Are there legal remedies that alleviate not just existing racism, but racism from the past?' Adam Gross, now a public interest lawyer in Chicago, wrote in his class notes in April 1994."	He is good at creating contexts for his discussions.
"For all the weighty material, Mr. Obama had a disarming touch... He did not belittle students; instead he drew them out, restating and polishing halting answers... A favorite theme, said Salil Mehra, now a law professor at Temple University, were the values and cultural touchstones that Americans share. Mr. Obama’s case in point: his wife, Michelle, a black woman, loved “The Brady Bunch” so much that she could identify every episode by its opening shots."	He is good at verbalizing what others wish they could say, and at referencing commonality.
"As his reputation for frank, exciting discussion spread, enrollment in his classes swelled. Most scores on his teaching evaluations were positive to superlative. Some students started referring to themselves as his groupies. (Mr. Obama, in turn, could play the star. In what even some fans saw as self-absorption, Mr. Obama’s hypothetical cases occasionally featured himself. “Take Barack Obama, there’s a good-looking guy,” he would introduce a twisty legal case.)"	He is a narcissist.
"Mr. Obama’s courses chronicled the failure of liberal policies and court-led efforts at social change: the Reconstruction-era amendments that were rendered meaningless by a century of resistance, the way the triumph of Brown gave way to fights over busing, the voting rights laws that crowded blacks into as few districts as possible. He was wary of noble theories, students say; instead, they call Mr. Obama a contextualist, willing to look past legal niceties to get results..."	Willing to look past legal niceties? Wary of noble theories? Unsettling signs here.
"In his voting rights course, Mr. Obama taught Lani Guinier’s proposals for structuring elections differently to increase minority representation."	A studied manipulator
"...Nor could his views be gleaned from scholarship; Mr. Obama has never published any. He was too busy, but also, Mr. Epstein believes, he was unwilling to put his name to anything that could haunt him politically, as Ms. Guinier’s writings had hurt her. “He figured out, you lay low,” Mr. Epstein said."	Twelve years in a prestige lecturer position and never published anything? What the...? Is this guy for real?
"The Chicago law faculty is full of intellectually fiery friendships that burn across ideological lines. Three times a week, professors do combat over lunch at a special round table in the university’s faculty club, and they share and defend their research in workshop discussions. Mr. Obama rarely attended, even when he was in town. 'I’m not sure he was close to anyone,' Mr. Hutchinson said, except for a few liberal constitutional law professors..."	Didn't want anything to do with fiery intellectual debates; didn't really like his colleagues, all of whom no doubt published stuff.
"Because he never fully engaged, Mr. Obama “doesn’t have the slightest sense of where folks like me are coming from,” Mr. Epstein said. “He was a successful teacher and an absentee tenant on the other issues.”	He didn't really care about his "fellows" with whom he had a 12-year professional relationship, has no real empathy
"Soon after, the faculty saw an opening and made him its best offer yet: Tenure upon hiring. A handsome salary, more than the $60,000 he was making in the State Senate or the $60,000 he earned teaching part time. A job for Michelle Obama directing the legal clinic. Your political career is dead, Daniel Fischel, then the dean, said he told Mr. Obama, gently. Mr. Obama turned the offer down. Two years later, he decided to run for the Senate. He canceled his course load and has not taught since."	No sense of allegiance to these particular people. This is the University of Chicago we are talking about, home of the neo-conservative movement.
"Mr. Obama told his class, wondering aloud what had happened to the art of political oratory. In particular, Mr. Obama admired (Frederick) Douglass’s use of a collective voice that embraced black and white concerns, one that Mr. Obama has now adopted himself."	Recognized the power of verbal persuasion.
"So even some former students who are thrilled at Mr. Obama’s success wince when they hear him speaking like the politician he has so fully become. 'When you hear him talking about issues, it’s at a level so much simpler than the one he’s capable of,' Mr. Rodriguez said. “He was a lot more fun to listen to back then.”	He is pandering to the simple center, positioning himself as do ordinary politicians.

Taken separately, those quotes and responses seem innocuous enough, but reading down the string of notes in the column on the right (my responses) makes me a little nauseous. It doesn't profile Obama as an appealing character. (Is this the Times reporting? My own bias?) To the contrary, it profiles someone with a deflector's personality who has taken a calculated path toward a goal he has long coveted.

That doesn't make Barack Obama all that different from other "career politicians," but then again that is part of the creep quotient.

What exactly Obama wants, beyond attainment of the highest office in the land, is not clear to me either from his legislative record or his campaign rhetoric.

In fact, Obama's lack of any real intellectual rigour, beyond pitting adoring students against each other as part of his learning experience, seems telling. Obama has not been a good debater, just a reflective force. He doesn't win points, he stays calm, and that is what people notice and remember. Maybe in a world of followers he has learned to lead through simplicity. He doesn't give anyone too much to think about. He speaks not in grand visions but in broad themes. And he represents with a cultish zeal, conjuring up a metrosexual symbol for a new generation of change.

Among the many things about him that vex me: Have you ever noticed that the only time he seems to break into a grin is when he is saying something to undermine someone who has criticized him? Or to deflect?

What makes me most queasy about Barack Obama is that we have seen this guy a hundred times before, from the political intrigues of the Egyptian Pharoahs through the Greek and Roman Senates to the 110th United States Congress. He is the one who emerges from the dark corners of the hall, trying to simultaneously blend in and stand out. There is that innate duplicity in his behavior.

You recognize a shadowy, undefineable presence in Barack Obama.

You recognize a certain kind.

For better or worse, his mission seems to be to tear apart that which has been made, and rebuild it to his schemata¹.

He is the one renouncing the status quo and promising change, exact nature uncertain. - RAR

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¹From Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary

Main Entry: sche·ma
Pronunciation: \'skē-mə\
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural sche·ma·ta \-mə-tə\ also schemas
Etymology: Greek schēmat-, schēma
Date: circa 1890
1: a diagrammatic presentation; broadly : a structured framework or plan : outline
2: a mental codification of experience that includes a particular organized way of perceiving cognitively and responding to a complex situation or set of stimuli

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Published July 25, 2008ar

President of the Subconscious

There were a number of positive signs coming out of Barack Obama's recent tour of Europe and Iraq; a tour he was goaded into by John McCain, who conversely suffered one of his most excruciating weeks of his campaign, and the signs there are not good.

Most positive for Obama was the open embrace he got from leaders such as French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Jordanian King Abdallah* (who personally chauffeured Obama from his palace to the Amman airport), and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. He just got a Foreign Minister in Germany.

Obama, of course, was using this trip to build his foreign policy credentials and exploit photo opportunities in which he could look presidential on the international stage.

Obama does this type of thing well and one can take great hope in the probability that his election to President would allow the U.S. to begin to rebuild its standing in the world, decimated by the hubris and incompetence of the Bush Administration. Obama is our best hope for capitalizing on the United States' best international playing card, which is that the majority of the world's citizens don't really hate Americans or the United States, they hate our wrong-headed leaders. Obama seems, at least by comparison to Bush and company, to represent a turn in the right direction.

That said, who Barack Obama himself must think he is remains a complete mystery to me. Little by little, I think it is appearing more and more that way to others, as well. The polls are not really moving in his direction, as predicted. He can't "make the sale" in the middle American states, goes the refrain. He was expected to get a big bump after finally wrapping up the Democratic nomination, but that didn't happen. That he is in a virtual tie with John McCain, who is certainly the least gifted candidate the Republicans have fielded since Bob Dole, is intriguing. John McCain seems wrong on every issue. I take that back, he is at least thinking on immigration policy. On balance, however, he is just wrong headed. Worse yet, he either can't see his "wrongness" himself (which should be disqualifying) or won't admit it (which also should be disqualifying). This must be what the Obamans mean when they talk about "a third Bush term" with McCain, which is to say stubborn allegiance to failed policy.

But McCain is still in the race! It seems impossible given polls indicating that 8 in 10 Americans believe the United States is headed in the wrong direction (NPR reported May 15, 2008, Morning Edition).

Independents are not yet embracing Barack Obama, nor are certain supporters of Hillary Clinton, myself included. Where his admirers see a supremely cool and confident young guy with new ideas, fence sitters see a guy who talks in bromides and they wonder if it isn't because there really isn't much to him. He does issue policy statements and detail his ideas to some extent, and yet they don't seem to stick in the public mind. What sticks is his salesmanship of unspecified Change, with a capital "C." Obama's surrogates can't even seem to hammer through their candidates policy objectives beyond that.

"Change" would typically be a tough sell, except in this environment of American dissatisfaction. That is the wave Obama has been riding, though always a little low of the crest. His appeal is to the subconscious, the sense that there may be hope for us all if he is elected, but so far he has been on more of a boogie board than the platform of a full 8-footer.

McCain, the "Centrum Silver Surfer" in this scenario, seems to be riding the core Republican revulsion to the Democratic candidate - wouldn't make any difference which one - and a public legend, nurtured over time, of his American Hero story. I am fairly certain that McCain will soon wipe out altogether, probably in dramatic fashion around Halloween. Even if he doesn't fall off a stage or do something Bob Dole style, exposure to his bumbling grandfatherly ways will eventually convince the voting public that he is too feeble to be Commander In Chief.

That brings us back to the festering American subconscious and the desire for change.

Norman Vincent Peale famously said "Change your thoughts and you change your world," and I suspect this promise of reawakening or rebirth is at the core of what Barack Obama touches in people. Personally, I find his pastor-like drone and his air of superior consciousness to be kind of creepy. It is the ethereal drift of his vision, and that arrogance that makes Jessie Jackson want to sever Obama's nuts.

What Obama has tapped into may be no deeper than Pop Culture, which would explain his appeal to people who don't typically follow government and politics closely, and to politicos who in him see a coat tail they can exploit to their own ends. Or it may be something more.

This brings me back to that "creepy" thing.

In Germany, 200,000 people turned out to see the photo op staged by this U.S. political neophyte who needed something to make him look like a world figure. In this crafted moment, which in staging came with obvious comparison's to JFK's "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech in Germany almost a half century ago, Barack Obama delivered his campaign stump speech. He changed the references, so that instead of speaking to Iowans or Texans he was speaking to the citizens of the world, but essentially he gave them his canned address.

CNN's Candy Crowley is currently drawing the ire of Obama bloggers for reporting "nothing new here" on the speech, and also reporting that the German audience walked away wondering what all the fuss had been about. And yet Obama was able to turn out a crowd of a size available only to the world's biggest rock stars.

There is definitely something going on with Obama. He clearly represents promise to internationals, urgently desiring to re-connect with a rational America. And he connects with the subconscious of this first-time voter generation, with his natural constituency, with a segment of guilt-ridden white America, and with influential media figures. With them the perceptions of Obama seem distorted, his nebulousness less of an issue. They are enthralled, under his spell. He reaches them somehow and gets in their heads.

Somehow Obama is running his race in a largely subconscious landscape of associations and triggers, and coupled with shrewd political manipulation it is working well enough to make him the odds on favorite to become the next president.

For me, however, something about Obama makes me want to keep my distance; something I sense in his nature. He is too self-assured for what he has accomplished, too dependent upon his silver tongue. He sallies in argument with demeanor, not return fire, undermining any challenge with a dismissive disregard. He practices the verbal tactics of no less a deceiver than Dick Cheney, using the same under the radar drone, the sleep inducing calm that convinced voters in 2000 that however big a screw up George W. Bush might prove to be, at least Dick Cheney was there as someone the nation could count on.

America opted for change in 2000, at least in numbers great enough to throw the election to the Supreme Court. It was, ironically, a change away from the direction of the Clinton Administration, and the resultant two Bush terms have been devastating to this country.

Opening the door to "change" when you don't know what is on the other side is unsettling. Is it Pandora's box or the Arc of the Covenant? We don't know and we don't know that Obama knows either. There is just this invisible force moving him forward, right out of America and into the world at large.

One senses that Obama may be "the one," but "the one" what?

I don't know. I can't seem to decipher what it is he is saying. I just feel his pull. - RAR

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* U.S. State Department spelling of "Abdallah." Most media spell it "Abdullah."

Let's Have Some Coffee, Drink a Beer, Shoot Some Hoops

In so many ways, Barack Obama is another George W. Bush. Obama is an apparently shrewd political operator. He took the nomination from Hillary Clinton by out maneuvering and out managing her campaign, piling up little wins in caucus states and big delegate numbers in states with high percentages of black voters, and won support based on little more than an appealing presence, much as Bush did in 2000 and 2004. Also like Bush, Obama is good at gauging the public sentiment and leveraging it. "W" put himself in a position to "beat" two Democratic patrician candidates by being the more approachable figure, the guy people felt more comfortable with. They could relate to Bush, even to his bumbling ways because we all screw up our words sometimes and fail to articulate our thoughts, but it doesn't mean we are wrong, and people didn't imagine Bush was really wrong either. On the other hand, Gore and Kerry may have been "right" in some ways, maybe more "right" than Bush, but they were so damned annoying!

The American lunch bucket voter will not reward someone they perceive as already having gotten all the best breaks. Think about it. Democrats vote for humble Governor types like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Republicans vote for "losers," i.e., guys who have tried for the nomination and failed, like Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush Sr.

Obama has been this cycle's George W. Bush to Hillary Clinton's Gore and Kerry. He has won the "likeability" mantle on the Democratic side, though "likeability" may also explain why he is having trouble shaking the inept Senator McCain. Wrong on every issue, John McCain has the ability to go on "Saturday Night Live" and portray funny, self-effacing characters. He is sort of adorably clumsy in his mannerisms. And he walks around with this personal legend behind him, the war experience, that people accept as legitimate evidence of character. One can kind of imagine going up and shaking the hand of either, and finding in that grip some reason to sincerely encourage these two men. They both represent, in largely ethereal ways, some hardship story, respect for which is hard-wired into the American psychological makeup. - RAR

Published July 25, 2008arFirst Appeared in the July 25, 2008 Edition

John McCain's Wild Ride

In 1967, Lieutenant Commander John McCain, a naval aviator and son of an Admiral of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, was seated in the cockpit of an A-4 Skyhawk on the flight deck of the supercarrier USS Forrestal. The ship was situated in the Gulf of Tonkin serving as launch deck for the planes of Attack Carrier Air Wing 17, flying against targets in North Vietnam. On the fourth day of the assault, while flight crews were preparing aircraft on deck, a rocket somehow fired, striking an adjacent aircraft and setting off a chain reaction that led to flaming fuel washing over the flight deck. McCain scrambled from his plane as it burst into flames. While trying to pull another pilot to safety, a bomb exploded and McCain was injured by shrapnel from the blast. The fire blazed for 24 hours before it was brought under control. When it was over 134 sailors were dead.

That was in July of what was a pivotal year for the 1958 Naval Academy Graduate. He healed from his injuries, got himself reassigned to another supercarrier, and resumed flying missions against North Vietnamese positions until October of that year when he was shot down over Hanoi. He parachuted into a lake, both arms and a leg fractured, and nearly drowned before being pulled from the water. A crowd is said to have descended upon him, breaking his shoulder with a rifle butt, and he was bayonetted before being hauled away to the Hanoi Hilton.

What happened there in those first days is disputed. Some accounts say that McCain was denied care for his injuries, and was instead beaten and interrogated. The New York Times and the Washington Post gave McCain's capture front page coverage. McCain was moved to a hospital where he received what some reported as "marginal care."

Whatever transpired, in this short, nightmarish period, McCain's hair turned white.

He was moved in fragile condition to another prison camp, where he was put in a cell with two other Americans, neither of whom expected that McCain would live through the week. McCain pulled through, but only to be moved into solitary confinement in March of 1968. There he stayed for two years.

McCain's story moves from horror to heroism with his refusal to accept an offer of early release that he knew would be used as a propaganda victory for the North Vietnamese. They wanted to use young McCain as an example of the favoritism supposedly shown by the U.S. government toward members of its privileged elite. McCain, they would argue, son of the Admiral who by this time had taken over command of all U.S. forces in the Viet Nam Theater, was one such coddled American whose special privilege was that his government would shield him from the treatment meted out to "regular" POWs. When McCain refused them their victory they initiated a campaign of brutality against him that was systematic and purposeful. They bound him with ropes and beat him every two hours until finally extracting a "confession" statement from him. The beatings continued, two to three times a week, for the remainder of his imprisonment as his captors chafed over their inability to get him to sign additional statements.

By the time it was over, in 1973 when McCain was released, he could no longer raise his arms above his head.

McCain returned home to further challenges. While he was imprisoned, his first wife Carol, a model from Philadelphia, had been in an automobile accident that had left her with severe physical challenges and ongoing medical expenses. McCain threw himself into his career, graduated from the National War College at Fort McNair, Washington, D.C., had his flight status reinstated in 1974, and was awarded a Meritorious Unit Commendation for his command of a training squadron stationed in Florida.

McCain had been through hell, survived and even thrived. He was still only 38 years old and married to a disabled woman whose time together in their marriage had been riven by his experience of war. Perhaps it is understandable that John McCain began to have extramarital affairs that would eventually doom his first marriage.

In fact, McCain's broader seduction moved into full swing in 1977 when he was introduced to Washington D.C. politics during a stint as the Navy's liaison to the U.S. Senate. By all accounts, McCain loved the trappings of the upper chamber and felt he had found a new career.

In 1979 he began dating Cindy Lou Hensley, a teacher and heiress to a liquor distributorship fortune. He received an amicable divorce from his first wife in 1980, and that same year, with Senators Gary Hart and William Cohen (Democrat and Republican respectively) standing up for him, he married "Cindy McCain." Cindy McCain is famously wealthy, her money protected by a prenuptial agreement and a practice of filing separate tax returns from those of her husband.

McCain retired from the Navy in 1981, as a Captain, turning up a shot at Rear Admiral. He had earned seventeen military awards and decorations including the Silver Star, Legion of Merit, Distinguished Flying Cross, Bronze Star and Navy Commendation Medal, and he retired with a disability pension. He moved to Arizona and took a job as Vice President of Public Relations at his father-in-law's firm. This introduced him to powerful Arizona business interests, including banker Charles Keating, Jr., who would soon enough figure in McCain's near fall from grace (read on).

McCain won a seat in the United States House of Representatives and served two terms, 1982-1986, which featured his much publicized vote against recognition, in Arizona, of Martin Luther King Day. He later called that a mistake. In those early years, McCain, a newcomer to Arizona, was called a "carpetbagger" for re-establishing his residence to run for an open House seat (1st Congressional District).

In 1986 McCain sought and won the Senate seat vacated by the retiring Barry Goldwater and he became a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, with which he had formerly done his Navy liaison work. He also joined the Commerce Committee and the Indian Affairs Committee, and he was a primary author of the 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act. His other passion was passage of the Gramm-Rudman legislation that enforced automatic spending cuts in the case of budget deficits.

McCain had an Obama moment at the 1988 Republican National Convention, where he gave a well received speech that put him on the short list as a possible vice-presidential running mate for George H. W. Bush. Bush Sr. famously chose the irredeemable Dan Quayle for the V.P. slot and McCain was left as chairman of "Veterans for Bush."

McCain's political career was nearly destroyed by his association with the "Keating Five," i.e., five United States Senators who received unlawful political contributions from Charles Keating, Jr. and his partners in the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association. McCain was among those senators whom Keating and his associates contacted in an effort to head off the government's seizure of the lending institution. McCain was cleared of wrong doing and went on to win re-election to his Senate seat in 1992.

The McCain family was honored by the 1992 christening of the USS John S. McCain. Senator McCain's full name is John Sidney McCain III. As was stated earlier, the two J.S. McCain's who preceded him were both Navy Admirals.

McCain's Senate record has included:

n Member of the 1991–1993 Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, chaired by Democrat and fellow Vietnam War veteran John Kerry, McCain investigated the fate of U.S. service personnel listed as missing in action during the Vietnam War. The committee's unanimous report stated there was "no compelling evidence that proves that any American remains alive in captivity in Southeast Asia."
n Instrumental in the 1995 normalization of diplomatic relations with Vietnam.
n Voted to confirm the following Supreme Court nominees: Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas.
n Has made campaign reform his signature issue. Worked with Democratic Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold to pass the McCain-Feingold bill that put limits on "soft money" contributions. This is partly where McCain gained his "Maverick" image, as his reforms were opposed by interests in both parties.
n McCain supported the Line Item Veto Act of 1996 that was central to his campaign against "pork barrel spending." In 1998 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the act unconstitutional.
n McCain was considered for the VP slot on the Dole ticket of 1996. He didn't end up the nominee, but in 1997 Time magazine named McCain one of the "25 Most Influential People in America".
n In 1997, "McCain became chairman of the powerful Senate Commerce Committee; he was criticized for accepting funds from corporations and businesses under the committee's purview, but in response said the restricted contributions he received were not part of the big-money nature of the campaign finance problem" (Wikipedia).
n 1999, McCain and Feingold shared a Profile in Courage Award for their work in campaign finance reform. McCain's Faith of My Fathers memoir became a best-seller.

Even given the above-stated legislative record, there is a feeling that John McCain didn't really become a major player in the Senate until he returned defeated from his run for the Republican nomination for President in 2000. That raised his profile to that of a national figure and gave him name recognition (at 97 percent in polls held during the 2008 election cycle).

Since returning to the Senate following his first run for president, McCain has performed as follows:

n Broke with the Bush administration on HMO reform, climate change, and gun legislation.
n Was one of only two Senate Republicans to vote against the Bush tax cuts.
n Supported Bush on the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan.
n Co-sponsored with Senator Joe Lieberman the legislation that created the 9/11 Commission.
n Co-sponsored with Senator Fritz Hollings the Aviation and Transportation Security Act that federalized airport security.
n Got McCain-Feingold passed in both Houses of Congress and signed into law by President Bush.
n Supported U.S. action against Iraq as a response to "a clear and present danger to the United States of America" and voted for the Iraq War Resolution in October 2002. He wrongly predicted that U.S. forces in Iraq would be treated as liberators and later turned against Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for not providing sufficient numbers of troops to the Iraq theater.
n McCain voted against the second round of Bush tax cuts, saying it was unwise at a time of war.
n Co-sponsored with Senator Joe Lieberman the doomed-to-defeat Climate Stewardship Act that would have introduced a cap and trade system aimed at returning greenhouse gas emissions to 2000 levels. Later reintroduced a version of the act with the co-sponsorship of Barack Obama. It also has not passed.
n Was considered for the VP slot on John Kerry's Democratic ticket in 2004, but ended up defending Kerry's war record but campaigning for George W. Bush. In 2004, McCain had the best favorable-to-unfavorable rating (55 percent to 19 percent) of any national politician.
n Cast Supreme Court confirmation votes in favor of John Roberts and Samuel Alito, calling them "two of the finest justices ever appointed to the United States Supreme Court."
n Working with Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy on comprehensive immigration reform to include legalization, guest worker programs, and border enforcement components. Characterized as an "amnesty" program, the bill has failed two times to gain Senate passage.
n As Chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee helped expose the Jack Abramoff Indian lobbying scandal, though has proposed amendments to the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act that would limit creation of off-reservation casinos,[82] as well as tribes moving across state lines to build casinos.
n Clashed with Bush Administration over his McCain Detainee Amendment to the Defense Appropriations bill for 2005 that prohibited inhumane treatment of prisoners, including prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, by confining military interrogations to the techniques in the U.S. Army Field Manual on Interrogation.

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With some exceptions, it is pretty hard, from the viewpoint of a Democrat, to say much bad about John McCain's record, though as the presumptive nominee of the Republican party in the 2008 election cycle he has exhibited some disturbing tendencies; behaviors that remind people of the thing that has always been at the heart of feelings about his character - his five years as a POW in Viet Nam.

McCain is in the odd position of having his story work both for and against him, giving his supporters ample evidence of his remarkable character, and his detractors ample explanation for why to them he is so damned crazy!

He has been amazingly wrong in his analysis of the situation in Iraq, including his current campaign line about the effectiveness of "the surge" strategy that he supported and that Barack Obama didn't. Here is an instance where the War College graduate has been out-flanked by the neophyte, all because of McCain's insistence upon clinging to a campaign line that doesn't really hold weight. Violence in Iraq has abated and no doubt "the surge" has played a part in that, but more deterministic has been "the awakening," which put Sunni fighters in the pockets of the U.S. occupation forces, and the cease fire of the Mahdi Army and the probably unanticipated dilution of the influence of its leader Muqtada al-Sadr.

Running a national campaign forces people into odd policy positions, and the ones McCain has staked out are the ones he must to satisfy the majority of the Republican base, which he so desperately needs. He is going to talk tough on foreign policy and chase Osama Bin Laden (remember him?) to the Gates of Hell. He is going to confuse many in his party with his "Straight Talk Express" that conjures up his Maverick reputation from the past while in 2008 he essentially exhibits adherence to the party line.

My sense is that McCain is essentially an honorable mess; a guy who "did hard time" and was owed a little something for his service, which he found payment for in the corridors of the Washington D.C. power establishment. He got his kicks, then finally got serious and championed some worthy causes.

McCain, to me, comes across as a conflicted individual who is undermined by at least some perception out there in the voting public that he is probably not psychologically up to the job of leading the free world.

My further sense is that McCain probably wouldn't screw things up any worse than they are now. And who knows, if he somehow pulled his faculties together and showed some of that old Maverick nature, he might even do some good. - RAR

First Appeared in the June 1, 2008 Edition

It is a Good Year to Be An Independent

Making Fangs Work

My wife has been a staunch supporter of Sen. Hillary Clinton for a long time, but Tuesday night, on the last night of this election cycle’s presidential primary season, she broke rank – spiritually.

She didn’t like the way Hillary behaved in her “non-concession” speech, that she didn’t praise Barack Obama the way he has, of late, been praising her. My wife finds Obama shallow and ambitious, a deplorable tandem, but she thought Hillary’s performance that night revealed something about her candidate that she didn’t like. “Hillary showed her fangs,” I heard her comment in phone conversation with a girl friend, another Hillary supporter. She wasn’t gracious, which even other women expect a woman to be. Ironic, isn’t it? To them Hillary seemed like the proverbial, i.e., “bitch.”

After what, in many ways, has been a 7-year long campaign to become President of the United States of America via a Senate seat in an adopted state, their hopes of having a “First Woman President” in Hillary Clinton were dashed by an ill-conceived primary system and a cultural phenomenon represented in a person and a public attitude.

They were dashed by an upstart junior senator who had “cut in line” ahead of Hillary on the strength of a casual way with words and sheer audacity, and my wife and her friends, like other Clinton supporters, found that galling. That he benefited from a long-germinating seed of political correctness that insulated him from criticism was to them infuriating. That he behaved better than her once he had rested the mantle of “presumptive nominee” from her was for them disheartening.

That Hillary got better and better at detailing her prescription for change, consistently winning the important swing state primaries, and yet was shedding “Super Delegate” potentials like dandruff flakes was…well, the story of the campaign season.

Why did the Democratic party leaders, many of whom were beholden to former President Bill Clinton for his strength in standing up to the onslaught of the Republican Revolution (1994’s Contract With America) and reinventing the Democratic party in a way that allowed it to remain viable and at least a little true to its core values, abandon the Clintons?

My sense is, they abandoned the Clintons – and I find it impossible to think of Hillary as a lone Clinton , another irony given their public image as a distant couple – to get aboard what they perceive as a wave in the form of Barack Obama. Obama, the party leaders decided, had the energy and style to ensure a voting block of energized black and young voters for years to come, much as Reagan had reinvigorated the Republican Party with his election in 1980.

Hillary, it seemed in retrospect, was never going to do that. The Clinton ’s time was in the 1990s and they did as much as they could hope to do, which was hold the line in terms of America ’s commitment to domestic security. They were not really change agents when they had the chance to be, because history was not on their side.

History, the party leaders have reasoned, is on young Barack Obama’s side.

Whether or not this turns out to be true will be witnessed in stages if he defeats McCain to become President. Election to the office would be historic, of course, but what we could expect after that is anyone’s guess. Like many Hillary Clinton supporters, I don’t believe that Barack Obama is a fully formed leader or visionary, but rather a marginally charismatic avatar of unspecified change. If elected, he will have a friendly Congress to work with and will be given a honeymoon period. Maybe the hope is that Congress will advance landmark legislation that Obama can promote and sign into law and in that way expand his legacy beyond being a “first.”

But what of Hillary Clinton? Has she “shown her fangs” in a way so disappointing that it has damaged her legacy? Can she go back and be a junior senator and continue to be an important figure in the Democratic Party? Can she become a Supreme Court Justice, as some have suggested?

I am guessing much depends upon her speech Saturday to her supporters, her belated concession. She can probably reverse the negatives coming out of Tuesday night with the kind of grace in defeat that losing Democrats Gore and Kerry did way too well. (What is it with Democrats that they can’t make a compelling and eloquent argument for anything other than their own concessions?)

I hope Hillary isn’t hoping to become number two on the Obama ticket, because that isn’t going to happen. For her to try to force her way on to the ticket would only further diminish her, which is a shame.

I continue to feel that in Hillary Clinton, the U.S. has a transformative figure along the lines of Hillary’s idol Eleanor Roosevelt. But the real change that may have taken place had she gotten her shot may always have been a chimera given the party leaderships’ apparent distaste for Hillary and Bill that has become apparent with Obama’s ascension to the throne.

My sense is that the Democratic Party has become a shell of a party, not really championing anything other than election and re-election and holding on. Maybe Obama will generate ideas that will change that. His more likely legacy is as an ambassador to the world, a fresh face of the U.S. , and in that role he can probably be really effective.

Personally, I would like to see Hillary jettison the entire Democratic Party and carry on an independent run for the office. She has the strongest platform of the three candidates and could capture the middle ground vote. She wins the female vote, sucking the air out of the Obama ticket, and the independent vote, stealing McCain's only chance at the office. She out performs both in debates. In a three way race, I think Hillary, who captured 50 percent of the Democratic primary votes, wins the key states of Ohio , Florida , Pennsylvania , Texas , possibly Michigan . She holds the big coastal states and in doing so could pull off real change, i.e., destroying the lock the two major parties have had on U.S. politics for most of the last century. That is the only thing that is going to bring about any real revolution in American politics, and Hillary, if she recognizes it, still has a chance to effect the most powerful change of all, which is change from the "middle" of the political spectrum.

Were that to be the crux of her speech planned for Saturday night, then suddenly the fangs of Tuesday are attractive things that need never be retracted. What they need is purpose beyond resentment. I don’t see her getting that opening any longer within the turncoat Democratic Party.

On the other hand, the one signal that has been sent consistently throughout this campaign season is that it is a great year to be an Independent. Just ask Lou Dobbs. - RAR

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RAR entertaining the "troops" at an impromptu MoveOn.Org rally in Benicia, CA (Jan. 11, 2007) against Bush Administration plans to escalate the "war" in Iraq.

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From the April 12, 2008 Edition of RARWRITER.com

CHRONICLES OF CHAOS: Is America’s moment of elevation turning to glass?

Are you getting a creepy feeling about where the Democratic Party’s laboratory experiment in democracy is taking us? That in creating a system of primaries dedicated to the purity of proportional representation that they have put a lacerating laser light on the party’s make up and heated it to glass halves? And that each of these fragile pieces are but a minority subset of America ’s whole, neither any larger than that other piece of the pie that is John McCain and the Republicans?

“John McCain” is actually a subset of “Republicans,” but that is part of what makes this situation so interesting. Republicans are “winner take all” and the pox on proportional representation type of folks. They are masters of simplification, and they have simplified their early nomination process to the point where old John is already old news and now feels he must wander around reintroducing himself while the Democrats continue internecine warfare for their Party’s nomination. McCain is polling less than 50 percent in his own Party more than a month after his last best rival, dinosaur rider and bass player Mike Huckabee, finally stepped aside. And yet do you sense he could win this thing?

I do. And it doesn’t have anything to do with my contempt for the Democrats’ nominating system, though I have problems with the whole primary and caucus process.

I have been surprised by the legs under the Barack Obama phenomenon. He seems way over his head to me, but as his momentum has grown so has my fear that by the time his callowness is revealed that he will have the Democratic nomination wrapped up. That may yet be the case, and certainly already would have been the case had the Democratic Party not been so “democratic.”

Obama’s statement on the motivations of small town America, while not really of jaw dropping magnitude or even really very offensive, is another ripple in the pond of indications about Obama. He doesn’t really know what he is talking about. I did a good part of my growing up with small town people in Kansas , and I live in a small town now, albeit an atypical one. The people Obama was describing are not the people I know at all.

People in rural communities are not really bitter, in my experience. In fact, my amazement with them has always been how extraordinarily self-righteous and self-assured they are. In their relative isolation, which is being obliterated by the digital age, they often view themselves as living at a fortunate distance from the rest of the world and its misplaced priorities and weird obsessions. These people are not dependently clinging to their guns and their religions; they are just carrying on the traditions of their kind, which to them are part of the fabric that makes them superior to their counterparts in the big cities. I think they feel lucky.

The “bitter” people Obama is talking about may be those in his own limited experience, the inner city people he did outreach for 20 years ago, and from that he is projecting. That is the problem with this guy, his projections.

Obama projects change on a population of young voters who are at vulnerable places in their lives and want to believe in something for the future beyond the dreary sameness their parents have accepted life to be.
He projects empowerment to the black community, who were slow to buy his line, but have come to see him as their deliverer.
He projects promise to the Democratic Party leadership, who have started to see him as key to locking up this young generation of voters and the black community for generations to come, reorganizing those parts of their Party’s natural base.
He projects something to male voters, but I haven’t figured out what it is yet. (When he said recently that he thought he “could take” George Bush in a basketball game, I didn’t really believe him. I doubt the rail thin Obama can post up. He seems like purely a perimeter guy.)
And in a weird way, he projects redemption on minority segments of white voters who would really like to be able to feel that they could support a black man for president. Interesting to me is that these are not necessarily the same people who feel inclined to support a woman for the office.

But here is where it turns to glass.

Barack Obama is going to implode and with him are going to go the hopes of a certain percentage of the Democratic base.

If he implodes this week, following his extraordinary misstep regarding “bitter” people, the beneficiary will be Hillary Clinton, who could build momentum insufficient to capture the nomination but way sufficient to puncturing the Obama myth. In that case, Obama limps into the general election watching some unknown percentage of the Hillary vote slip away to the maverick McCain, who on many issues is close enough to being a Democrat to gain him crossover voters.

Or, if Obama’s implosion is really big, maybe Hillary wins by margins sufficient to edge her ahead in the total popular vote and thereby buy herself some favor with undecided Super Delegates. But what happens to the black vote at the core of the Democratic base if their favorite son Obama doesn’t get the nomination? I think the Clintons have somehow managed to alienate themselves from some of this part of what had always been their base, and they will see diminished numbers from that community in November if Hillary gets the nomination. Again, the beneficiary is John McCain.

If Obama implodes later in the year it could only be offset by some stunt on the part of the doddering McCain. That is really the wild card in this, is what gaffe will old John make that will be his own undoing, like Bob Dole falling off that stage late in the 1996 presidential election. That is who McCain strikes me as, this year’s Bob Dole. At least McCain hasn’t been stupid enough to give us his Senate job. He is still probably a few years away from peddling Viagra.

I sense that Barack Obama is only days away from inadvertently shattering one of those parts of the Democratic crystal.

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From the February 15, 2008 Edition of RARWRITER.com

If Hillary Can't Puncture the Obama Balloon, Does She Have What It Takes to Be President?

While I believe Hillary Clinton has done a far better job of being a presidential candidate than I would have imagined she would, there are holes in her performance that make me wonder about her potential as a world leader.

In Barack Obama, she has a Teflon rival, one who is casually skilled at deflecting questions and criticisms. He seems particularly immune to Hillary's calculations and prepared attack lines. A case in point comes from the debate in Texas on February 21, when Hillary allowed Obama the leeway to present himself with an attitude that made him seem plausibly presidential. Worse, he used Hillary's failed 1994 attempt to establish universal health care to negate any perception that Hillary has it all over him political expertise-wise. He blunted the "experience" issue.

Or, more to the point, she fumbled the experience issue.

Hillary needs to let people know what happened with health care reform in 1994. Then, as a 46-year old idealist, Hillary and husband Bill made critical missteps that torpedoed their good intentions. They decided they would achieve sweeping change in Washington D.C. by virtue of their own cleverness and willpower. They determined to use public sentiment to bludgeon the health insurance industry and replace their for-profit schemes with a national single-payer system similar to those "socialized medicine" models in place in most other advanced nations.

Bill and Hillary, it turned out, didn't understand some fundamental things about how Washington D.C. policy making works. And Hillary had been around these legislative processes since the Nixon administration, when she worked on the impeachment inquiry staff advising the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives. That was 20 years before the '94 health care initiative, and she was fully engaged in law, public service and politics, presumably growing her knowledge and expertise in those areas all along the way. And yet, she bombed on the important health care endeavor because she failed to understand and respect the political culture of Washington. She bungled the planning, which was handled as if she was secretly plotting a coup, and she completely mishandled the presentation of her proposal.

Hillary, in 1994, was the age Barack Obama is now.

Even with all the experience she had previously in Washington D.C., which is far more than Obama has now, she just wasn't ready.

Barack Obama isn't as prepared to affect change in Washington D.C. in 2008 has Hillary was in 1994.

Hillary is 60 now, with 14 more years of deep Washington experience. And one suspects that now she is ready. She dedicated 8 years to the United States Senate, which was a calculated decision to get herself to this point of readiness.

If Obama is truly dedicated to the big picture, to the long-term betterment of the United States of America, what would be so wrong with him first getting the experience, and establishing the skills he needs, to be a "transformative" figure? His too-early decision to contest for the Democratic nomination bespeaks the personal ambition of a young fool. What would be so wrong with Obama doing the work, paying the dues, and preparing himself for a run eight years from now, when he'll still only be 54 years old.

That age of 54, by the way, is the age George W. Bush was when he assumed the presidency. There was a guy who had been around national politics his entire life, and even had the experience of "running" an administration (Texas governorship). Even "Dubya" had better credentials than does Barack Obama, though in retrospect Bush Jr. was clearly never going to be ready.

Obama's answer is that he sees "the process of change" differently.

My first rule of political perception is "Beware leaders who first seek to re-define the world we know to exist." It signals that their plans will work only if we adopt an entirely new paradigm, a new reality, and that we embrace this change. It is this thinking that George W. Bush, with his Cheney-Rumsfeld coalition, brought to Washington D.C., and it doesn't work. It locks us into a brain freeze while we try to reconcile our experiential truth with the alternative truth being promoted by someone seeking to skew perception to his advantage.

In our high tech world of inputs and outputs, the output of re-definition initiatives is BULLSHIT.

If Barack Obama's cult celebrity carries him to the White House, are we all going to have to live through yet another leadership debacle while another Washington D.C. neophyte, whose main skill is that he taps U.S. voter needs to associate with their president on some personal identity level, fails to deliver on his well-intentioned promises?

I think America was at a critical "Y" in the road in 2000 and the country turned wrong. Eight years later the path before us is winding and rutted and the situation has turned critical. We simply cannot afford the luxury of another arrogant young lion at the nation's helm.

So why can't Hillary seem to make that case? And what does the fact that she can't make that case say about her?-RAR

Sick of Obama Yet?

Barack Obama and the Making of that "Fairy Tale"

Several weeks ago, in January 2008, while supporting his wife Hillary's campaign in the South Carolina primary, former President Bill Clinton caused big trouble for his wife's campaign by describing as "a fairy tale" Sen. Barack Obama's description of his prescient vote against Bush's appropriation request for the funds that would eventually be used for the Iraq War. That same criticism became a "race card" statement when Bill Clinton also likened Obama's South Carolina primary win to Jessie Jackson's win in that state in '84. (Jackson also won a South Carolina caucus in 1988.) Bill Clinton was almost universally chastised for his statements, and he was uncharacteristically chastened as a result, retreating to a milder, less precise version of his thoughtful and more amiable self. Unfortunately, the damage to Hillary's campaign has been in the form of near total erosion of the number of black voters who once formed part of her base. Blacks are now voting for Obama over Clinton by a margin of 8 to 1.

Something worries me about this and it has to do with the "neuro-transmitter" relationship that the press has with the "body politic," the rank and file voter. That circuitry has been known to be compromised by the introduction of viral strains, and it was inevitable that Americans' feelings about "race" would surface as the most aggressive of those.

Voter profiles from the primaries and caucuses to date indicate that race trumps gender identification issues. That is the lift presently being felt beneath the wings of the Obama campaign, the wave of black voters rushing to his support now that he appears to be a legitimate contender.

It feels like recognition of that movement is driving the U.S. press corps to the sidelines, in its role as public Ombudsman, in much the same way that they were during the 2000 elections. It is an exile self-imposed by reason of sensitivity to the public's will.

In 2000, George W. Bush, campaigning on a platform slightly more specific than the one Obama is campaigning on this election season, seemed to be given a pass by the press. They didn't do much of anything to delve into his record, or even his resume. The toughest questions of that election year may have come from David Letterman, who talked a reluctant Bush onto his show and then asked if some of his policy ideas, like drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, weren't "just crazy."

All these years later the press corps, consisting largely of the same cast of characters still around from the 2000 cycle, is aware of the criticism of their performance that year, and yet they can't seem to help themselves.

They seem utterly incapable of reporting on the substance of the issues, instead focusing entirely on their analyses of "momentum" and voter exit polls. They are covering the campaign, while the world balances precariously on the edge over issues that will likely define the first half of the 21st Century.

A RECORD WORTH REPORTING: Part of the problem the press had covering the candidate Bush (in 2000) is the same problem they are presently having in covering Barack Obama, that being that there isn't a great deal of legislative record to look at.

In fact, Barack Obama's resume is remarkably thin. Writing as a person who competes for consultant opportunities in the competitive San Francisco market, I think a guy with nine years of "real world" work experience, split between four different career paths, may have a tough time getting hired to even a mid-level position in the Bay Area, particularly in a top law firm. Obama has a prestigious background differentiator in his time spent as editor of the Harvard Law Review, but even that is just academic work. Were he a guy just walking into an employment agency with that resume, a counselor would see that he has done some low level research, some community work, some legal. And then he has taught at the university level. Let's see, do we have anything in the $100,000 box?

Obama does have another dozen years of experience in elected office, mostly at the state level.

There are primarily two types who seek elected office: established leaders in the legal or business (and sometimes social and academic) communities, and persons for whom being an "elected official" is a career objective and a means of putting one's self on an equal footing with established leaders from such "esteemed" groups. Obama;s call to service comes from the latter category.

The Obama's of the world must hone skills specific to their political calling, which include communication, negotiation and compromise. They must serve their constituencies while establishing coalitions with powerful interests.

Obama's first three years in the Illinois legislature were unremarkable, save for his struggle to overcome a perception in the black community that he was strictly an Ivy League elite. But Obama was nothing if not ambitious. In 2000, against all counsel, he challenged for the seat of incumbent U.S. Representative Bobby Rush, a former Black Panther Party leader.

Obama got trounced. There was a sense in Chicago that Obama wasn't black enough, and following the Rush defeat he set out to address that image through outreach to the black churches in his district.

Things in the Illinois legislature did not go smoothly for the ambitious Obama, who gave himself a "black eye" over a controversial gun-control bill that was fiercely opposed by the National Rifle Association and the Republican majority leader of the state Senate. The legislation had been hammered out through tough negotiations between Democratic Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley and the Republican Governor George Ryan, but passage was going to be close and every vote was needed.

When the vote was called, Barack Obama was on vacation in Hawaii with his family. (Does this sound familiar? Crawford anyone?) Though Obama had supported the bill rhetorically, he refused to return to Chicago to cast a vote, saying his daughter was ill and he couldn't leave her side. The measure went down to defeat. The Chicago Tribune, noting that plenty of his fellow politicians had left sickbeds and vacations to do their civic duty, blasted him as "gutless."

In further point of fact, the "gutless" charge is also leveled at Obama for the large number of non-committal votes of "present" that he cast in the Illinois state house. He didn't come across as a stand up guy on this set of "tough" issues:

prohibiting "partial birth abortion"
reducing the crime of carrying a concealed weapon from a felony to a misdemeanor for first offenders, while raising the penalty of subsequent offenses
specifying mandatory adult prosecution for firing a gun on or near school grounds
protecting the privacy of sex-abuse victims by allowing petitions to have the trial records sealed
parental notification of a dependent minor's request to have an abortion
protection of a child surviving a failed abortion
prohibiting strip clubs and other adult establishments from being within 1,000 feet of schools, churches, and day care centers

Obama didn't vote for or against any of these.

He took the third option offered to legislators in the Illinois state house: he voted "Present."

The things that Obama did play a role in are also wrapped in enigma, an example being his involvement in the revival of the Chicago public school system. My teacher-wife had a conversation recently with a school administrator in California, a black woman who had worked in the Chicago schools. This lady had high praise for the turnaround of that public school system, and she stated flatly that "Obama did that." This sentiment is shared by the Chicago Teacher's Union, who recently endorsed Obama for President.

What the school administrator is referring to is Obama's support of Democrat Mayor Richard Daley's "Renaissance 2010" program, a controversial initiative launched in 1995 that gave the City the authority to privatize portions of the Chicago school system and relocate students as certain public schools were closed and then reopened as charter schools. This peculiarly "Republican privatization concept" has been reviled in some quarters as "corporate school reform" as promoted by educational theorists at the University of Chicago. These include Arne Duncan, who is an advisor to Obama's presidential campaign. Daley, Obama and those UC theorists have all been accused of having overly chummy associations with corporate interests.

The Chicago Teacher's Union endorsement is equally perverted in terms of the way liberal Democrats typically view teachers' unions. The Chicago teachers broke ranks with the Illinois Federation of Teachers, the state teacher's union, back in 2003 to endorse Obama for Senate. But Obama is a Hyde Park-Richard Daley man, and in the tradition of "Chicago politics" is not really seen as a friend of the union worker.

It may also be worth noting that Barack Obama sends his kids to private school, not one of the public schools he is credited with rebuilding.

Obama's primary claim to fame on the national stage is that when running for the Senate in 2002, he filled out a questionnaire for the Chicago Sun Times that indicated that he would not "have voted for the $87 billion supplemental appropriation for Iraq and Afghanistan" and made speeches to that effect from the stump. Hillary Clinton was among 29 Senate Democrats (of 50 total, at the time) who voted for H.J.Res. 114; Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002. (Click here for a recap of that vote. You'll note that Barack Obama endorser and 2004 Democratic Presidential Nominee John Kerry also famously voted "Yes" on the resolution.)

Obama wasn't even around to vote at the time of the initial resolution, but he has voted in lock-step with the Democrats in favor of additional Iraq appropriations since he has been in office. His claim that he was "right" in opposition to the Iraq War is probably correct, but like much of his record it is meaningless. This is what Bill Clinton described as "fairy tale." Obama wasn't faced with actually making a real-world decision, he just filled out a survey.

* * * * *

It has not been all that easy for me to educate myself to Barack Obama, and I think that is part of why the press also seems to be struggling so. If Obama has momentum that carries him into the White House, I would expect that to be better than having a Republican in residence there. And I can certainly appreciate the feeling within the black community for whom the election of a black president would be a tremendously uplifting historical event. It even has the potential of improving the United States' international image. But then again, so would the election of a woman President.

On the other hand, I suspect this early primary / caucus season, and this early nominating process, may work against us Democrats in Obama's case.

I worry that Obama may get enough delegates to capture the Democratic nomination just before people start to take a deeper look at who they have committed themselves to.

I fear that "buyers' remorse" will set in.

I suspect that John McCain will come across as significantly more seasoned than young Barack, whose rhetoric will start to sound a little pathetic, and somehow the Democrats will blow it again.

It will be just like us. Somehow the Republicans are canny enough to win with a puppet front man like George W. Bush while you sense that in Barack Obama we have a scarecrow who may well blow away with his own windy call for an unspecified change.-RAR

____________________________________________

2008 Election Fields - RAR Picks

From the January 1, 2008 Edition of RARWRITER.com From the November 15, 2007 Edition of RARWRITER.com

Is Help Finally Coming?

American Health Care and the 2008 Elections

Hendrick Hertzberg has an interesting opening "The Talk of the Town" piece in the October 1 edition of The New Yorker, in which he reports on the leading Democratic candidates' healthcare proposals.

Hertzberg, in writing about how Hillary Clinton is maneuvering to avoid the obstacles she encountered in her 1994 attempt at health care reform, points out that - "Every Democratic President since Harry Truman has been elected on a platform of national health insurance, and, in spite of public support for the idea by majorities as big as those in Europe, every one of them has failed to get it enacted." He goes on to talk about how insurance lobbyists impact the labyrinthine process of passing legislation in our system, which has effectively safeguarded the status quo, protecting private industry profits while maintaining America's standing as "the only advanced capitalist democracy on earth that does not guarantee health care to its citizens."

RAR Note: The subtext to the health care issue in this country is found in the Molly Secours story above, and it has to do in part with employer-provided health insurance coverage. The very concept of employer-provided coverage, as we all know, tends to force people into the wage pool "for the benefits," though the healthcare meltdown in progress is tied to employers covering less and less of the total costs of coverage, and more and more declining to offer coverage at all. Americans' actual earning power has stagnated and receded for years, as health insurance costs have eaten more and more of the available cash flow of employees and employers alike. And for "rebels" like Molly Secours, who have elected to live "outside the system" of standard employment, the healthcare system has simply opted out entirely through imposition of impossibly expensive private insurance premiums and refusal of coverage due to "pre-existing" conditions.

The Clinton, Obama and Edwards plans all provide a flexibility of choice that undermines one of the key Republican arguments against "government run" healthcare. The pillars to each of their plans are these:

Keep the insurance you have if you are happy with it
Choose from the menu of private plans offered to members of Congress
Choose to opt for a new public plan modeled on Medicare, with the option to buy special additional coverage out of your own post-tax income

Here are the kickers:

You cannot be blackballed or billed unaffordable premiums on account of "pre-existing conditions."
There is an "individual mandate" that says you must choose one of the above options and be covered, just as you already must have auto insurance to operate an automobile.

There is a stealth initiative underlying this new Democratic strategy to address the big government concerns of the "Harry and Louise" crowd. (Remember those adds that ran in 1994 suggesting that the Clinton healthcare proposal was just more wasteful, big government bureaucracy that would raise taxes and limit your choice of doctors?)

The Democrats are mounting a slow motion assault on private insurers, guessing that if this new program passes, and people who are buying expensive private insurance see that people in the public plan are getting the same level of care at less personal expense, that they will leave private insurance in droves, thereby shrinking that industry.

Why will this work? Because the Republican arguments against big government healthcare are neutralized by the success and popularity of the Medicare and Veterans Administration programs (Walter Reed fiasco aside). (Ask any World War II or Korean era vet, like my father, and they'll speak appreciatively of the V.A. system.)

And here is the truth about those Republican claims that big government is wasteful:

Medicare administration expenses are 2 cents on the dollar, where administration expenses among private insurers are 15 cents of every dollar. The 13 cent difference primarily covers the costs of keeping sick people uninsured and finding ways to deny benefits to those who are insured. - RAR

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GENERAL BETRAY US, THE INVASION OF IRAQ AND PLEASE MOVEON.ORG

On a recent episode of HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” author Salman Rushdie suggested that one of the reasons dialogue about the “Iraq War”[i] has been so unproductive is that the Bush Administration has been so good at steering the dialogue toward talk about the war rather than the war itself. This was in response to Republican “outrage” over the MoveOn.org “General Betray Us” ad and the New York Times’ reduced-rate support.

Salman Rushie’s is a good insight. The Bush message team has blunted the points of war critics – enough that the “thing” drags on, even without apparent gain – by portraying anti-war people as unpatriotic Americans who turn their backs on “our troops.”

Language within a conflict is loaded however you use it, and “our troops” is a particularly conflicted notion. They are “our troops” in the sense that they are our neighbors and they are in uniform in a conflict overseas. But anointing them as representatives of all that is American is part of the mindfield that has been planted by Republican operatives between the realms of logic and reality. One would think that would be tough terrain to negotiate effectively, but hats off to the Bush crowd for consistently doing it with enough success to maintain the status quo without public support. That’s brilliant, when you really think about it.

There was a research study recently, revealed as “bogus” by Slate.com, that purported to show that liberals are “smarter,” or at least better able to adapt to new information, than conservatives. Nothing that takes place in reality would seem to support this finding. My team – the “progressive liberals” represented by such as MoveOn.org – seem utterly incapable of doing what conservatives do with ease. However ridiculous their argument, “conservatives” – an effectively loaded noun – state their case with confidence, as truth that one can reasonably take unquestioned.

So why can’t we do that?

The truth about MoveOn’s “General Betray Us” ad is that it demonstrates incompetence on a par with that MoveOn accuses of the Bush Administration. Messaging hasn’t really been MoveOn’s strong suit so much as has been web savvy achieved a little ahead of the curve. They are not really “content” people so much as they are Internet geeks who have succeeded to a new plateau of scrutiny, and there they are hard to relate to as “our troops,” the voice of the liberal left.

“General Betray Us” is grade school-level clever, extraordinary in its lack of sophistication, stupid in its understanding of the nuances of media and political culture. It embarrasses our side of the aisle. It does not illustrate any evidence that “we” have a better grasp on the complexities of our world than do our simple-minded counterparts in the Republican party.

On the other hand, what would one expect of a group that names itself in response to a specific event in history – the impeachment of Bill Clinton – but has no real message to move on with other than that conveyed in their name. To be sure, MoveOn.org has demonstrated the effectiveness of the Internet as an organizing tool, but a few exchanges with a MoveOn.org CSR – they actually have them – may leave you believing that political enlightenment is less a goal than social networking.

For we “progressive liberals” (more loaded bullshit) MoveOn.org’s “General Betray Us” spot did way too much to swell the ranks of activists who detest the left. And isn’t that what we argue the indefensible “War in Iraq” is doing for Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalists?

Republicans attempted to make much of Democratic presidential candidates' refusals to speak out against the spot. This speaks well of Hillary, Obama, Edwards, et al. They know enough to stay well clear of a stinker.

Now that’s messaging. - RAR

[i] I cannot reference the “Iraq War” without the quotes, because this doesn’t seem like a war in any traditional sense. I could comfortably reference “Iraq Invasion” without the punctuation support.

The Nature of People - 90/10 Rule

California is spending a huge amount of money to incarcerate people, and recently Aunode da Gubernator signed a bill to spend $7.4 billion to add 40,000 prison beds and 13,000 county jail beds to the system. When this expansion is complete, the Golden State will be the only state in the union to spend more on incarcerating people than it spends on educating them. That's pretty grim because in shear numbers we are incarcerating a great number of people who are no danger to society. They are rule breakers, jay walkers on the avenue of strict enforcement. Somehow we want to have room in lockups for them, along with the murderers and those violent offenders who will be back among us soon enough. This prison-building exercise doesn't change any laws, it just provides more cells.

All of this is wrong in a hundred ways, but I am always taken by how much worse it could be. This is my Pollyanna side showing, but as I traverse the cross section of the citizenry it consistently occurs to me that at least 9 out of 10 people you meet, probably more, are basically fine. I, personally, have never been attacked by anyone, rarely been assaulted, infrequently been harassed or intimidated, and only occasionally been taunted. An astonishing number of people are either not trained in etiquette or just don't care, but what astonishes me might not faze another person. I tend to detest rudeness, so if 20 percent of my encounters are with the impolite I tend to think of it as epidemic. Actually, though, that's pretty good, isn't it? The majority of people just let you be, and a special few are even courteous.

The other thing I am taken by is that this 90/10 thing seems to me to hold true across the racial divides. I find that young people misbehave at a proportionately higher rate, but sort of expect that; their brains aren't even fully formed until they are 25, so I deal with the ignorant young (and that is a minority, in my experience) as "retards." They might get better, but maybe not. I do not find that Blacks are any more rude than Latinos, or Chinese any more rude than Pilipinos.

Quite honestly, given the pressures of life, the injustice in the distribution of its rewards and hardships, and the natural inclination toward suspicious feelings toward unfamiliar types, it amazes me that we aren't constantly in a state of civil war. But we aren't. In fact, even when we were in the American Civil War only a minority of Americans, many of them conscripts recently off the boat from Europe, were involved in that.

I have always believed that the energy we living beings create is an entirely neutral thing, as malleable a force for good as it is for bad. Maybe how it gets directed is a function of the dual nature of man, but that makes it all the more amazing to me that it is generally channeled so positively. Clearly we learn of places like Darfur where unspeakable violations of humanity are commonplace and see that the balance of mankind can be undone, and we get these events throughout the world throughout human history. We have sectarian violence in Iraq right now, given reign by an impenetrable will to impose order on an imposed chaos. People in power can make decisions that make you wonder about humankind, but look around. The vast majority of us are just fine.

So why do I feel like such a misanthrope? - RAR (May 2007)

Where I Stand on the Gordian Knot of America

In 333 BC, Alexander the Great, wintering in Gordium, a province of the Persian Empire, gave the world a great metaphor. He cut the Gordiian Knot. Legend had it that the individual who could undo the knot, which tied the ox cart of King Midas to a pillar post in Phrygia, would go on to rule all of Asia. Young Alexander, who would have been about 23 at the time, found the knot impossible to untie, so legend has it that he drew his sword and whacked the knot in two, thus simply circumventing this most vexing challenge. His became known as the "Alexandrian Solution," and he did go on conquer all of Asia Minor.

Now, in 2007, with the United States of America in steep decline, hated in much of the world for our wrong-headed foreign policies, embroiled in an insane war abroad and hell-bent on fomenting more violence, too morally bankrupt to entertain any notion that doesn't have financial gain as its bottom line, feted on the ignoble diversions of sports and pop culture entertainments, it is time for us to cut our own knot - the one that binds us to ignorance often tied to our own myths. We have become so lost in the forests of our own bullshit that we need an American Solution as pure and simple as the Alexandrian's. We need a new bottom line, a fresh start.

Here is my take on what needs to be done to right the U.S.A.:

PRESCRIPTIONS FOR CHANGE	BENEFITS
MAKE corporations illegal - Our War of Independence with Great Britain was fought to free ourselves from tyranny, not just that of King George (now there's an irony), but that which emanated from the power of such foreign policy arms as the Hudson Bay and East India corporations. Corporations are designed to make the rich richer and shield their leaders from personal legal responsibility for corporate actions. That is just wrong.	n Broader redistribution of the nation's wealth n End of corporate influence on policymaking decisions n End the dominance of insurance companies, which are a pox on our civilization
KILL CORPORATE TAX BREAKS - Of course, this won't be necessary if we kill the corporations themselves. As it is, the giant corporations set prices, profit ruthlessly, and don't pay anything near the percentage of taxes on their profits that middle class individuals are required to pay.	n More money for important social and infrastructure programs n Renewed faith in the average working American that the deck is not rigged against them
ESTABLISH UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE - An extraordinary number of our nation's problems are linked to the manipulated cost of health care and the fact that it is in private hands for profit. Our current system of delivering health care at the most expensive points of delivery - the emergency room and in critical care environments - is ludicrous. Common sense should put us on a course that has already been selected by every other industrialized nation in the world. What are we fighting to preserve? Answer: corporate profits at the expense of the nation's health.	n Lower overall costs of delivering health care in the U.S. n Guarantee equal benefits and services to every individual, regardless of race, gender and income n Remove forever employer mandated health care coverage, which n makes "health insurance slaves" of workers, limits their ability to care for their families, and limits their mobility within the workforce
KILL TAX EXEMPT STATUS FOR ORGANIZED RELIGIOUS GROUPS - People who believe in fairy tales and have specific political agendas shouldn't be given immunity from civic responsibility.	n Eliminates a way over-subscribed tax shelter
END CAPITAL PUNISHMENT - We need radical prison reform. Only people who are a danger to society should be warehoused in prisons, and "the state" has no business executing anybody.	n High ground that will let us speak with moral authority to other less enlightened world parties n Put an end to racial discrimination in the practice of executing criminals and, occasionally, innocent people or people who lack the mental capacity to understand the impacts of their own actions
ABOLISH THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE - The Electoral College was established to make certain that a small group of powerful leaders maintained their grip on power. As the nation has grown, it has given the backwards inland and southern states way too much influence on national affairs.	n A step toward ending "representative" democracy
CONTROL IMPORTS - We shouldn't allow products to be sold in the U.S. without requiring that a certain percentage of the labor and materials in any product be of U.S. origin.	n Re-establish America's manufacturing base n Stop the exporting of American jobs for corporate profits
NO COLLEGE UNTIL 21 - End the practice of sending kids directly from high school to college. The vast majority of kids are not mature enough at 17 and 18 years of age to view college as anything more than a lark. They start getting more focused in their junior and senior years. Between high school graduation and their 21st birthdays, kids should be required by law to attend vocational training, to get training through enlistment in the armed services, or to be enrolled in apprentice programs.	n Focus on realistic, productive goals n Earn money for college (which they'll appreciate more) n Greater esteem in late-teens with skills that make them competititve n Improved citizenship through improved values n Greater productivity from an underutilized and energetic labor force n Opportunity for early start on "nest egg" savings (compound interest)
EXPAND BENEFITS FOR SENIORS - Starting at age 70, seniors should be completely exempt from charges for utilities and other basic services. No one should freeze to death in winter in America. No one should be forced to make a choice between buying heat and purchasing full doses of needed prescription drugs.	n Reward the investments of lifetimes of productive work n Assurance within citizenry that America does the right thing
COMMIT TO THE KYOTO CLIMATE CONTROL PROTOCOLS - America the Irresponsible is about to be surpassed by China in terms of our deadly carbon footprint. It is suicidal that these two behemoths, who create so much of the planet's atmospheric waste, are the two fighting environmental protections.	n Saving the planet n Allowing the USA to become a good world citizen
COMMIT TO INTELLIGENT URBAN PLANNING - We need to stop building subdivisions, satellite communities and highways and start building sustainable communities where people live and work together and are not reliant on the automobile for routine daily needs (like long commutes). We need to get people back on the sidewalks, not joining the ranks of the homeless but re-joining human communities.	n Reduce energy consumption n Reduce the need for additional roadways n Re-establish the village concept that supports healthier communities
MAKE PARENTS RESPONSIBLE FOR THEIR CHILDREN'S EDUCATIONS - The problems in public schools today are not all with teachers and administrators. Most are with parents who aren't there for their kids, often because of job demands, and often because they are ill-equipped to function as teaching role models for their own children.	n Reduce behavior problems in the classroom n Encourage productive learning environments n Engage parents in lifelong learning
CONTROL GUNS - Get rid of hand guns, automatic and semi-automatic weapons entirely.	n Reduce gun violence n Reduce accidental shootings n Get into step with the International community that currently sees America as a violent, gun-crazed society
LEGALIZE STREET DRUGS - Get help for people who are abusing drugs like marijuana, cocaine, speed, ecstacy.	n Keep non-violent offenders out of prison n Eliminate criminal profiteering n Control drug violence
REPAIR OUR INFRASTRUCTURE - Instead of spending billions of dollars a month creating terrorists throughout the world, which is what our "War on Terror" (possibly the stupidest phrase ever created in the name of government policy) is really doing. We best take care of our home country before we lose the ability to manage basic needs, like waste elimination, the delivery of safe potable water, and power grids that are protected against interruptions.	n Avoidance of larger expenses down the road n Assurance of quality standards n Insurance against service disruptions n Job creation
MAKE IT POSSIBLE FOR EVERY WORKING AMERICAN TO OWN THEIR OWN HOME - Replace employer mandated health care with employer mandated home buying assistance. Every working American should have a right to their own domicile that cannot be taken from them as long as they are contributing to society through work and by paying their fair share of taxes.	n A more stable, committed society n Protection of a key element of "the American dream"
ABOLISH JURY DUTY - End the practice of allowing the court system to hide from accountability behind the sham illusion that justice is meted out by citizen peers. Jury cases are mostly decided by judges' instructions to the jury, and on what information is allowed or not allowed in the trial. In what other aspect of life do we subject amateurs to the arcane machinations of professionals and then demand that, based on what they have witnessed and how they have been instructed, they determine the fates of other human beings? It is pure crap, an attempt to make it appear that the government is not passing judgments on its citizens, which is simply not true. Trials only take place when prosecutors and defenders have been unable to reach a plea deal, which means that every jury trial is held in hopes of manipulating jurors in ways that the lawyers couldn't be hoodwinked by, rendering each a farce. We should elect professional jurists who know the law, know the lawyers and all their creepy tricks, and make their rulings based on knowledge and wisdom.	n Courts that are responsible for their own actions n Justice that is not reliant on the relative qualities of lawyers n No lost wages, which amounts to an additional taxation just being a U.S. citizen n The end of bench warrants against citizens who, for whatever reason, didn't make their time available to the justice system
MAKE IT ILLEGAL FOR PHARMACEUTICAL COMPANIES TO ADVERTISE THEIR PRODUCTS TO THE GENERAL PUBLIC - End the practice of patients requesting specific prescription drugs from their physicians.	n Reduced prices on pharmaceuticals
END THE PRIVATIZATION OF ESSENTIAL SERVICES - Take the profit motive out of service delivery in areas of great public need, i.e., utilities, transportation, etc.	n Public safeguards Guarantee service delivery without caveats
ABOLISH THE USE OF NUCLEAR POWER - Develop alternative energy resources that will not create dangerous pollution that generations will need to contain and control for the next 100,000 years.	n Job creation and technological innovation through the exploration and development of alternative energy resources
OFFER AMNESTY TO "ILLEGAL ALIENS" WHO HAVE BEEN WORKING IN THE U.S., PAYING TAXES, AND ESTABLISHING HOMES - Americans have been more than happy to pay low wages to foreign nationals to have them do jobs that Americans won't do for the same money. These people have earned their citizenship and we should welcome them as American citizens with full rights and privileges.	n Workforce stability and sustained economic growth n Accountability gained through incorporating these workers into the system, providing them with social security numbers
LEGALLY RESTRICT THE NUMBER OF HOURS A PERSON MAY BE REQUIRED TO WORK - Americans need to get their priorities straight. We need people who are at least as available to their families as they are to their employers.	n Workforce stability and a gentler, saner America
SUPPORT THE UNITED NATIONS - Not all the smart people who have ever lived have their signature on the Constitution of the United States of America. Some signed the Charter for the United Nations in 1945, trying to beef up the League of Nations, which had been summarily brushed aside by Adolph Hitler in the previous 10 years. As Russian Premiere Putin pointed out recently, Hitler ignored the League of Nations in a manner similar to that with which George W. Bush has brushed aside the United Nations. (Through his actions, George is really pretty hard on the smart-guy Constitution writers too, though he wouldn't say as much.) He has been in open disdain of the U.N., and in his politically inept way has stripped himself naked to his base intent, which is to kill the body. The U.S. needs to embrace the U.N., and start by paying the back dues that have gone unpaid under Republican order for reform. (And they thought John Bolton was the guy to do this? Why not Don Rickles?) One can imagine what that has done for U.S. credibility internationally.	n A sleeping policeman (speed bump) on the road to war n A world view

Now, do I believe that America will take these steps to fix itself? No, not for a second. America does not belong to its citizens in general, but instead to its powerbrokers. I have every faith that they, the masters of this universe, will continue to build higher walls around their gated communities and create greater protections to maintain the status quo. Eventually they'll be building their underground complexes so when this nation eventually melts down - and make no mistake, this is our future - they can retreat into their garish keeps until one day when the sun shines again, and we are all gone and out of their way, and they can once again slither along the surface of the earth, no doubt to resume the whole wretched cycle of humanity once again. I'm sure they'll provide for a few of us who will live to see the bright new day, because every master requires a certain amount of cheap labor to sustain his empire, even if it is only comprised of ants and other lowly vermin. - RAR (5-13-07)

The Ten Commandments - Gotcha!

Surely one of the most satisfying moments on television these days comes on HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher" when Maher is able to reveal one of his "Christian-right leaning" guests' lack of knowledge of something they hold up as evidence of their own virtue. The best of these "gotchas" occurs when The Ten Commandments - the actual Moses-delivered list, not the movie - is called into play. It's a favorite Maher topic, a central piece of his current standup routine. His premise is that the substance of The Ten Commandments perfectly reflects the emptiness of the Republican obeisance to "Christian values"; that if any of these people actually knew anything about the Commandments, they would see how utterly out of whack their Republican party's policies are with the Christian philosophy they claim to adore. The look on the face of Philadelphia conservative radio-talk host Michael Smerconish, on the March 29 episode, when Maher challenged his knowledge of the Commandments text, was, as they say, "priceless..."

The Ten Commandments, like the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States of America, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Bill of Rights, are iconic in a way that superficializes. We the people no longer feel we really need to read these foundation documents to know what they say. We know they are good, evidence of something divine and provident about us Americans, and we can pretty much take it all on faith. Besides, it's easier and we all must make choices about how we spend our limited free time. Best just to believe.

Now of course the Commandments, like any such text, are filtered by the religions who recognize them as legit. Catholics, Protestants and Jews all kowtow to the Commandments, though they don't really enumerate them the same way. There may be ten, or maybe fifteen. (This disconnect served as the set-up to the Mel Brooks joke about Moses initially having an additional stone tablet, which he dropped and broke on the way down the mountain. Moses, who was nothing if not flexible, shrugs off the misfortune and delivers what he can.)

Disagreements on the numbering of the Commandments aside, what really do they command? What do they say?

Here's my take.

COMMANDMENT (Paraphrased)	INTERPRETATION	REPUBLICAN VIRTUE?
I am the Lord, put no others before me, make no idols of your own.	This is not a democracy, I am in charge here, and don't even think about getting cute.	NO Repubs are all about false idols and "I can afford it" lifestyles
	RELEVANCE TO MODERN LIFE: Low. No one has ever even seen this guy making these boasts, and if I haven't seen him then he probably hasn't seen the shrine to Scarlett Johanssen I've erected in my bathroom (you know, where she's in the Cinderella get-up), so its irrelevant.
Make no wrongful use of the name of your God.	It is tempting to read this as an instruction to avoid swearing, but that seems a little shallow. Probably something here about using God as a cover for your actions. Hmmm...who does that remind you of?	NO They are dedicated Crusaders
	RELEVANCE TO MODERN LIFE: High, if this means not to launch a Christian crusade against Islam.
Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.	This, of course, sends us racing to the appendix for the definition of "holy." If it means not working or keeping Wal-Mart closed on Sunday, this probably doesn't have much meaning in the modern world. God may want us to take the day off, but the corporations we work for have stuff that needs doing before Monday.	NO They may take some time off, they just don't want you to
	RELEVANCE TO MODERN LIFE: Average, if this helps us work a little balance into the time on/time off thing. It tends to reveal God as not a particularly forceful presence in a society in which 90 percent of the population claims to believe in him.
Honor your parents.	Okay, seems timeless, not terribly in left field as ideas go; maybe a little inconvenient.	MAYBE But they aren't honoring yours
	RELEVANCE TO MODERN LIFE: High, if this means respecting a set of values and policies that protect the fabric of our society.
Do not commit murder.	Surely this is understood to be "situational." Under certain circumstances, we can find a better word than "murder," in which case this just doesn't feel relevant to most of us, just terrorists and...well, murderers.	NO Hunting, capital punishment, war -they are murder addicted
	RELEVANCE TO MODERN LIFE: High, if we define murder broadly to include war against rival philosophies and cultures; high even if we don't, now that I think about it.
Do not commit adultery.	Again, this is one of those technical things that surely must be weighed as a situational response. And what exactly is "adultery" really? Sometimes a dalliance on a business trip is just therapy, like a spa treatment, not an act of infidelity, you know?	NO Let's see...McCain, Gingrich, Giuliani...Bob Dole on Viagra
	RELEVANCE TO MODERN LIFE: Average, because it destroys families in some instances and almost never leads to a long-term solution to anything.
Don't steal.	Some of these Commandments are just for street people, who need to understand their place. Higher up the food chain this concept of "stealing" gets a little fuzzier. Sometimes you must steal from Peter to pay Paul, right? It's just the way business works.	NO Don't get caught, maybe, like ENRON and Halliburton
	RELEVANCE TO MODERN LIFE: High, as long as it is broadly applied; Low, if it applies only to those who are desperately struggling to survive in an unjust world.
Do not bear false witness.	This must have something to do with lying, but come on. Our entire legal system falls apart if your lawyer can't bring in your witness to tell the part of the story you want the jury to hear. Is that false?	NO False witness is the hallmark of the current administration
	RELEVANCE TO MODERN LIFE: Low. In a world where "truth" has been marginalized ( to become "truthiness"), maybe we shouldn't take as true anything we hear anyway.
Don't covet your neighbor's wife.	Yeah, well good luck with that. And how exactly does my fascination with my neighbor's arm piece matter a bit in the overall scheme of things? She doesn't know I exist anyway.	NO No, but so's the relevance to anything
	RELEVANCE TO MODERN LIFE: Low. "Covet" is not really an action verb. My neighbor's wife probably wants to be "coveted." She just doesn't want me coming over.
Don't covet your neighbor's house.	Oh come on! If I don't get a house as good as the one my neighbor's got, how am I going to steal his wife? Her price is simply not open to negotiation!	NO The whole party philosophy relies on not believing in this
	RELEVANCE TO MODERN LIFE: Low. Are you kidding me? Coveting your neighbor's stuff is central to the power of predatory capitalism. Take the coveting out of the picture and we start to wonder why we are working on Sundays!

How Effective is Democracy in the U.S.?

After listening this morning to part of George W. Bush’s press conference in Chicago, and listening to his never-ending promotion of democracy and American style freedoms, I got to thinking – how great has this really worked out for me, your standard issue American?

When Bush goes on about how “freedom” is a natural human instinct, a yearning born into every person on the planet, what is he talking about? I think when Americans extol the virtues of our great country they are talking about freedom of speech, freedom to worship as we please, freedom of assembly, etc. An argument could be convincingly made that many of these freedoms have been diminished under this freedom-boasting administration.

So is it that kind of double-talk coming from our President that is at the root of why I am so nervous about my American experience? Why even as an American, I am to some extent afraid of Americans? And, most importantly in these uncertain times, can I really say that, based on my experience, American democracy, the civic extension of the freedoms we cherish, has been…well, worth fighting for? I mean, there are other older working models that are not only continuing to thrive, but are also doing well by their people.

Here, for instance, from the United Nations Human Development Report, 2005, is how the nations of the world rank on something called the U.N.'s Human Development Index. It takes into account life expectancy, adult literacy rate, schooling and Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

1.   Norway
2.   Iceland
3.   Australia
4.   Luxembourg
5.   Canada

6.   Sweden
7.   Switzerland
8.   Ireland
9.   Belgium
10. USA

11. Japan
12. Netherlands
13. Finland
14. Denmark
15. UK

There we are in 10th place in the world, even with our GDP being greater by far than that of any other country on the planet. You factor in the other things, the human stuff, and nine other countries suddenly pass us by.

Save the Children does research on international health care, and based on their research CNN reported recently on another measure of citizen care: "American babies are three times more likely to die in their first month as children born in Japan, and newborn mortality is 2.5 times higher in the United States than in Finland, Iceland or Norway, Save the Children researchers found. Only Latvia, with six deaths per 1,000 live births, has a higher death rate for newborns than the United States, which is tied near the bottom of industrialized nations with Hungary, Malta, Poland and Slovakia with five deaths per 1,000 births."

So, you can get statistical indicators of service delivery, such as the grim report above, and if your view is that the exercise of democracy should yield superior results, then you have two narrow-slice measurements of our government's performance, and as free-voting citizens, our own. Measurements seem to show that we are an industrious people, bright and inventive, but we don't do a great job of taking care of each other.

So what is the actual experience of being an American?

There aren’t that many measurable, shared experiences in American society, and what is there is pretty much limited to each individual's status of wealth, i.e., how much money one makes. You can bet those American babies dying in the statistic quoted above aren't the children of the well to do. So you could say we all share the experience of either being healthy or not, but the experience beyond that varies widely.

"...the heart of the nation beats in the President's chest."

I can only come up with one true shared national experience that might shed light on the American soul as it pertains to democracy, and that is the thing democracy was in part designed to deliver: presidential elections. The office of the President is the only national office we have. Metaphorically, the heart of the nation beats in the President's chest. (And I know I didn't come up with that myself.) I began to wonder to what extent the voice of the people, who have elected our presidents, represents me and the things I value. Is the President's heart my own? Or, as I often feel, am I just another American for whom “democracy” seems to yield unsatisfying results. And what have the results been?

I came up with the following table, which charts all of the administrations I have experienced since being born in October 1952, the last months of the Truman administration. I experienced Harry for about three months and recall that he was a short man in a hat. I went on to figure out how many months each of the administrations spent in office, and then, in black and white terms, I gave each either a “Yes” or a “No” vote depending upon my perceptions of how well each of these gentlemen have done in meeting my own subjective judgments about democracy and freedom and the role of government.

ADMINISTRATION	MONTHS	YES	NO
Harry Truman (1945-53)	3	O
Dwight Eisenhower (1953-61)	96	O
John F. Kennedy (1961-63)	22	O
Lyndon Johnson (1963-69)	74		O
Richard Nixon (1969-73)	63		O
Gerald Ford (1973-77)	33		O
Jimmy Carter (1977-81)	48	O
Ronald Reagan (1981-89)	96		O
George H.W. Bush (1989-93)	48		O
Bill Clinton (1993-2001)	96	O
George W. Bush (2001-Present)	66		O
TOTALS:		265	380
PERCENTAGE:		41%	59%

The results, in fact, shed some light on my feelings of “democra-freedom” shortfall. Good God! I have only been happy with Daddy – the guy in the White House – 41 percent of the time! And have been unhappy with, sometimes ashamed of and often embarrassed by, our president 59 percent of the time! Anyway you look at it a 41/59 split is awful. While highly variable and not at all scientific, this result would seem to indicate that I am typically in disagreement with almost 6 out of 10 voting Americans. For me to accept that Democracy produces the best of all possible outcomes, I would need to believe that 6 out of 10 people I run into just plain know better than I do.

I don’t think so, but maybe that's a symptom.

For sure, some of my Yes/No judgments are wobbly. I scored Truman a “Yes” based on nothing other than that he was a Democrat, as am I, and he was scrappy. Not nuts about the decisions to drop two atomic bombs on Japan, though I know that I am to understand that it saved a lot of lives. Not nuts about America being the only country ever to have used these fearsome weapons. I guess a guy does what he feels he must.

I credited the Republican Eisenhower with 96 months of superior service. Eisenhower sponsored and signed the Civil Rights Act of 1957, undeniably good. He sponsored and signed the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, which was also probably good – we needed those interstate highways and building them created a lot of construction jobs. Ike balanced the budget three times by refusing to cut taxes and raise defense spending, contributing to the prosperity of the 1950s. And, of course, he issued all those great warnings about the “military industrial complex,” so that all seems good. He ended the Korean War, which was unquestionably good, and he kept America out of other wars, so I like Ike. Ike was a Republican, but one of the good guys.

JFK was only around 1,000 days, so how much could a guy do, right? Well, he did champion civil rights and justice for black Americans, launch this nation's exploration of space (which I have become wishy-washy toward), and give birth to the public's engagement in the arts and humanities. He avoided nuclear holocaust with the Soviets during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He increased federal spending, cut taxes while keeping the deficit in check, and he issued a ban on atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons. That’s all pretty good, though the tax cut thing usually makes me suspicious. Still, JFK was a “Yes.”

I will always dislike Lyndon Johnson for escalating the Viet Nam War, and that’s why I gave him an overall thumbs down, but LBJ did a lot of good, too. He continued the JFK agenda and in 1964 helped get the Tax Reduction Act passed, which reflected the economic theory that at times the federal government must spend more than it takes in in order to stimulate economic growth. Now that’s a “good Democrat!” He also pushed Congress to pass a very broad civil rights law that attacked segregation, banned discrimination in public accommodations, and eliminated restrictions in job opportunities. That’s a “great Democrat!” And he got better. After winning the 1964 election with 60 percent of the vote, LBJ pushed to establish health insurance for the elderly under the Social Security program – Medicare. He helped pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which outlawed illiteracy tests and removed other obstacles that tended to prevent blacks from exercising their right to vote. He established the departments of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and Transportation (DOT). He increased Federal aid to primary and secondary schools, and he called for an "unconditional war on poverty," leading to the enactment of legislation liberalizing unemployment compensation, expanding the food stamp program, and enlarging opportunities for youth employment. But, Viet Nam dogged, and how much good HUD and the DOT have done is unclear to me. The social programs were an attempt to address a festering sore, but there is more poverty now than ever. So many of his Great Society intentions came to naught.

If I were to move LBJ into the “Yes” category, I would suddenly be at 53 percent “Yes” and this democracy thing would start to look better to me.

But Viet Nam…and inability to really mount a sustained commitment in our country to wage war on poverty. I am keeping LBJ a “No.”

Richard Nixon, hard as it may be to say, may have been “the last good Republican,” which says something about the glass ceiling over Republicans (unbelievably low). Tricky Dick subscribed to the Republican value of fiscal responsibility but recognized the need for government's expanded role and accepted the basic contours of the welfare state. He just wanted to be a better manager, but things went south on Tricky right away. Nixon was in office when America turned a corner from which it has never returned. We saw inflation soar under Nixon and the DOW fall, unemployment rose and Nixon’s wage-price controls did little good. The 1973 war between Israel, Egypt and Syria prompted Saudi Arabia to impose an embargo on Israel’s ally the United States. OPEC quadrupled their prices. Americans faced shortages and inflation reached 12 percent in 1974, causing even more unemployment. This era of recession and inflation ("stagflation") brought an end to the unprecedented economic boom America had enjoyed since 1948.

The Nixon Administration -- "This era of
recession and inflation ('stagflation') brought an end to the unprecedented economic boom America had enjoyed since 1948."

Nixon’s response was to restore "law and order." Nixon chose to use government power to counter rising crime rates in American cities and political protests, increased drug use and more permissive views about sex in U.S. universities. He lashed out at demonstrators, attacked the press for distorted coverage and sought to silence his opponents. (In case you missed that, these are assaults on American freedoms by a seated President of the United States.)

Nixon was a dog and he was hounded from office – a big “No” in my books.
Of course he did go to China.

Gerald Ford… Well, let’s see, he pardoned Richard Nixon. (Do we keep going?) He was in office for the withdrawal of American forces from Vietnam and he executed the Helsinki Accords, which said the international community would respect each other. He oversaw more inflation and recession. He had vetoes overridden frequently. Not much to write home about. A big “No.”

Jimmy Carter shot himself in the foot repeatedly, most notably with his notion of a “Misery Index,” which rose by 50 percentage points during his one term in office. (Note to self: Don’t make up some goofy concept that will help seal your own fate.) On the positive side, Carter created a national energy policy and consolidated governmental agencies. He enacted strong environmental legislation; bolstered the social security system; and appointed record numbers of women and minorities to significant government and judicial posts. In foreign affairs, Carter's accomplishments included the Camp David Accords, the Panama Canal Treaties, the creation of full diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China, and the negotiation of the SALT II Treaty. In addition, he championed human rights throughout the world and used human rights as the center of his administration's foreign policy.

So, Carter was a peacemaker but he also did some unbelievably stupid stuff like deregulating the trucking, airline, rail, finance, communications, and oil industries. Look around, folks, and tell me any of those services have been improved by deregulation.

Carter’s a “Yes” on my chart, but mostly because I think he tried to work over-arching themes (human rights, peace) and I need him. Put him in the “No” category and I’m down to 34 percent satisfaction with what democracy hath wrought. Geez. Maybe there should be another column measuring ineptitude because I'm on the horns with Carter. I find both hope and despair in who he is.

Speaking of “ineptitude,” we then got Ronald Reagan. As historian Stephen Ambrose says: “A funny thing happened to Ronald Reagan on the way to his place in history. At the three-quarter point, he made a sharp left turn, then another, and ended his journey going in the opposite direction from his start.”

Well, Ron was really confused. He was the predecessor to tough talking George W. Bush, the guy who coined the "evil empire" phrase. He launched the greatest arms race in history, topped by the single most expensive weapons system ever undertaken (which still doesn't work). He did avoid going to war, was the first to reach an arms reduction accord with the Soviets, and he helped make it possible for Mikhail Gorbachev to begin the process of restructuring Soviet society. That last thing may not have been quite so good.

Reagan promised to eliminate the nation’s deficit then allowed it to swell beyond comprehension. He failed to make abortion illegal, and failed to make prayer in the schools legal – neither of which I have a problem with. Drugs were the number one issue in the 1988 presidential campaign, so "Morning In America" was really a pretty weird time. A few people made obscene amounts of money while most struggled. And the drugs were all the worst kinds: cocaine, crank, ecstacy... After two rounds of Reagan, America was well off track.

Ronnie did dismantle federal programs and forced states and cities to assume more responsibility for running their own shows, but of course ever since we have dealt with unfunded federal mandates, so the advantages of this form of federalism have been uncertain.

"Republicans still contend that Reagan showed us that when the government lowers taxes it generates greater revenues, but that’s a canard...Real per-person revenues... grew about twice as quickly in the 1990s, when taxes were increased..."

Of course, Reagan’s big gift to the U.S. was going to be “tax reform,” but he got lost in that arena and had to change course. The Republicans still contend that Reagan showed us that when the government lowers taxes it generates greater revenues, but that’s a canard. Something called the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reported in June of this year: “In 1981, Congress approved very large supply-side tax cuts, dramatically lowering marginal income-tax rates. In 1990 and 1993, by contrast, Congress raised marginal income-tax rates on the well off. Despite the very different tax policies followed during these two decades, there was virtually no difference in real per-person economic growth in the 1980s and 1990s. Real per-person revenues, however, grew about twice as quickly in the 1990s, when taxes were increased, as in the 1980s, when taxes were decreased.”*

Either way, a government dedicated to starving federal programs put in place to provide services for its people does no one other than the rich any favors by concentrating wealth in the hands of the very few. Reagan is a huge “No,” runner-up to George W. Bush as the lousiest president in my lifetime.

George H.W. Bush’s two greatest accomplishments were the passage of the landmark Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) -- a good thing -- and the successful prosecution of the war to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation – a marginal accomplishment that obviated the need for his idiot son’s invasion of Iraq, though somehow nobody told the younger Bush this. Bush 41 was a big “No.”

Bill Clinton is a big “Yes” because he was extraordinarily competent. He cut taxes on 15 million low-income families and made tax cuts available to 90 percent of small businesses, while raising taxes on just 1.2 percent of the wealthiest taxpayers. He wiped out the budget deficit and turned it into a surplus. He signed the Brady Bill and put more police officers on the street. He signed the Family and Medical Leave Act, cut the federal bureaucracy and launched the school to work program. He increased Head Start funding and signed an assault weapons ban. It goes on and on. He didn’t enact huge social programs – the will of the people was not there to do that – but he made America better.

Then along came Bush 43, the biggest “No” in presidential history. What has he done right?

So, to review, my score card seems to indicate – depending upon how I come down on the Democrats Jimmy Carter and LBJ, on whom I am split – that I am somewhere between 34 and 53 percent satisfied with my American presidents. That means that American democracy, as represented by its presidents and their policies, have been not better than mediocre and maybe not that good at doing the things that seem to me to be in the best interest of the greatest number of people.

Isn't that, at least theoretically, what a democracy should yield? Policies that are in the best interest of the greatest number of people?

I don’t doubt that “W” is right about people wanting to be free. Democracy, or being able to participate in a freely elected government, is an outward extension of that desire. But what does it say that more than half of the electorate selects a candidate who isn't going to do very well by the majority of the population?

Are we just hoping to settle for a peaceful accord? Where most people don't really get much help, but nobody gets shot either?

But of course people do get shot, out on the streets of America every day. Because democracy in America has meant that we can have guns, and that's how some of us disenchanted Americans vote -- with bullets. They can't work a better deal through the democratic process, so they express themselves with what is available.

Maybe I’m just getting grumpy. Since I reached voting age in 1970, I have only been satisfied with the guy in the White House 32 percent of the time. - RAR (7-7-06)

* From the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, June 14, 2006, CLAIM THAT TAX CUTS “PAY FOR THEMSELVES” IS TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE: Data Show No “Free Lunch” Here, by Richard Kogan and Aviva Aron-Dine

Why Can’t Democrats Exploit the Minimum Wage Issue?

Am I alone in suspecting that Republicans are really just reptiles in people suits, like those aliens in "V," and if real people ever saw them for what they are the Republican party would cease to exist?

The Democrats apparently don't know this, but in the debate over raising the minimum wage they failed yet again to coax the Republicans out of their skins. Certainly the scales were in evidence when those opposed to raising the federal minimum wage dragged out their musty argument that minimum wage is paid to entry level workers who need to get training if they ever hope to rise up from the economic basement of American society.

That argument says so much about who Republicans really are -- and where they live.

Where I live in California, I straddle two communities, one affluent and one working class. In the affluent community you have teenagers working at their first jobs at the franchise operations. They are typically polite, fresh-faced kids who are having the times of their lives while making some summer spending cash. On the other hand, in the working class community, you more often find uneducated adult women who are contributing to the incomes of their families or, in some cases, providing sole support. Some of these are the mothers of my kids' classmates. They are immigrants who don't have great English skills, and they are working hard at the jobs they can get. At $6.75 an hour, these jobs gross out at $13, 770 a year. (To put that in perspective, a family of four would expect to pay at least $1,200 a month to rent really marginal housing in the North Bay of the San Francisco Bay Area, or $14,400 a year -- and, of course, paying rent does not build equity of any kind.) No one in that service worker's family is going to get any kind of additional schooling on even twice that level of income -- not mom, working there at Burger King, or any of the siblings. The kids over in the MacDonald's in the affluent community are typically college bound, but those people on the other side of the tracks aren't going anywhere.

"The kids over in the MacDonald's in the affluent community
are typically college bound, but those people on the other side of the tracks aren't going anywhere."

How is it the Democrats cannot tell their story?

Somehow the Republicans more effectively find cover in the sanctity of business. It is small businesses, you know, that are producing most of the jobs. But who are these service industry tycoons who, depending upon the community they serve, are doing the country such a service by exploiting the most vulnerable members of our society?

The minimum wage has now been frozen at the same rate for the longest period of time since the concept was established in America with the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. Conversely, incomes for the richest Americans continue to skyrocket upward on an annual basis. As Sen. Kennedy pointed out this week, the Senators gave themselves a $30,000 per year wage increase just within the past few months, and yet we can't get 6 out of 10 of these assholes to give the working poor a couple bucks an hour?

You ask yourself who are they working for, Americans or American business? It is not a question without weight. Americans are living, breathing, blood and bone people. American business is an "idea," a "philosophy," and by its nature is without a soul.

What master are we serving?

And don't we have any issues to work with here? - RAR (6/23/06)

Why We Never Talk About Public Policy

Like most people I know, I have given up trying to persuade others to points of view regarding solutions to society's ills. I would like to be persuasive, but it is easy to overload people who have plenty on their minds already, and everyone I know falls into that category. We 21st Century types just want selected information in chunks, it's all we can handle. We all have our own lives and we know what makes us happy and we just want the chunks that will help. The rest can wait. It's a "choices culture." We make the choice to be happy.

And that's why we never talk about public policy. - RAR (6/15/06)

Democracy in Decline – The Death of Net Neutrality

This entire site – indeed, the entire Internet phenomenon as we have known it – is built on a legal concept that was established to regulate the telephone industry in the 1930s but within the last year has begun going the way of the dinosaur. That depression era law prohibited telephone companies from refusing to carry calls placed by customers of rival telephone services, and that guarantee of open access was carried into the Internet age through a concept called “net neutrality.” To Internet users it has meant that every packet of data is routed on a best-effort basis, so every content provider and recipient has enjoyed the same level of service. That means that guys like me, who wish to promote their creative works and ideas by providing content through personal websites, have a platform for doing so that is the equal of those of the big corporate content providers.

Enter the dark forces of monopolistic capitalism and market deregulation.

The telecommunications and cable companies have watched the enormous successes of Internet phenomenons like Google, Yahoo and Amazon – companies profiting off the use of telephone and cable infrastructures – who are realizing enormous profits at a time when the three largest telecommunications companies are experiencing huge profit losses. In 2005, AT&T and Bell South saw profits fall by double-digit percentages. The profits of Comcast, the nation’s largest cable company, saw profits fall by 4.3 percent. At the same time, Google’s profits increased by 267 percent, Yahoo’s by 126 percent, and eBay’s by 39 percent. More alarming yet to the telecoms is that their market caps are substantially lower than those of the Internet giants. Google, for instance, with revenues less than one-twelfth of Verizon's, has a market cap higher than any telecommunications or cable company.

So what have the telecom giants done? They have challenged the old telephone laws in court – and won! In 2005, the Supreme Court ruled that cable companies like Comcast sell an “information service,” not a telephone service, and therefore is not subject to telecommunications law. At the same time, the Federal Communications Commission declared that high-speed DSL connections, though sold by telephone companies, are also not telephone services, but rather are “information services.”

This clears the way for the telecoms, which see now that they can compete with the cable companies to deliver the trifecta of phone, high-speed Internet access, and television services, to profit from the sale of bandwidth. The effect is to offer various levels of service to various content providers based on their ability to pay.

The means for establishing tiered levels of service – the antonym of “net neutrality” – is provision of infrastructure. Verizon, for instance, is spending billions of dollars to construct their FiOS fiber optic broadband network, designed to offer access speeds of 10 to 30 megabytes per second. They will charge content providers for that premium level of service and Google, Yahoo and the rest will be driven by market forces to accept that deal.

Free market capitalists argue that telecom investments in infrastructure must be rewarded with returns, that it would be illogical to expect otherwise. They further argue that offering new technology and higher speeds doesn’t diminish current technologies and current speeds, which seem sufficient to most purposes (excluding delivery of television and other services requiring really broad bandwidths). They argue that there will be no impact at all on most current content providers, like yours truly.

"There are forces at work in the jungles of commerce that have lives of their own and yield outputs both intended and otherwise."

Don’t believe it. There are forces at work in the jungles of commerce that have lives of their own and yield outputs both intended and otherwise. No one really sounded alarms when Sam Walton and his boys started building Wal-Mart stores all across the nation. Sure, they were going to move product faster and in greater quantities than ever before, but for those who preferred a slower pace, a more personal experience, there would always be Main Street America. Except that guess what – Main Street America died when Wal-Mart arrived, and the negative impacts that has wrought upon the face of America can hardly be measured. As time moves on, fewer and fewer are those who were even around to know that America was, in cultural terms that can be understood in the context of daily commercial interactions, better than it is now.

That lower level of Internet service that will be “reserved” for voices such as mine – and yours – will at first seem quaint, like dial-up access, then slow, then will cease to exist altogether.

So enjoy personal websites like this while you can, kids, and make your own while you can still believe that you are on an equal footing with the big corporate entities, the “Beefeaters” as I have called them. But act fast, because our days are numbered. - RAR (6/1/06)

The two pieces directly below first ran in the February 1, 2008 edition of RARWRITER.com

What Difference Does This Decision Make?

What difference does it make that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama take different approaches in seeking to reach the same ends? That may one day be something about which political historians can make qualified determinations, but in the present all we have are their track records to date. Here is why the two are campaigning as they are, Obama selling inspiration and unspecified "change" and Clinton selling a specific strategy of targeted tax breaks (that worked during her husband's administration) and mandated universal health care (the politics of shared sacrifice). Obama doesn't have that laboratory testing experience, and so seems light on the issues, all theory and soaring hopes. In fact, his dedication to simplicity, as exemplified by his "across the board" (minus the top 10 percent of earners) tax cut, seems evidence of a mindset that wishes to stay above the policy fray. And it seems oddly elitist. If Hillary Clinton is resurrecting "It's The Economy, Stupid!" then Barack Obama is raising the "Keep It Simple!" standard, but can America be both elegant and progressive? If Obama succeeds he will be a truly transformative figure, which is clearly his goal, i.e., to be like Ronald Reagan, whom he clearly admires. But what is it about Reagan, whose own lack of grasp of the issues caused him to do a 180 halfway through his administration when it became apparent that his theory of supply side economics was not raising all ships but was raising the national deficit.

I find the Reagan parallels unsettling, as I do a tendency in some of the electorate to apply the same standards to Obama that they disastrously applied to the candidate George W. Bush. For various reasons, some loaded with feelings about race and others with generational change, some people have decided they "like" Barack Obama more than they do Hillary Clinton. Obama has helped nourish this sentiment by refusing to limit the perceptions people may have of him by embracing specific policy decisions. He wants to be "macro" in his prescription for America, and in his candidacy. He wants to represent something elevated and forward looking, something different from the same old Washington establishment.

I hope Obama can somehow be that special, transforming progressive, but he had better get his feet on the ground. Right now one suspects that he will press forward with his behavioral economic theories until he finds that there are no acceptable imbalances in an economy facing what the U.S. is facing in the decades to come. It took Reagan four years to realize he had been living on hot air. The U.S. can't really afford to wait until 2013 to get right. - RAR

Sarah Barracuda It is not easy for me to remember that Alaska Governor Sarah Palin was not a part of America's national consciousness, including my own, before two weeks ago. It feels now as if she has always been here. There is extraordinary iconic power in Palin, and one wonders if John McCain's choice of her, which seemed almost desperate on first blush, doesn't indicate some buried brilliance deep within this election cycle's war hero. However astute old John may have been in choosing her, Sarah Palin is the one who has elevated the decision by being so much more than anybody expected. Her performance at the GOP convention was a deep exhale of relief that mushroomed into an exhalation of joy. After Obama's ridiculously self-important coronation at the football field in Denver, Sarah Palin came across in Minnesota like a fearless, happy, populist warrior. She scares former NYC Mayor Ed Koch, who probably saw the footage of her speaking to her former Evangelical congregation. She incites the liberal wing of the Democratic party even while seeming like a kindred spirit to a surprising number of Hillary Clinton women voters. But most of all, she has breathed fresh, energetic spirit into the stretch drive of an election cycle that seemed to be running out of inspiration. She has already completely marginalized Joe Biden, who is talking as if he is regretting his decision to accept the VP nomination. Hillary Clinton would have been better, he sadly opines. And Palin has largely subordinated her own leader John McCain, who is energized by campaigning with her at his side, like an old man in late days of glory. Until and if she goes off the tracks in the debates, or when she finally has to speak without a script, Palin has also neutralized Barack Obama as the fresh face of the campaign. Obama has seemed whiney about it, like a spoiled brat jealous over the attention being given to the new kid in the class. Gads, he even implied that she is a "pig." Is this guy ready to be class president? In fact, when you add the iconic power of youthful freshness in Palin, with the international military experience and power politics of John McCain, Obama-Biden starts to seem like a puppet act.	An example of the type of jokes circulating on the Internet featuring GOP VP Nominee Sarah Palin:
	RAR NOTE: I received this stuff above as part of a forwarded email, as I'm sure many of you have. It is a joke made by the images, of course; most especially poor Joe Biden's. He looks like a car or an insurance salesman, which really undermines what has been a pretty good Senate career. One wonders if he doesn't wish he had left well enough alone, put his ego on hold as best he can, and just live on in the Senate. I don't know if that is a PhotoShop job on the Palin picture. The guy who sent it to me suggested that there are PhotoShop pics of Palin on the Internet, but mostly they are nude shots. "If you are going to PhotoShop a picture, why not go all the way?" That was his take.
An Inconvenient Infection It is hot as Hades here in the North Bay today, as it has been for days; over 100 degrees on a few, rare for here, though summer heat often arrives late, often topping out in October. Maybe it is global warming, localized. The ice is melting on the polar caps, something that was reported to me last night from my TV, by some British fellow rowing madly through polar waters in a kayak. He was at the North Pole, I think, but he didn't seem too cold. Last year, he reported as he paddled, there was ice 3 meters deep at the north cap, and one year later it is only 1 meter deep. I don't live too far from the Carquinez Strait off of San Pablo Bay off of the San Francisco Bay off of the Pacific Ocean. I think about things that way, as strings of connected things. Bodies of water. Stretches of land. Communities of people. Animals. I wondered for a moment what it might be like as the waters rise. Mostly I was hit by the nature of it all. Mother Earth is trying to wash us away, like an infection. She, of course, will live on and renew herself. It is us I harbor deep doubts about. - RAR *Photo right from www.hydrogencommerce.com* The Bridge to Nowhere Ketchikan, Alaska's famous "bridge to nowhere" - the proposed Gravina Island Bridge - is getting a great deal of attention this election season, touted by John McCain and Sarah Palin, who killed the project, as the perfect example of "pork barrel spending." The bridge, you will remember, was championed by defamed Alaska Senator Ted Stevens, who managed to get $398 million earmarked for the project that would create a bridge over the Tongass Narrows that separates Ketchikan from it's airport. You can see the air strip (situated on Gravina Island), the narrows, and the "town" of Ketchikan in the Google satellite image on the right. Ketchikan's airport is the second busiest in Southeast Alaska, after the airport at Juneau. It services around 200,000 passengers each year and those that cross the narrows to Ketchikan (Population 7,845 in 2002) do so by ferry. That service runs regularly, every 15 minutes in the summer tourist season, every 30 minutes the rest of the year, and about 350,000 fares are paid on those ferries annually. The population of Gravina Island numbers only 50. The "bridge to nowhere" tag always strikes me as humorous, because these Southeastern Alaskan "cities" - there are tiny populations, usually numbering less than 100 citizens, dotting the Alaskan "panhandle" - are all isolated communities and none of them are connected by roadways. I am sure they don't appreciate being thought of as "nowhere" destinations, though that is largely what they are: dead ends. One doesn't drive from location to location in Southeast Alaska. To get from Ketchikan to Sitka, Skagway, or the state capitol in Juneau, you must use the state's well-developed ferry system or go by air. As you can see from the Google image, the "bridge to nowhere" was going to lead to a limited roadway infrastructure that also goes "nowhere" outside of Ketchikan itself. Southeast Alaska doesn't really have anything but "roads to nowhere." The main road out of Juneau, for instance, goes north out of town up to Auke Bay and then just sort of peters out in the wilderness, or at least that's the way it was when I lived there for eight of the longest months of my life back in 1983-84. Auke Bay, I am told, has been developed a little bit since I was there, but beyond a campus of the University of Alaska there isn't much out there in the woods. There are some small residential developments, a post office, and a ferry terminal. The Gravina Island Bridge was labeled "pork barrel spending" because it is impossible to justify so much expense for so little benefit. People are presently getting across the Gravina Narrows quite easily via the ferry system, and while 350,000 crossings (each year) might seem like significant traffic, the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco handles 118,000 vehicles every single day. And while the Golden Gate Bridge is an important commuter and tourist asset, and therefore an important part of the Bay Area economy, there wasn't much likelihood that the Gravina Island Bridge was going to represent any kind of an economic stimulus for Ketchikan, which like all the Southeast Alaska cities is dependent upon tourism as lumber milling and fishing has declined over time. Governor Palin first supported the Gravina Island Bridge project, but then canceled it after it became a hot potato and Sen. Stevens started getting heat for his ability to steer federal funds into projects in his enormous but enormously unpopulated state. It is worth noting that while Palin canned the $398M earmark for the bridge, she retained the $29M earmarked for roadway projects in Ketchikan. It is expensive to maintain infrastructure in Alaska. To a U.S. public that had never heard of the Gravina Island Bridge project until it became iconic for "pork barrel" politics, the story now has two facets: Stevens the federal funds pirate, and Palin the crusader for responsible government. It should have a third, however, that being civics and information thereof. Civics you ask, perhaps perplexed? It seems to me that every time some congress person gets investigated for channeling funds into his or her state that person gets vilified as if they are doing something they are not supposed to do. That awful Sen. Stevens, for instance, must be a terrible man, a danger to the public! He should probably go to prison. If you didn't know anything about Ted Stevens, you might feel that way. If you lived in Alaska, however, you likely see Ted Stevens entirely differently. Here are a few interesting facts about the "good" Senator: n He is an Indiana native, born in Indianapolis in 1923. n In December 2008, Stevens will celebrate his 40th year in the U.S. Senate. n He is a WW II veteran, a pilot who flew transport planes in support of the famous "Flying Tigers," primarily supporting Chinese units fighting the Japanese. His commendations include the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal from the U.S., and the Yuan Hai medal, awarded by the Chinese Nationalist Government. n He is a graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law who headed for Washington D.C. upon completion of college. n Stevens went to work for the law firm of Northcutt Ely, which specialized in natural resource issues. Stevens was assigned to client firm Usibelli Coal Mine of Healy, Alaska, whose primary interest was in selling coal to the military. n He worked for the Eisenhower campaign of 1952, writing papers on water and land issues. n He moved to Fairbanks in 1953 (on a six-month trial basis) to accept a job with the Alaska legal firm that represented Usibelli Coal. n He returned to Washington D.C. in 1956 as a legal counsel for the Department of the Interior. n He engaged in illegal lobbying for Alaska's statehood, something brewing since 1943, and wrote part of the Alaska Statehood Act, which finally passed in 1958 after previous attempts at passage died in the U.S. Senate. n Stevens was named "Alaskan of the Century" in 2000. Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport, renamed for him in 2000, is the largest airport in the state. The "civics lesson" in all of this Stevens history is that one man's crook is another man's Senator. That is the nature of representative government: the job of elected officials is to steer available funds into their districts and states, and in large part how "good" they are at their jobs is determined by how effectively they accomplish these financial transactions. Stevens has been incredibly good at it. He is to Alaska what George Washington is to America, the difference being that Stevens has been involved in crafting legislation in ways that old wooden teeth never was. A great deal of Stevens' legislation has been designed to flood federal funds into his state. In July of 2008, Stevens was indicted by a Federal Grand Jury on seven counts of falsely reporting gifts from one of Stevens' interests, the oil-field services VECO Corporation. Investigations had uncovered bribes paid by VECO representatives to Stevens' son Ben, who is now a former Alaskan state senator. That led the IRS to look into Stevens' home improvement projects, which may have been gifts from VECO. In fact, there have been all kinds of investigations into Stevens' tenacity in fighting for federal funds that lined the pockets of his Alaskan business associates. Ted Stevens has brought home the bacon, and one wonders where Alaska would be without him. There was not a great deal of support for granting Alaska statehood. President Eisenhower was opposed to the idea, primarily because the state's resources, in his view, needed to remain the territorial property of the U.S. government, which would be lost if Alaska controlled itself as a fully vested state. Stevens wrote a special section of the Alaska Statehood Act to appease Eisenhower, giving the federal government the authority to cease those resources as required to meet extraordinary national security needs. The authority has never been used. In truth, Alaska is nothing other than a humongous playground for outdoor recreation, a marginal tourist magnet, and a vast ocean of energy resources. It is too awful a climate to be anything more, practically unlivable for at least half of each year. The population, which totals less than that of the smallish city of San Francisco, tends to be tough, independent-minded pioneer types who have an innate distaste for "the lower forty-eight," as they refer to the contiguous United States. There is a natural antipathy there toward the soft citizens of the main part of the nation, and an odd association with the other outlying territory turned state, Hawaii. (Alaskans in the past have gotten great airfare deals to their sister state, and have tended to think of Hawaii as their alternative to the winter doldrums, which has not been lost on the tourist bureau of the Aloha State.) Alaskans get an annual stipend just for living in Alaska, which must tell you something about life conditions up north, where alcoholism is a huge problem and people are allowed to have as much as 4 ounces of marijuana in their homes provided it is for personal use, not resale. Recent polls in the state show 74 percent support for medical marijuana, which one assumes every state resident would qualify for, because loss of appetite occurs naturally amid misery. If Stevens and his cronies, responsible for inventing this god forsaken place as an outpost for human beings, feel like they ought to get some benefits, in the form of graft for their services, is it any wonder? Corporations need incentives, because without them there is no reason to weather Barrow and Prudhoe Bay, Anchorage and Fairbanks in winter, and even Juneau in the rainy season, which in my experience lasts from now until forever, other than for the freak sunny day, when you can see the Bald Eagles sweeping down out of the trees to pluck salmon right out of the water. Those anomalous moments of blue skies and temperate conditions are almost worth the price of admission, which in the context of our "civics" lesson is the bribes we pay through guys like Stevens to keep the place open. I am not saying Stevens' and his cronies' graft and corruption is right, but it occurs to me that it can be justified, like hazard duty pay and time-and-a-half overtime. Certainly the Gravina Island Bridge was a boondoggle, a true causeway to nowhere, except that it would have provided jobs for Alaskans desperately in need of employment options, and would have created an infusion of cash to a Ketchikan economy that has little going for itself. That is really what the bridge was imagined for. It was a bit of pork designed to keep the lights on at the first stop north along that pearly strand of Southeastern Alaskan towns leading to the rich in-country resources of the state of corporate Alaska. - RAR