Election 2012 Voter Suppression! or "I Got Them Jim Crow Blues"

There are  various Republican-dominated state legislatures from Texas to Pennsylvania engaged in promoting a passel of new laws  designed to disenfranchise as many young, minority-group and working-class voter as possible to ensure continued ascendancy of their party.  The voter identification laws have been challenged at the federal level by Attorney General Eric Holder and will likely face stiff court battles from citizens groups who will not take the disfranchisement of millions (an estimated 700,000 in Pennsylvania alone, and a million voters in Texas, the biggest states involved)  in their respective states lying down.

This goes beyond the sort of healthy rough-and-tumble politics we have had for generations in the United States.  This is a giant step backwards to a time when wealthy groups used racism and gender-hegemony  and xenophobia against immigrant groups to create a solution to a "problem"---the problem of a mature and open democracy. 

 

The "dangerously radical" idea put forth by many of the Jeffersonian/Jacksonian groups in early America was that an expanded voting franchise was the natural outgrowth of the great Enlightenment experiment in perfecting government. But to the elites there was  an inherent flaw--a flaw first grasped upon by elitist forces like the Federalist Party of Alexander Hamilton in the 1790's.  The "flaw" is that the "common man" is not to be trusted with the public business.

This elitism had to give way as Western Expansion gave more and more power to voting arenas far from the major cities of the eastern seaboard. The Jacksonian Democrats fought for reform of the franchise for all white men-- taking it as politically feasible.   Then came the issue of slavery and freedom and its containment that sent 650,000 men to their graves  and wounded and nearly destroyed a nation. There are many causes cited for the American Civil War, but one of them has to be that a  powerful agrarian-based culture in the South would not yield to the idea that slavery was a pernicious evil and they were on the wrong side of history to wish for its expansion. Eradication had already happened in nations as diverse from each other as Great Britain  and Russia.   

  To block the newly-freed slaves from voting after the war, the "Jim Crow Laws " were instituted.  A quick refresher course in them shows their long-lasting power in many states. 

"The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws in the United States enacted between 1876 and 1965. They mandated de jure racial segregation in all public facilities in Southern states of the former Confederacy, with, starting in 1890, a “separate but equal” status for African Americans. The separation in practice led to conditions that tended to be inferior to those provided for white Americans, systematizing a number of economic, educational and social disadvantages. De jure segregation mainly applied to the Southern United States. Northern segregation was generally de facto, with patterns of segregation in housing enforced by covenants, bank lending practices, and job discrimination, including discriminatory union practices for decades."

from Wikipedia entry "Jim Crow Laws"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws

    The established order of institutional racism and laws that extended to voter supression of poor whites with onerous literacy tests at the polls were all predicated by the notion that African-Americans and many upstart poor people of all stripes were easily swayed by "outside agitators"  (northerners, "radicals" of any stripe from liberal to Communist, union organizers, et al.)  Many of these "agitators" were citizens falsely tarnished as "unAmerican" or tarnished as being in league with Moscow or Greenwich Village, whichever suited the slanderer.

  

Voter suppression 1.0  (Old school)  

 

Also targeted were human rights advocacy groups like  the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the National Association for the Advancent of Colored People (NAACP), dissenting Christian organizations who organized boycotts and demonstrations led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Rev. Ralph Abernathy, and Rev William Sloane Coffin. One of the men who fought back in the 1950s and 60 against Jim Crow is Congressman John Lewis. He had been badly injured in a police riot by cops during a peaceful march from Montgomery to  Selma Alabama. 

"On March 7, 1965, 525 civil rights activists began a march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. Just outside Selma, heavily armed police and deputies broke up the march with billy clubs and tear gas, injuring sixty-five people and hospitalizing 17 in a melee that became known as "Bloody Sunday."

That same year President Lyndon Johnson got a Voting Rights Act thorough Congress and signed  the most signifigant piece of Civil Rights legislation for the first time in US history since the years directly after the end of the Civil War.  

Lewis stood his ground again in May of this year over a reintroduction of "states rights" skullduggery, and against a Congressman from his own state of Georgia who wanted to gut the Voting Rights Act.  

 voter suppression debate: t a         

 Most would say these are battles that have been fought and won and the "bad old days" are behind America.  But the straight linear path of progress occasionally gets caught for a spin.   

 

It's clear that Jim Crow 2.0 will not feature men in white robes and flaming torches burning the crops and houses of blacks people and immigrants.  But it is also clear that the aim  of these measures is the same---to protect the conservative status quo from the college students, poor seniors, non-Cuban Latinos (especially those in Texas where new Congressional Districts should help Hispanics gain representation), African Amerians and others  from voting.      

From the Associated Press:

The numbers suggest that the legitimate votes rejected by the laws are far more numerous than are the cases of fraud that advocates of the rules say they are trying to prevent. Thousands more votes could be in jeopardy for this November, when more states with larger populations are looking to have similar rules in place.

More than two dozen states have some form of ID requirement, and 11 of those passed new rules over the past two years largely at the urging of Republicans who say they want to prevent fraud.

Democrats and voting rights groups fear that ID laws could suppress votes among people who may not typically have a driver’s license, and disproportionately affect the elderly, poor and minorities. While the number of votes is a small percentage of the overall total, they have the potential to sway a close election. Remember that the 2000 presidential race was decided by a 537-vote margin in Florida.

A Republican leader in Pennsylvania said recently that the state’s new ID law would allow Romney to win the state over President Barack Obama.

Another Pennsylvania official estimated that state’s law could impact more than 750,000 voters there. As Mother Jones has recently reported, 11 percent of all adults of voting age currently don’t have a valid photo ID. Of them, blacks make up the largest group.

Adults without a valid photo ID

 

         

 

 

 

 

 

The fight goes on.  

 

 

"Pity the Billionaire: The Hard Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right" (2012)

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Nonfiction
Author:	Thomas Frank

In 2003, Thomas Frank (a former writer for "The Wall Street Journal" who contributes to Harper's and other periodicals) previously penned the insightful "What's the Matter With Kansas?" A best-selling tome that traced how one American midwest state changed from being a hot-bed of progressive politics in the 1900's to a bastion of conservatism a century later.

Frank has now written a book to explain one of the knotty problems of recent US politics: how the free-market, hard line de-regulators of corporate capitalism (the GOP) emerged as the dominant party in the 2010 Elections s despite the tremendous losses in the economy just two years earlier under the Bush-Cheney Administration.

Mr. Frank shows in short and snappy prose how the far right revitalized itself and used corporate power to finance a lightning-fast conservative revival with the help of former Bush campaign guru Karl Rove, former Congressman Dick Armey's lobbying prowess and the money from the likes of billionaire Charles Koch and his brother in an alliance to "change the story" of the Wall Street banking crash and the mortgage crisis into a government plot rather than a failure of the heights of investment macro-capitalism and shady schemes like the credit-default swap and toxic securities games that led to the worst downfall in economic US history since the Crash of 1929 and subsequent free-fall.

Frank's book follows the rise of the American Tea Party and its appeal to the simple and accessible heartland-narrative that everything the government does is wrong and all regulations are bad because they hurt "small" business (i.e., multi-national banking and financial speculators and bond and futures traders.) Frank spends a good deal of the book showing the rise of unlikely "populists" like the commentator Glenn Beck and the enduring power of the super-capitalist propaganda writer Ayn Rand to help explain the "intellectual energy" behind the movement.

This book is a very good analysis of how the right wing of America continues to regroup over and over again (for the fourth time in forty years if you count the rise of Richard Nixon's "Silent Majority" in 1968, The Reagan "Revolution" of the 1980s and Newt Gingrich and the "Contract With America" movement in 1994.) Counting the recent upsurge in 2010 and its apparent that, like clockwork, every dozen years or so, a "thunder on the right" campaign emerges from the boardrooms and think-tanks of the American rightward establishment. And, s far, each time said movement is more radical rather than conservative than the last movement. So radical indeed that previous leaders like Nixon and Reagan would be considered too soft to lead the movements they inspired not so long ago.

Here's a portion of Frank's main themes in the book, taken from a analysis he wrote on the "Reuters" website: http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2012/01/12/how-everyone-got-the-right-wrong/

"Rather than acknowledge that they had enjoyed thirty years behind the wheel, they declared that they had never really got their turn in the first place. The true believers had never actually been in charge, the “Conservative Ascendancy” never really existed—and therefore, the disastrous events of recent years cast no discredit on conservative ideas themselves. The solution was not to reconsider conservative dogma; it was to double down, to work even more energetically for the laissez-faire utopia.

"Pure idealism of this sort is unusual in American politics, however, and the jaded men of the commentariat sat back and waited for the system to punish the wayward ones, for the magnetic pull of the “center” to work its corrective magic. But this time the gods didn’t intervene in the usual way. In 2010, a radicalized GOP scored its greatest victory in congressional elections in many decades.

'The simplest explanation for the conservative comeback is that hard times cause people to lash out at whoever is in power. In 2010, that happened to be Democrats. Ergo, their rivals staged a comeback. But surely the two parties are not simply interchangeable, like Coke and Pepsi. They are able to control their own fate to some degree, to differentiate themselves from each other. Besides, history provides enough examples of public sentiment moving consistently in a particular direction to show that it need not always flop aimlessly back and forth."

Yet flop the average "independent voter" who bothered to vote in 2010 did--flopping right back into the main party that led the way (along with pliable semi-conservative Democrats) to the sub-prime mortgage/toxic securitization scams that put us in trouble in the first place!

Oh, well. At least I feel better having read this engaging 187 page book. I now at least understand better how the swindlers operated.

Here's an interview with the author from January.





For access to Thomas Frank's recent essays: http://www.tcfrank.com/essays.php

Bay Area News Pioneer Belva Davis--"Never In My Wildest Dreams"

Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 60's-70's and early 80's, I used to watch Belva Davis on television. She was  a television news anchor first on CBS Channel 5 (KPIX) and later on the main Public Broadcasting station in the Bay Area, KQED, which she hosted a nightly news program called "A Closer Look" and later a show called "This Week in Northern California."   She and the erudite Rollin Post were my favorite news people on the tube.    

I realized she was unique in being an African-American Woman on the television, but I didn't know  she was the only African American female anchor west of the Mississippi.   Or that her life was so interesting and so remote from the past I imagined.  Thanks to her fortitude and inner power to overcome the racism endemic in a high-profile business she did excellent work in documentaries and interviews and captured a lot of those times--which included riots in Berkeley over the Vietnam War, the rise and violence swirling and surrounding  the Black Panther movement, the Zebra and  Zodiac mass murders of the early 70's, the firing of radical UCLA Professor Angela Davis by the then-Governor Ronald Reagan,  the kidnapping of Patty Hearst in 1974, the mass killings of 900 people in Guyana in November 1978 by the demonic Jim Jones and his People's Temple followers and the assassinations of Mayor George Moscone and America's first openly-Gay supervisor,  Harvey Milk, at the San Francisco City Hall that  very same month. 

Her memoir tells these stories as well as her own---a child raised by her aunt in Monroe, Louisiana--the same town that Black Panther Huey Newton came from--and her coming to California with her family when jobs in military plants opened up in World War II.  I know a lot of people have never heard of this lady, but I think at least the broad outlines of her life is worth hearing about.   And she's still working.

 Here is a introduction to Ms. Davis from the PBS News Hour .    

NFL Football: Shootings and Viscous Beatings Now Part of "Fan Culture"?

(above, police try to get security situation established after shooting in the parking lot outside Candlestick Park, San Francisco after a Niner-Raider game on August 20th 2011.)


Last Saturday night, the San Francisco Forty-Niners and the Oakland Raiders played a meaningless exhibition football game. It was the so-called annual "Battle of the Bay". Normally this minor event, minor in all ways given the records of the teams these last seven or eight years, has all the newsworthiness of a 30-second wrap-up segment on local news or ESPN or NFL-TV.

Fan fights at football and baseball games at San Francisco's Candlestick Park and other venues are nothing new. I've been to Candlestick many times and saw how excessive taunters, drunken rowdies and plain stupid people would get into brief brawls before they were escorted to the holding pens to wait for the law to deal with them or just kicked out of the stadium.

I've witnessed fights--more like scuffles--among inebriates in the parking lots before and after the games. They were usually a mild distraction for people getting to and from the stadium and usually were not serious.

What happened Saturday is an exception, a ramping up of violence that now includes gunplay and fights that appear to be more related to some type of hooliganism on a broad scale.


Both teams have played some of the most really mediocre football in their respective NFC/AFC divisions over the past few seasons. The Raiders have been a shadow of their once legendary selves, as have the Forty Niners the onetime "Team of the 80's"' Just watching the Forty Niners new coach Jim Harbaugh and his staff trying to reboot 2005's Number One draft pick Alex Smith into the starting quarterback role--yet again--- after six seasons of sub-par play is painful enough.


But to see this low-rent rivalry turn so ugly is much, much worse and totally inappropriate.

Violence is never a great thing. But at a sporting event with kids and ordinary fans being put into danger over a lousy exhibition game is way over the top and needs to stop now.

Some thugs, strident fans, gang members, meth-addled gun hoods, whatever, decided it would be a good thing to come to a game and create havoc. Seventy people of both sexes were ejected from the game for fighting. (The normal is about twenty.) Shots were fired. Blood was spilled. At least one person is on the hospital with multiple gun-shot wounds. No arrests have been made in the multiple shootings mostly after the game, which raises serious questions about stadium security, which was supposed to be on heightened alert.

I was glad to see this morning that the 49ers have banned tailgating parties after the start of the games and will pull season tickets for any fans who instigate violence.

One can't expect a perfect world inside a sports exhibition. A friend of mine once got hit in the face for accidently spilling a part of his beer on a guy's shoes. I guess there is some connection between male pride and a sports event which brings out the pathetic losers who saw one too many Steven Seagal movies growing up.

But, given the prices that the NFL charges for their games and the parking fees and the concession prices, decent people with wives and children can and should expect reasonable security. If not, let their be no more "Battle of the Bay" exhibition or regular season games at candlestick until the cops and the 49er organization at least get their act together.

When Did "Flaming" on the Internet Pass For Argument?

"Flaming, also known as bashing, is hostile and insulting interaction between Internet users. Flaming usually occurs in the social context of an Internet forum,  Internet Relay Chat (IRC), use net , by e-mail...and on video sharing websites. It is frequently the result of the discussion of heated real-world issues such as politics, sports, religion, and philosophy, or of issues that polarise subpopulations, but can also be provoked by seemingly trivial differences."--Wikipedia

 

I found myself checking out my You Tube website this morning, to see if any messages I left weeks and months back thanking or commenting on videos had elicited any responses. I only do this once every few months.

 

  It turned out I had several responses back to my past comments. A couple of them were nice--people acknowledging my thanking them for posting some rare video clip or something. I never expect that but its a nice gesture.

But the majority of comments on what I thought were simple corrections or reasonable rebuttals backed up by facts as I knew them, were  hostile. It was suggested that (a) I must be on drugs (b) a brainwashed idiot who takes orders from a cable television news station and (c) simply brain-dead.  A couple of the other comments were backed up by the kind of foul language I personally reserve for when I accidentally fall off the roof while mucking out the gutters.  

If you've been around the Internet, visited You Tube or a small to regional newspaper "comments" site or any website where politics, sports, religion, or any debate-able matter is open for discussion, you'll know what I mean.  You Tube itself has started to cut off commentary on many videos if they have a glut of these angry missives. Other still open have page after page of this junk that passes for "debate." I went through a couple sites today and was disheartened to see there was no end to some of the crud that passed for argument. Is this what has become of the  greatest personal communication  system since the invention of the telephone?

By now many experienced hands on the 'Net are saying "Well, what do you expect, Doug?"  Same old, same old as they say. Well, frankly, I think things are getting worse out there, not better.  And that's my point.    

 

Shouldn't more web users be getting the knack of this by now?  Why do more sites seem polluted by rancor and nastiness.  When did typing "you suck" (and that's just the lowest level of abuse) become a clever debating gambit?  What is It about the anonymity of the web that causes people to sink to the verbal level of a childhood schoolyard, or at the worst a prison exercise yard?    

CNN's Tod Leopold interviewed a communications professor on this subject for a November 2008 article. Here's a portion of it: 

  

"One reason for the vitriol that emerges on the Web, experts say, is the anonymity the Internet provides. Commenters seldom use their real names, and even if they do, the chance for retaliation is slim.

"'In the [pre-Internet era], you had to take ownership [of your remarks]. Now there's a perception of anonymity," said Lesley Withers, a professor of communication at Central Michigan University. "People think what they say won't have repercussions, and they don't think they have to soften their comments."

"'Contrast that with a face-to-face conversation, or even a phone conversation, where you can judge people's moods from facial movements or vocal inflections, observes University of Texas psychology professor Art Markman. "It's hard to be aggressive when you're face to face," he said.

"Moreover, he points out, aggression often carries a subtext of power.

"'A lot of times, real anger is an attempt to get control over a situation where the person doesn't usually have it," he said. In that respect, comments to blog posts are attempts to strike back.'"

http://articles.cnn.com/2008-11-03/tech/angry.internet_1_web-sites-blog-posts-nonverbal-communication?_s=PM:TECH

 

Let me first off say that I am not talking flaming from any of my regular friends here on Multiply.  People seem to be able to disagree here and there and get along okay. Those who want to spew  some kind of personal attack on me can have at it here--to a point.

Those strangers who come along to my site just to raise ire for the sake of drawing anger---well, horseman or woman, please gallop on by. 

 

Criticism I can handle.  Most people can.  But what I'm seeing on under-monitored sites is appalling. I'm curious what if other people have experienced this flaming lately and if they think this is getting better or worse?    

George Washington and the Modern "tea party"; A Bad Fit

Where George Washington and Today's Tea Party Part Company 

Nothing in contemporary American politics irks me quite as much as how the so-called "tea party" movement wraps their collective selves up as representing the best interests of  the Founding Fathers of America. It is one thing to dress up as Continental Soldiers with tricorner hats and shout "No taxes" slogans and wave "Don't Tread on Me" flags from the 1770's. It is another to acurately reflect the history of that period. 

They simply don't do their homework about the schisms between those like Alexander Hamilton who saw a need for the United States to be a manufacturing power and those Jeffersonians who feared the rule of urban financiers and favored an agrarian economic system.  We have had schisms in our nation from its founding: they cannot be reconciled as being of little consequence except by the ignorant activists among us who see wrapping themselves up in revolutionary garb as a way to rationalize away their desire to pay less taxes and let someone else bear the costs for endless wars and balancing state budgets.  

As Professor Paul Henriques of George Mason University in Virginia  writes: 

'In seeking to reconcile Hamilton and Jefferson (whose views were every bit as divergent as those of the tea party and Obama are today), the president eloquently urged forbearance: "I would fain hope that liberal allowances will be made for the political opinions of one another; and instead of those wounding suspicions and irritating charges there might be mutual forebearances and temporizing yieldings on all sides, without which I do not see how the reins of government are to be managed."

For the full article, please see the link below:  

 http://www.deseretnews.com/article/print/700078995/Would-Washington-join-the-tea-party.html

From the 2008 HBO Mini-Series "John Adams"--Paul Giamatti is Vice President Adams, Stephen Dillane is Secretary of State Jefferson, Rufus Sewell is Secretary of the Treasury Hamilton, and David Morse is President Washington.  

California: Dreams of Clean Energy Deferred?

Most people know that California is the largest state by population (37 million and rising) in the United States.  It has often been said that what happens in California will remake the nation.  It has been boasted that "The Golden State" by itself has one of the ten largest economies in the world. 

That's why any major proposition put forward to direct vote of the population can have a major effect on America and the world. The most recent of these is Proposition 23, an effort sponsored by a Texas oil money and supported by the far-right "Tea Party" movement could, if passed, pose a major setback to a cleaner global environment.

A little history: in 2006, California's GOP Governor Arnold Swarznegger, signed AB 32, a bill that would roll back total emissions from the state to 1990 levels by promoting more renewable and "green" technology, by instituting a "cap and trade" energy policy and promote non-carbon solar, biofuel and wind technologies to the point that these alternative fuels wills represent 33 percent of all energy use by 2020.  

 What Proposition 23 would do is to suspend this bill's provisions for cleaner air and reducing climactic impact by petroleum and coal based technology.   It would suspend such laws until the total unemployment rate in the state falls to 5.5 percent (it currently stands at 12 percent). Almost 74 percent of the funding for this proposition comes from out-of-state oil companies Tesoro and Valero, and Flint Hills Resources, a petrochemical company owned by Charles and David Koch, Kansas billionaires who have pumped millions in big money into dozens of political causes this year

Here's Governor Swarznegger's   take on the Brothers Koch.  

They’re not interested in our environment; they are only interested in greed and filling their pockets with more money.

 

 Although the "No" forces have a narrow lead, some polls show this Proposition might still pass,  a serious setback to putting less junk in the atmosphere for kids and elderly people to breathe and making global climate change worse. 

The fact is California's decision here does have an impact on the global future. And it also  sends a message that at least 15 percent of America's population serious about changing the future of our children for the better.    

This is not strictly a "liberal" movement--many Republican leaders including the GOP candidate for governor, Meg Whitman, oppose 23. But the traditional American fear of "government intervention" serves the interests of the oil and gas companies who want to hold back this law from taking full effect.

One can only hope Californians will not let a down economy blind them to a better future.  

Here are some more details on this important measure and the bad effects that will occur if it does pass.  

Here's more on the bill from the Earthjustice website.  

Financed by Texas oilmen, Proposition 23 would suspend A.B. 32, which has put in place the nation's strongest standards governing greenhouse gas emissions. If it passes, this deadly proposition could have impacts that cascade across the state of California, nation and even into the international community. Here's a quick look at what Prop 23 could do if it passes:

• Kill Clean Energy Jobs: More than 500,000 Californians now work in clean tech jobs in the state, and since 2005, California green jobs have grown 10 times faster than other sectors of the state's economy.

• Pollute Our Air, Endanger Our Health: Prop. 23 would let oil companies and other polluters off the hook by suspending requirements to clean up their acts, drastically increasing air pollution and public health risks. 

• Keep Us Addicted to Costly Oil: At the exact moment when California's wind, solar and other renewable energy technologies are starting to reduce our energy costs, Prop. 23 would protect polluters and send a message that the United States cannot keep up with Japan, Europe and China, who are taking the lead in renewable energy production.

• Undermine Environmental Laws: Not only would Prop. 23 indefinitely repeal A.B. 32, it would also threaten dozens of other regulations in California—laws that Earthjustice uses every day to clean up pollution in the state.

U.S. Congressman Challenges Shadowy Opponents

This story concerns Peter DeFazio, a Democrat who represents Oregon's Fourth Congressional District, which encompasses its second largest city (Eugene) and part of its coastal population. DeFazio has not had any serious opposition for re-election (in 2008 he run election for the 10th time with over eighty percent of the vote.) 

His main opponent is Art Robinson, a little-known science professor whose major issue seems to be refuting the idea of human-caused global warming. Oh, and he also came out for abolishing the public school system, the entire system I guess, calling it "socialist education."  Given that Mr. DeFazio's district is  home to one of  the best public education institutions in the Northwest, The University of Oregon, you would think Professor Robinson was waging a quixotic campaign. And it would be a hopeless task for a man so out of touch with this constituency.  But where his ideas might fail him, unlimited money from anonymous sources  are given the challenger a boost. 

Why anonymous sources and why unlimited money you ask?  

After the Democratic Landslide elections of 2008, the Supreme Court of the United States of which a majority of Justices and its Chief Justice were  appointed by conservative Presidents, decided to overturn a 100-year old law banning direct corporate spending in political campaigns.  The decision came from a case called Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission.

From a news article from National Public Radio: 

"As a result of the Supreme Court's ruling, groups such as Americans for New Leadership and Concerned Taxpayers for America have come out to take advantage of the new rules. Some of these groups are known as 501c4's, which is a tax designation; others are simply referred to as "super-PACS."

"Under the new rules, these groups are not required to say who they are or how they're funded, and it's very difficult to find out any information about them."

So now politicians all over the country whose views are not simpatico with investment bankers, private medical insurance companies, hospitals, and wealthy people who before would have had to declare themselves against  a candidate to donate money  to see his or her defeat are now protected from any scrutiny whatsoever by law. 

Which means the money can come from anywhere--even a foreign country--and no one has a right to know where it came from or who it is behind the funding. 

Which brings us to Concerned Taxpayers for America, the shadow group that just threw  80,000 dollars into a television ad buy against De Fazio.  Much more money is likely to be in the pipeline from "Concerned Taxpayers for America", whomever they are,as the November 2nd Election draws nearer.  

"Is this a corporation? Is it one very wealthy, right-wing individual? Is it a foreign interest? Is it a drug gang?" DeFazio said. "We don't know."The names behind those voices apparently will remain a mystery - at least until the organization has to make a quarterly filing to the FEC in October. (from "The Washington Post").

Determined to find out where this money was coming from, DeFazio, accompanied by reporters from the Washington Post, went to an address in Washington that was supposed to be the headquarters of Concerned Citizens. He personally knocked on the door of the Washington townhouse that had been left on a filing paper for the political action group. 

This is a transcript and part of an article from The Huffington Post, from September 26, 2010:

The Huffington Post, along with a couple of journalists from The Washington Post, accompanied DeFazio on the short walk from the Rayburn House Office Building over to Concerned Taxpayers' headquarters, listed as 10 E St, SE, which turned out to be a small grey townhouse. DeFazio had to ring the doorbell, knock, and yell through the mail slot before someone came to the door. The man identified himself as Mike Omegna and he told the congressman that he had never heard of Miller or Concerned Taxpayers, nor was his voice on the organization's voicemail:

DEFAZIO: You don't know Jason Miller?

OMEGNA: No. No, I don't, sir. ... I rent this place. [...]

DEFAZIO: Did you ever hear of Concerned Taxpayers of America? 

OMEGNA: Nope. [...]

WASHINGTON POST: You're on the [voice] message, aren't you?

OMEGNA: Am I? I shouldn't be.

DEFAZIO: So you know nothing about Concerned Taxpayers for America, and you're not forwarding calls.

OMEGNA: No.

DEFAZIO: You're just a renter?

OMEGNA: Yes.

"These people must be really scared of revealing who they really are, or they wouldn't be having a blind drop and someone who's probably misrepresenting themselves answering the door," DeFazio told reporters after the incident.

 

 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/24/peter-defazio-concerned-taxpayers-ambush_n_738532.html 

Art Robinson for his part says he has no idea where the campaign money is coming from, but they have already spent more money for him than he could raise for himself. One would hope the Federal Election Commission rules will shed some light for the voters of Oregon on just who these donors are.  

But why would anyone or any entity want to spend millions to  take down a relatively obscure Congressman like DeFazio. Well, this speech The maverick Oregon Democrat delivered  in September of 2008, on the eve of the Bush Administration's  700 billion dollar bailout of major investment banks, might have something to do with that. DeFazio bucked both parties leaders in the Congress on this. one.     

It is enshrined in law that people are entitled to a secret ballot; the question is today:  are they entitled to spend millions secretly working against a candidate with modern media ads?  How are the voters supposed to tell where the shadowy interests of these few people (or one person) or company or foreign entity lies---until too late? 

De Fazio is probably--my finger crossed-- going to hold unto his seat.  Oregonians have a tradition of electing Representatives and senators who are always a little out-of-step with their colleagues from BOTH major political parties. 

But with the Republicans running an estimated 7-1 advantage in money raised by these new "Super PACs", what Congressperson in a tough re-election  fight elsewhere is likely to want to investigate a company doing business with the government, let's say, if said company can attack that Representative with the impunity of a cloak of secrecy for much if not all of the campaign season?  

  

Newsweek Magazine

Rating:	★★
Category:	Other

I have been a regular subscriber to "Newsweek" for the past thirty years. Although I never relied on it to give me more than a primary source of national and international news and commentary, I always got what I felt was a good cross-section of solid reporting from journalists in many of their two dozen bureaus around the world.

Since May of 2009, however, the New York-based magazine has underwent a complete makeover. According to managing editor Jon Meachem, this was supposed to make the news weekly more engaging to the subscriber.

What it has done in reality is simply reduce the amount of in-depth news coverage in favor of a more like the old lightweight "Life" Magazine style of photo-happy periodicals of the past---with lots more big pictures that take up two pages to introduce a three-page story, for instance, as happened recently with an article on the Catholic Church and its role in covering recent pederast scandals. The story was short, but there was a big photo of the Virgin Mary. Go figure

This is all we don't need in the world--more fourth estate pandering to advertisers, major stories reduced to dumbed-down snippets and a higher amount of celebrity head shots and "guest columnists" like Christopher Hitchens or Henry Kissinger doing an ax job on some old enemies.

Perhaps it is no surprise that the U.S. circulation of the once-solid weekly has been cut in half in terms of subscribers in the last two years. Apparently the editors started laying off staff reporters in late 2008, leaving its core commentators. Paradoxically, the publishers have stated they plan to RAISE the subscription price to attract a more well-heeled clientele for their advertisers.

James Robinson of "The Guardian" explained part of this--to me, flawed--strategy in a May 2009 story:

"Newsweek has publicly conceded it no longer has the money for labour-intensive reporting, and comment is cheaper to produce than news, but the ex-staffer claims the strategic shift has not been prompted solely by commercial considerations. {An ex staffer said} "It's economic reality combined with a philosophy that existed years before those realities become apparent. I don't think it's going to work. Too many other titles are doing a similar thing."

"The key challenge facing both titles is how to maintain readership at a time when more people are getting their news online, the same problem newspapers have been grappling with since the turn of the century. Meachem acknowledged the dynamics of the news industry had changed several years ago, telling the American Journalism Review in 2007: "What's happening now is that headlines are delivered by the web. That has pushed newspapers to become more like the news magazines were in 1982, and it's pushed the news magazines to produce a monthly-quality product on a weekly basis, and it's pushed the monthlies into the place of the great quarterlies, and the quarterlies have become books."



What has gone wrong?

Like all media outlets, Post-Newsweek has been hit by the power of the Internet to attract eyeballs away from old-style magazines. But the reporting that Newsweek once supplied is ever more vital in a world where there are so many pundits and professional bloggers and ever fewer professional journalists who can do old-fashioned things like gather information.

My fear is we are being left in a world that is increasingly full of media hacks sitting about and pontificating and leaving the news consumer more and more bereft of facts to serve the purpose of personal critical thinking. There is, in truth, no substitute for journalistic experience and training and just watching television news (which is a joke, at least on many of the 24-Hour News stations) is an exercise in bias and special pleading. And having editorial writers is little help when they seem more and more to be writing the same three or four editorials over and over again, changing the names and the sentence structure a bit here and there to cover their tracks.

George Will and Robert Samuelson are two of the main columnists who indulge in pattern-pontificating. It was in spite of and not because of their work that I had been a faithful reader. And will continue to be I suspect...until my subscription lapses next year.

Without fact-gatherers and editorial staff sifting through the work to bring out the clearest story-lines, we are all the more ignorant of what is happening in the world regardless of where we sit in on the globe.

Hopefully other periodicals like "The Economist" will pick up the slack that the new thinner (by twenty pages on average) and glitzier Newsweek has now embarked on. We can only hope.

Rural Oregon Town Says No to Nazi Neighbors

The small eastern Oregon lumber town of 2,000 people has one of the highest unemployment rates in the western states (17 percent) and is predominately white. Yet John Day's residents are not willing to step back in the ugly past of America with endorsing or tolerating the American nazis in their midst.

 

 

The self-proclaimed leader of the Aryan Nations is some 36-year old male nuisance named Paul Mullet. He wants to move out of the Aryan Nations compound that they have in the hamlet of Athol, Idaho (in part apparently because even that remote area is becoming toxic to tender Nazis sensibilities.) The nazi leaders goal is a headquarters for his pack of primitive racists in rural Oregon. But its not working out quite as easy as the storm troopers thought:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here''s a bit of the feedback from the community the nazis have been getting:

Reinhold Niebuhr, The Health Care Fight and The "Immoral Society"

"...a 'laissez-faire' economic theory is maintained in an industrial era through the ignorant belief that the general welfare is best served by placing the least possible political constraints upon economic activity.   The history of the last hundred years is a refutation of this theory...It's survival is due to the ignorance of those who suffer  injustice from the application of this theory to modern industrial life but fail to attribute their difficulties to the social anarchy and political irresponsibility that the theory sanctions."

--Reinhold Niebuhr, "Moral Man and Immoral Society, A Study in Ethics and Politics" (1932).  

Reinhold Niebuhr (1891-1971), pictured on the left in a TIME magazine cover from the early 1950's, was considered the one of the foremost American Protestant theologians of pre and post World War II America. He wrote many books and articles about politics and ethics and was the Professor of Christian Ethics at the Union Theological Seminary in New York State from 1928 to 1960.  Prior to that he served as a pastor for thirteen years at a church in Detroit, Michigan.   Another important work of his is the book "The Irony of American History", a book that explores the conflicts between "the hopes of the founding fathers and the reality of the present situation" (i.e, America in the dawn of The Cold War.)  He has been cited as one of Barack Obama's favorite philosophers. 

After World War II, he co-founded the leftist but non-Marxist group "Americans For Democratic Action", which is still an active and leading independent progressive organization which, among other activities, watchdogs the voting records of Congressional members in both the House of Representatives and The Senate. 

Professor Niebuhr's book on morality in public life by groups and individuals seems relevant to me today not only because both Barack Obama and John Mccain cited him favorably during last year's Presidential Election, but because of the health care debate in the USA which is raging at the moment.    The current struggle can be summed up  in two competing philosophies. The first is the traditional view that nothing the government does in the domestic sphere can be of benefit to the average person.  Change from Washington or the State Houses is simply incompetence at best and a collectivist power grab at worst.  These views are all over the editorial pages of the "liberal media" newspapers, and there is a plethora of examples.  I will spare you the cacophony of those who feel the status quo in having 40-50 million uninsured Americans is only worthy of modest reform and cite just one advocate, Michael Tanner of the conservative Cato Institute, writing recently in The Los Angeles Times:

"Everyone agrees that far too many Americans lack health insurance. But covering the uninsured comes about as a byproduct of getting other things right. The real danger is that our national obsession with universal coverage will lead us to neglect reforms -- such as enacting a standard health insurance deduction, expanding health savings accounts and deregulating insurance markets -- that could truly expand coverage, improve quality and make care more affordable."

  

Herein is the usual argument: to Mr. Tanner, health care is a commodity like an automobile, dog food or a latte coffee creation for someone's morning caffeine fix.  Just let the "free market" take care of all this, add a tax cut to sweeten to pie, and all will be well.  

Such thinking did not serve the America that Professor Niebuhr's wrote about during The Great Depression.  Unregulated markets and speculation run wild had crashed the economy.  And now we face a similar era of recovery from the sins of ignorance. 

Health is most decidedly NOT simply a commodity. By it's nature it is often too expensive to purchase for those without the social protection of  decent job.  And the dangers of underinsured Americans means that 40-45 million Americans are not entitled to any primary care at all, unless it is under-borne by small-scale clinics which are underfunded.  In addition those who fail to get primary care have to resort to the emergency room to get treatment, often for conditions that are long neglected.  The result makes for sicker patients and higher bills. Today, more Americans file bankruptcy and lose their homes because of medical bills they can't pay than for any other reason.  

One of the things Niebuhr wrote about in "Moral Man..." was the need to go beyond appealing to moral principles to create a change.  Entrenched interests like the health care lobby will always try to show that their position of power is in the best interests of the country.  They will protect that.  Change can only come if enough people demand it, demand something that is so "radical" that all nations in Europe and Canada that elect governments already have some form of it--a public health care system with regulated costs and open access.  Otherwise, we will be left with the status quo, which traps people in jobs, and makes a mockery of a "free" society :

     

"Equivocation": Shakespeare Has A Story To Tell....Or Else!

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Literature & Fiction
Author:	Bill Cain

"Why me?"

These are the first words of Bill Cain's new play, "Equivocation".


The speaker is none other than William Shakespeare, chief playwright of "The King's Men", the leading "theatrical cooperative" in London. It's early in the year 1606, and the middle-aged artist is at the top of his game, having written histories,comedies and tragedies for over a decade to much acclaim. But the man who has summoned him, Robert Cecil, Secretary of State for the Kingdom of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales under James I, does not want Will to write another play about long-dead nobility from The War of the Roses, or a farce about twins separated at birth or some play about an ancient Worthy like Julius Caesar.

That stuff won't cut it this time.

Shakespeare or "Shag" (played by Anthony Heald, a very good actor who you might have seen in films of playing a judge on the series "Boston Legal) is literally made an offer he can't refuse. His majesty elevated the company of players after he came down from Scotland to rule both kingdoms in 1603, right after the death of Queen Elizabeth, the lady who put his mother, Mary of Scotland, to death fifteen years earlier.

Lord Cecil, who is akin to a Prime Minister to James, is putting the heat on "Shag"--he and His Majesty want him to put off writing the next Globe Theater production ("King Lear') and write a new play about "The Gunpowder Plot." Here is a little background courtesy of a BBC documentary, featuring the fame historian and novelist Lady Antonia Fraser :




Cecil and the King want a play about this Catholic Plot to blow up the kings and his lords. But "Shag" doesn't want to write such a play. It was normally forbidden in Tudor/Stuart England to write about current events. He wants to play it safe, let someone other writer-- Henry Beaumont, John Fletcher, Robert Middleton, et al--write this little propaganda piece that the King has already outlined.

But there are plenty of empty cells in the Tower of London for reluctant playwrights who refuse a royal demand. Thomas Kyd--who wrote the famous "Spanish Tragedy"--had been tortured by 1593 in the Tower when he ran afoul of the authorities a few years earlier. So, rather than a stretch on the rack and a cold cell, Will takes Cecil's money and goes back to the company--headed by his friend and partner, Richard Burbage--and thus commences to write and later rehearse the "official story" of the "guilty" men who stand in the Tower for treason.

As Shakespeare goes about trying to work out the King's outline of the play, he starts finding inconsistencies and implausibilities. Cecil won't supply him with reasonable answers on how the act of terrorism was supposed to be carried out. Such as "all the traitors were gentlemen--what do they know about building a tunnel big enough to carry 36 barrels of gunpowder in the first place? And all this tunnelling would take place right under Cecil's own office? Who might really gain from the discovery of such a dastardly plot. And why would James be in such haa hurry to break precedent and makes this "news event"" a popular entertainment?

For the sake of dramatic tension, Shakespeare becomes an investigator, convincing Cecil to let him talk to some of the conspirators who await execution in the Tower. He begins to see there maybe a counter-narrative to the official story--perhaps the heretical conspirators were set in motion by a "Fifth Columnist" or "False Flag" operation engineered in the highest levels of Whitehall itself. (Similar in some ways to the Babington Plot of 1587 that conned Mary, Queen of Scots, into believing she was in communication with King Philip of Spain while a prisoner of her cousin, Elizabeth. That bit of spymaster dirty-dealing cost James' mother her head. )

"Equivocation" is a play that anyone interested in Jacobean history and power politics would love. And its very relevant giving the issues of torture by "good" governments and questions about terrorism in our own times. A good deal of the subplot is provided by Mr. Cain introducing Shakespeare's youngest daughter, Judith, as a character--a sort of female servant working with her dad and keeping things tidy around the Globe "tiring house" backstage.

Judith is as sharp as a whip, and adds a lot of much needed humor in the play by her witty soliloquies, but her very presence haunts her father at times: she is the twin of his only son, Hamnet, who died before he was ten. The loss of his son has, at least in this play, made Shakespeare a different man than the young poet who was happy to make Richard III a monster if it suited the Tudor Establishment. He is more willing to reach out to those who are in pain--such as a young man who was caught by Cecil's men and is being tortured to tell all of what--apparently little--he really knows.

Cain also does a good job incorporating conjectures about Shakespeare's possible Catholic sympathies--his father, John, may have entertained priests at one time in Stratford and some historians believe Will was a tutor in a Catholic recusant estate in Lancashire before he came to London. He also has a heart-to-heart meeting in the Tower with Henry Garnet, a Jesuit Priest and spy. Here's a bit of his Wikipedia bio:

"Garnet supervised the Jesuit mission for eighteen years with conspicuous success. His life was one of constant danger, concealment and disguises. A price was put on his head; but he was brave and indefatigable in carrying on his evangelization and in ministering to the scattered Catholics, even personally going into their prisons. The result was that he gained many converts, while the number of Jesuits in England increased during his tenure of office from three to forty. It is, however, in connection with the Gunpowder Plot that he is best remembered."

Garnet's emotional and intellectual resources make him similar to Sir Thomas Moore in Robert Bolt's "Man For All Seasons"--you have to respect him highly, even if you might not have agreed with most of what he believed were he brought back to life. But was he really part of any plot? Most historians seem to think so, but others disagree. It is for those who favor the latter group who will find the conclusions drawn by this work the most satisfying.

This play has won The Edgerton Foundation 2008 New American Plays Award and will have more stagings in Seattle and San Francisco apparently next year. I hope many people who love a good intriguing bit of off-beat history will get a chance to see this superb multi-level work.

And now a bit of background from the writer himself:

Nadya "Octomom" Suleman: Motherhood as Media Sideshow

The Cult of Celebrity in America has drawn a new and so-far successful high priestess. She is Octuplets Mother Nadya Suleman and she is the woman who after already having six children went a little crazy down at Ye Old Fertility Clinic and had eight embryos put into body.  All eight were born, making her family consist of one single mother who is working on a college degree (a Masters Degree in Advanced Biology, I presume) and has little visible and legitimate means of ever supporting this baseball team of a family in the long term.  

 

 NBC News and The Oprah Winfrey Show have already done major stories about this family.   "The Today Show" in the morning devotes several minutes to this story. Only the downturn in the world economy is a bigger television story. Nadya has achieved  celebrity, for whatever short shelf-life that will bring her.  Even her mother and father are now  reluctant celebrities. . 

I have already seen the interview she did with Ann Curry on "Today". Before I could switch off  "Today" the folllowing  morning, my voyeuristic nature got the better of me. I was treated to seeing her argue with her mother on a videotape shown on "The Today Show".  Nadya's mother is having problems understanding why her daughter had so many kids after already having given birth to six.  (Grab a number and get in line, grandma.)

 It's sad.  Sad for her.  Sad for her parents, who seem like good people blindsided by the actions of their daughter.  I can only imagine what is going to happen to many of these kids when this lady suffers an inevitable breakdown when the cameras and the interviewers go away in a couple years.  (Foster Care most likely)  One television "psychiatrist" named "Dr'. Phil", whose not a real shrink but a great huckster, claims that she is "addicted  to being pregnant". Schrewd analysis there, Phil.  I would also add she is  addicted to getting her face on "People" or "Us" Magazine without going  through the trouble of becoming an actor or a model or a politician or billionaire.  

 The prime reason she had all these kids, it appears to me,  was to draw attention to herself, to use fecundity to create a cult of celebrity around herself.   It has already been reported that she had facial surgery to make herself look more like Angelina Jolie. And the media and yes, consumers of media like yours truly are  enabling her with interest in these interviews. 

Maybe Nadya can finagle some money out of these enterprises.  I honestly hope she can-without having to do anything too sordid. She is going to need some major day care services in the immediate time. And since it is estimated it now takes about $200,000 to get a child into adulthood in America, she'll need all the dealing skills and kindness of strangers  she can muster.  But at some point the media is likely to walk away and leave Ms. Suleman and her vulnerable children to their own devices.  

It's very unlikely that all this will end well for her, or these children.  Fourteen children, eight of them infants and many of the others, still young, seems to be too much for two well-established parents, much less one lady who may have an attention-addiction problem. It is reported that she is now considering an offer to appear in a porno film to make a million dollars, according to the New York Post.   Most likely the state of California  will have to step in and try and deal with the wreckage of this reckless woman actions, and those of her doctor who implanted so many potential kids into a mother of six. 

Don't get me wrong. I revere motherhood and respect ordinary women who choose to raise children without a husband.  But this is not an ordinary woman in a situation remotely manageable. If anyone sees a bright side to this developing train wreck of a story I'd love to hear it.