Healdsburg Goss

GOP Baloney

2012-02-11T06:14:00.000-08:00

President Obama is a Muslim with a deep commitment to Rev. Wright's radical Christianity, and he is waging a war on religion.

The Black Bloc Anarchists

2012-02-08T07:59:00.000-08:00

This might help explain a small corner of the news.

There are many kinds of anarchists, including Christian anarchists, nonviolent anarchists and so on. Anarchism is a set of theories, some of which are brilliant. For example, the idea that each child should have her educational needs met on an individual basis is an anarchist educational theory. The theory works--if your goal is for children to learn rapidly and happily.

If you pay attention to political demonstrations, you have probably noticed a relatively small bunch of guys in the major marches who attack buildings and smash things. Those are the Black Bloc anarchists. Groups like them have long been evident--I first met them in marches in the 1960s. They were the ones who broke windows as we marched and got us teargassed.

The Black Bloc anarchists are what Chris Hedges has called "the cancer of the Occupy movement." They are the dudes dressed in black who, after using the more positive Occupy people as human shields, break loose, attack property and confront the police. Of course the 1% savor this gift, this excuse to crack down on the 99%.

The point Hedges emphasizes is that the Black Bloc is deliberately destroying the Occupy Movement because they consider all organized movements on the Left as sell-outs. What the Black Bloc favors is petty vandalism, which they find romantic and revolutionary. Meanwhile they denounce unions, environmental organizations, Noam Chomsky (well, I denounce Chomsky but do not claim that he's a sell-out), etc. They praise the Unabomber's insane manifesto. The Black Bloc rioters lack common sense. They're like teenage boys doing 60 in a 25 mile zone, only what they kill is hope of change.

The Importance of the N-Word

2012-02-06T13:44:00.000-08:00

Quite a few years ago my friend and college roommate, Dennis Renault, drew an editorial cartoon for the Sacramento Bee in which he had a KKK member in a sheet using the term "nigger." The obvious intent of the cartoon was to attack racism--much as Mark Twain did in HUCKLEBERRY FINN--and thoughtful people understood that. Others did not. The same editorial board that had okayed the cartoon and published it, backed down as soon as some African American community leaders called for resignations, and the board issued a public apology. Seminars on the word "nigger" were held around the nation, including one on Long Island, 3,000 miles away. My wife attended that discussion, where she was told by an excellent African American law professor that no white person should use "nigger" under any circumstance. "The word is forbidden," she said.

That level of response was, in retrospect, childish. I mean that in this sense: children do not grasp irony. Neither did many of the cartoon's detractors.

That was then. Now we live in an age where a heavily racist term like "nigger" has been desensitized by rappers (at least for the young, who listen to rap). What I want to argue is a little different. I believe that "nigger" is the single most important word we know. Its contempt for other human beings points directly to the founding of this nation, which enshrined slavery in its Constitution. "Nigger" points to our original sin and one that we have hardly begun to correct.

Look at the Republican Party, home of those who claim that President Obama was born in Kenya, raised as a Muslim, graduated from Harvard without writing his own papers, etc. The tortured logic and invention of false facts dates back to the twisted intellectual defense that the South made of slavery. The South is still entrapped in rubbish. Many still believe that slavery was good for African Americans, a civilizing experience. Or they hide, as Robert E. Lee did, in the claim that the Civil War was not about slavery but was about states' rights (the right to own slaves). In fact, slavery was vicious and a curse that twists in our political system.

We need to repeat the word "nigger." It calls up a central fact of history. We would like to forget slavery, of course. We would like to forget the ugliest parts of our past and pretend that Robert E. Lee was a gentleman, not a slave whipper, but that would obscure who and what we are and what we are capable of doing again. We'd do better to keep our history in mind.

Latter-Day Saint Romney

2012-02-03T07:13:00.000-08:00

Someone recently wrote that a major problem for anchor-baby Mitty Romney is that he cannot speak about what he really cares about, not if he wants to win the Republican nomination. That's why Romney seems to be so earnestly false.

To start with, Romney's father was a liberal Republican, and Mitty was raised to be a liberal. He has to forget that. Romney's grandfather was a pluralist who moved to Mexico to practice polygamy with five wives. Best not to talk about that. I think it's safe to assume that Romney actually is a family man, but he can't discuss his family in detail without horrifying the teabagging Republicans.

Next, Romney stands before the cameras wearing a Mormon's secret religious underwear that helps remind him of sacred covenants. Many voters would find that weird if they knew about it, so Romney cannot talk in detail about his faith. Mormons have many such secrets--anyone can enter a Catholic Church, but non-Mormons are forbidden access to Mormon Temples. I assume that Romney's faith is quite genuine. That's supported by evidence. That';s all right with me--two of my grandparents were Mormons. But he'd better not tell voters that the Book of Mormon, written in the 1800s, is as sacred as the Bible. That would shock many Christians. Nor can Romney--who tithes $4 million a year to his church--tell voters that the descendants of Jacob moved to North America after the Babylonian Captivity or that America was visited by Jesus Christ after the resurrection. He can't really discuss in public the tenets of Mormonism.

Meanwhile President Obama is free to explain his view of our Christian responsibility to help one another, a belief familiar to most voters. That would seem to me to be unfair, if Romney had not devoted his working life to greed.

Our Socialist Super Bowl

2012-02-02T13:04:00.000-08:00

Martin Bashir pointed this out.

You might have noticed that in professional baseball, the same teams seem to win each year, the teams like Boston and the Yankees. They have the most money. Pro football is different. In football a team like the 49ers can be among the worst one year and among the best the next year, thanks to a form of socialism.

In 1994, the owners' and players' associations of the National Football League approved a salary cap. This cap is essentially a set amount of money that each of the NFL's 31 teams is allowed to spend on player salaries for the year. I don't know the real figures, but let's say that for the last season, the total amount of money available was $800 million. Divide that by the 31 NFL teams, and each team got to spend about $26 million. To oversimplify, each team gets what it needs; they start off even. Baseball represents the opposite theory: capitalism. The New York Yankees bring in a ton of money, so they get to buy the best players and pay them four times what a team like Oakland can afford. The Yankees hold the record for winning the most pennants. That's why rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for the Bank of America.

The GOP Jumps the Shark

2012-01-30T07:00:00.000-08:00

An expression in frequent use this year is "jumping the shark." It traces back to an ancient and sappy TV series called HAPPY DAYS and a character based on Marlon Brando's performance in THE WILD ONE. That character, of course, was the Fonz, Arthur Fonzarelli, who swaggered about in a black leather jacket, rode a motorcycle, and excelled at anything he put his hand to. In one episode of this long running sit com, the Fonz takes up water skiing, goes shooting across the ocean, encounters a large shark and jumps it. This ridiculous, over-the-top encounter was so silly that HAPPY DAYS never filmed another episode, according to myth. (It's safe to doubt that this jump had any real connection to the worn-out series ending as it did.)

So "jumping the shark" means going too far, becoming ridiculous and failing through excess. The GOP Presidential candidates, for example, have jumped the shark. Ron Paul demands we go back to the gold standard. Pretty Rick Santorum, fixated on gay men, has compared their love to "man on dog sex." Newt Gingrich wants to build a colony on the moon and make it the 51st state. Anchor baby Mitt Romney plans to treat 11 million undocumented workers with such cruelty that they will flee back to their nations of origin, particularly to Mexico, where his own father was born.

Spinner Vs. Spinner

2012-01-29T09:24:00.000-08:00

The most boring news event on television is two spinners confronting one another. This is what passes for fair coverage on CNN. The host gathers together the assistant chair of the Republican Party and the assistant chair of the Democratic Party, and the two of them recite baloney manufactured by their propaganda machines. No one learns anything. Nothing could be less interesting.

NBC has a cheaper variant. On MEET THE PRESS the nameless host saves time by inviting only one spinner, then takes the chore of the opposite spinner into his own oafish hands. When interviewing a Democratic spinner, the nameless host become a Republican spinner. If he's talking to a Republican spinner, the nameless host assumes the mask of a Democratic spinner.

The best defense against the mindless waste of time called spinning is to flip to a different channel. The minute you spot a spinner, flip. Look for panel shows where the participants are analysts or historians. Some panels contain spinners, so remain alert.

2012-01-27T17:17:00.000-08:00

In the January 30 New Yorker, Ryan Lizza has an informative article on how Washington changed President Obama. It's worth buying the magazine to read. For some time I've believed that Obama has been learning--a bit slowly--how to be President. There is a lot of information and analysis in the article, which takes on Obama's learning curve internal memo by memo. I will just quote from the conclusion. "The private Obama is close to what many people suspect : a President trying to pass his agenda while remaining popular enough to win reelection. Obama didn't remake Washington. But his first two years stand as one of the most successful legislative periods in modern history."

Okay. President Obama did save the automobile industry and 150,000 jobs there. He saved the economy from depression, passed a weak form of universal health care, and partly reformed Wall Street. He brought the troops home from Iraq and left all of our bases in Iraq. He is drawing down the forces in Afghanistan. He got this done during an era in which the nation was divided into two furious camps, one of which hates him with a ferocity that exceeds the hatred for FDR (when I was a child).

State of the Union

2012-01-26T10:15:00.000-08:00

President Obama's state of the union speech has given him and the Democrats a huge bump in the polls. The curious thing about it all is that many Washington insider analysts are still calling the speech a failure. In short, the speech failed among a good part of the pundit class.

No wonder we've heard so often that Washington is out of touch with ordinary citizens and has no idea how people are reacting outside the beltway. It's true.

My own take on the speech was that it was highly effective. It's unfortunate that to run for President a candidate must pretend that our freedoms are a gift from the military--imagine how astonished George Washington would have been to hear this rubbish. I'm sorry that candidates must swear allegiance to Israel to be elected, while pretending to threaten Iran (I don't believe for a minute that Obama will attack Iran and neither does Iran). And so forth. There is a long list of sorry pledges a President must make to be re-elected, thanks to us and to our system. But the bulk of Obama's talk was specifically populist, a challenge to the Republicans to do the right things for the voters. The President set out to make the Republicans squeal, and he succeeded. The voters--but not the Beltway pundits--loved it.

Gilligan's Republicans

2012-01-21T10:35:00.000-08:00

I'm sure someone has done this obvious task before--recast Gilligan's Island with the comics running for the Republican nomination. Gilligan, of course, will be played by Ron Paul, who is comically bumbling and dimwitted by nature. Michelle Bachmann as the irate Skipper. Thurston Howell is a fine role for Mitt Romney, and the useless Professor fits Newt Gingrich perfectly. Finally, the seductive Rick Santorum as Ginger, whose specialty is the reverse cowgirl.

And now for something completely different.

The Noble Pine

2012-01-21T10:13:00.000-08:00

In his journal Thoreau wrote about a "noble" pine tree (and later on about axing pines to the ground to get wood for a cabin). Trees daily pull water out of the ground and lift it, in some cases, several hundred feet in the air. Trees, I argue, are working class.

Mitt Romney is an Anchor Baby

2012-01-19T19:43:00.000-08:00

This is how it goes. The father of little Mitty was a Mexican named George Romney, born in Mexico. George's Mormon father had moved to Mexico because polygamy was legal there (or ignored). Events during the Mexican Revolution frightened George's father, so the family fled to the United States when George was a child. Once George grew up and fathered Mitty, George had his anchor baby and could not be sent back to the land of his birth.

Now if you want to quibble, you might argue that George Romney's parents were American citizens or at least citizens of Utah all along. You might claim that Mitty was grandfathered into citizenship. I'm prepared to be reasonable. The way I see it, Mitt Romney is a perfect candidate for the Dream Act.

Local Banks

2012-01-15T09:52:00.000-08:00

As some of you know, Occupy Healdsburg is urging people to move their money from the huge corporate national banks to smaller local banks, because the local banks actually use the money locally. That helps our economy. The Press Democrat this Sunday points out a good example. First Community Bank, Exchange Bank, and Luther Burbank Savings are lending money to Habitat for Humanity to buy foreclosed homes and rehab them for low income families. I have moved my money from Bank of America to Exchange Bank, which offers scholarship money (when possible) for junior college students.

Yesterday more than 300 people attended a memorial celebration of the life of Bob Boardman, a huge turnout from all over. Bob's gusto and positive attitude were maintained right to the end. His kith and kin did him proud on Sunday. We won't see his like again. He left an aching absence in our town and in my life.

The Windsor Democrats held a candidates' presentation forum for Democrats running for congress in our new district. In the end they made no endorsement. County Supervisor Mike McGuire read a letter from Assemblyman Jared Huffman. Jason Liles endorsed Stacey Lawson of San Rafael. For what it is worth--very little?--I support Normon Solomon, a sensible progressive with a long local record of working actively for peace and for help for those in need.

Vulture Capitalism

2012-01-13T09:35:00.000-08:00

Vultures, we understand, are nature's useful dead flesh eaters. They soar high in a blue California sky, occasionally joined by their even larger cousins, the condors. I don't know if they are protected, but I would never harm one. They perch near the dying, then consume the carrion, recycling the calories, leaving behind nothing but bones and a little skin. Also I would never take a turkey vulture home because they stink of rotting meat and death.

Mitty Romney devoted his short working life to running up his inherited wealth, perching near companies in trouble, selling off their assets, taking out huge loans, then eating the dying companies, leaving behind only skin and bones. In some cases this sort of thing is probably needed in a capitalist economy. Maybe its useful. It's legal. But you wouldn't make a vulture President--he stinks of death.

Mitty Romney's Stand up Comedy

2012-01-10T08:09:00.000-08:00

In the last day or two we've gotten a taste of Mitty Romney's sense of humor. He started by telling us that he "enjoyed" being able to fire people whose services didn't meet his needs (he was discussing health care). Romney was half-smiling, being daring. Many of us have changed doctors or dentists at one time or another, of course, but how many of us actually "enjoy" firing people? How oblivious do you have to be in order to take pleasure in crushing care providers?

In Romney's circle everyone who counts is rich. They might get his jokes. (Romney ranks as about the 3,000th richest person in the USA.)

For his next joke, Romney told us that during his senate campaign against Ted Kennedy, he spent so much money that he forced Kennedy to raise opposition money by mortgaging his house. That anecdote, a real knee slapper, was meant to endear Romney to the Republican primary voters by mocking the departed Massachusetts liberal.

Have we ever seen a major Presidential candidate with less ability to relate to voters with ordinary incomes?

Rick Santorum's Stump Talk

2012-01-08T09:25:00.001-08:00

"You might have noticed that in our last debate, Willard 'Mitt' Romney repeated an anecdote about his father's advice, which was that Mitty should not run for office until he did not need the job or the salary. So much for working class candidates. Now I happen to be a millionaire member of the working class because my grandfather was a coal miner, my great-grandfather played piano in a whore house, and my great-great-grandfather slept in Kleenex box until he was seventeen. That's why I am more masculine than Mitty. Unlike my opponents I have come out against bestiality, which is that same thing as gay sex. I don't use condoms and will, if President, make them illegal. Contraception gives people license to do bad things in the sexual realm. Birth control is killing social security. Insurance companies have the right to deny coverage to people with pre-existing conditions--those people are covered by what I like to call 'the Final Destination' provision. Also I am strong in foreign policy--as President I will order military strikes against Iran. I might not be able to change this country all that much, but I can certainly start a war. That's totally easy." (APPLAUSE!)

The Psychopathy Checklist

2011-12-28T08:56:00.000-08:00

I don't put much stock in Robert Hare's psychopathy checklist, but just for fun we might want to check it against some of our political and corporate leaders. Hare estimates that about three million Americans are psychopaths. That means that if you go to a Santa Rosa Symphony concert, there are probably about three psychopaths in the audience and maybe one leading the orchestra. Keep in mind that psychopaths are often "deciders" who exhibit what humans call "leadership."

Leaders suffering from aggressive narcissism show many of the symptoms listed below:

Glibness or superficial charm
A grandiose sense of self-worth and pathological lying
Cunning/ manipulative skills
Lack of remorse or guilt for antisocial outcomes of their behavior.
Shallow affect (genuine emotion is short-lived and self-centered)
Callousness; lack of empathy
Failure to accept responsibility for own actions

It's easy to point to examples of people who are glib, cunning, lack remorse and fail to accept responsibility for their own actions: Dick Cheney, Ralph Nader, Michele Bachmann, Noam Chomsky, Newt Gingrich, Bill Clinton, most corporate CEOs, Donald Trump, Mitt Romney, Paris Hilton, Ron and Rand Paul and so on.

Many of us are eager to follow at least one or two of them, aren't we?

No One Celebrates

2011-12-20T14:41:00.000-08:00

People who said that it would make no difference if Obama or McCain won the Presidency, might want to consider the following message from President Obama.

"Early this morning, the last of our troops left Iraq. As we honor and reflect on the sacrifices that millions of men and women made for this war, I wanted to make sure you heard the news. Bringing this war to a responsible end was a cause that sparked many Americans to get involved in the political process for the first time. Today's outcome is a reminder that we all have a stake in our country's future, and a say in the direction we choose."

John McCain, outraged, has protested. He wanted the war to continue endlessly.

_____________

We don't say it out loud, but the sacrifices made by our men and women and by the Iraqis were made for nothing. They died for nothing. The war was pointless, except that it made certain rich Republicans even richer. What we hear today, a few days after leaving Iraq, is that the Shia President has begun to crush the Sunni minority. As many predicted, the outcome in Iraq may be a new dictatorship to replace the old dictatorship, the real difference being that the new dictator will befriend Iran.

We can't face pointless deaths in an open way, but a war has ended and no one is celebrating.

My Senior Aide

2011-12-13T19:17:00.000-08:00

Newt Gingrich, it seems, has been saying uncomfortable things to reporters about his opponents and allowing himself to be quoted--but only if the quotes are attributed in the press to a senior aide in the Gingrich campaign. I know how Newt feels. I have a senior aide like that myself. She's the one who called Newt Gingrich a walking snot-bubble. Later she claimed that when Rick Perry tries to fall asleep at night by counting sheep, he gets a boner. Just yesterday she said that if Darwin is right, Michelle Bachmann will learn how to add and subtract in 800,000 years. Today she told me--and you can quote her on this-- that one of the Romneys is a male hooker, and for an extra twenty he will change his position.

I fired her, of course, and hired a new senior aide, who is the author of the paragraph above.

Teabagger Studies

2011-12-09T19:58:00.000-08:00

Studies of teabaggers have begun to reach us, and we can begin to form a more accurate picture of them. For instance, the Teabaggers have always been Radical Right Republicans and always will be. They have never voted for Democrats.

Teabaggers are old. They have no youth branch, but if they did they would look down on it because young people are not old. Teabaggers regard young people as fools.

Teabaggers approve of government programs to support wise old white semi-literate people. They disapprove of programs to help children, people of color and young adults. They don't care for public education, prenatal health counseling, student loans, etc. These things are, in the Teabagger's view, undeserved freeloading.

Teabaggers are as white as polished rice but not as smooth to touch.

Teabaggers like Newt Gingrich because he is an authentic butt-head who looks wisely ancient. Newt is their idea of an intellectual leader, someone has noted.

Teabaggers disapprove of the sciences and rational discussion. In their view, the idea that some people are better informed than others undermines democracy, which depends on a belief that all old men are equally wise.

_____________________________

This is a curious era in the sense that we have a block of ignorant old people who dislike the young vs. a larger and growing block of young voters looking for change. Perhaps that is always the case, but seldom has the division been so stark. The election in 2012 will decide a generational struggle. The next year should be fascinating.

Ship of Fools

2011-12-05T09:43:00.000-08:00

As I write this, the Republican candidates are lining up to take part in a forum led by Donald Trump, perhaps the most ludicrous horse's ass to appear on the American scene in my lifetime. Jon Huntsman and Ron Paul have refused to attend--salvaging a bit of honor for the Republican Party. At the moment the Ship of Fools is led by Newt Gingrich, narcissist. He exudes excessive self-love, much like a military dictator whose every whim has been met for 40 years. Something strange has happened. The two most disliked candidates running for the Republican nomination are now the two leaders. That Republican insiders detest Romney's fake face is well known. Their dislike of Gingrich is equally strong--they can't bear his arrogance, his nasty tongue, his ego, his condescension, his domination, his sexual cheating, his policy shifts, etc. What to do?

Meanwhile the rest of us emitted carbon dioxide from fossil fuel last year at a record rate. Yes, we set a new record. Emissions rose 5.9% in 2010. I remember how we scoffed when George W. Bush offered his solution to global warming: "Get used to it." Now that seems to be the road our leaders have taken.

Free Yourself

2011-11-27T16:25:00.000-08:00

The great American revolution of the 2oth century went unnoticed by many of us, because it was silent and leaderless. In 1900 about 90% of black people in America lived in the South, where they were denied citizenship. In the 1920s, for example, if you were a black motorist, you were forbidden by law, in much of the South, to pass a white motorist on the road. Over the next 50 years about half the blacks, deciding one at a time, moved out. They freed themselves.

Bloomberg the Book Burner

2011-11-18T10:21:00.000-08:00

Have you ever wondered what Mayor Michael Bloomberg of NYC is up to? I haven't.

I mean, until now. Bloomberg's a billionaire and a five foot pile of horseshit in a wig. My guess is that he bought himself a political job to get more face time on camera.

Last week he confiscated the donated 5,000 copy library of Occupy Wall Street and had it destroyed. That makes him Bloomberg the Book Burner. He did this, he claimed, to protect the citizens of New York, which he accomplishes by assaulting those citizens with hordes of large blue men wielding batons and pepper spray against children and old ladies.

Bloomberg is a typical American mayor, funded by real estate interests. By "protecting citizens" what he means is "protecting the system run by the 1%." A few people in tents are pushing for changes in the system--so tenting must be against the law and punishable by street justice. If you tent in NYC, Billionaire Bloomberg will beat you black and blue.

Big Window

2011-11-12T15:29:00.000-08:00

I like to amuse the Peace Project's Bob Boardman with new facts (new to me). The last time we had dinner together, about ten days ago, he spent most of the meal staring out the Big Window. I finally told him that 100,000 Jews (half Jews and quarter Jews) had fought in Hitler's army. "I didn't know that," he said, glancing at me, then resuming his stare.

A few years back Bob decided to bike in the AIDS ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles. He hadn't done much serious cycling, so the little bike club I belong to provided people for him to train with.

Anyway, Bob loves this club. Until recently he has joined us on twice-a-week excursions, where the point is to play like kids and then stop and eat something sweet. Bob fell on the trail for no apparent reason on his last ride. I suspect that he fell because he'd started to look through the Big Window. That's no way to ride a bike.

When Bob steps through the Window, everything will change. Nothing can stop that. The way I see it, we're here only once, so we should be good to each other right now. We won't get another turn. That is, more or less, my politics. Bob Boardman--no one better--has gotten his turn right.

Not Enough Jobs

2011-11-06T07:46:00.000-08:00

We've seen the new Sonoma County pension proposal made by Supervisors Shirlee Zane and David Rabbit, and it is conventional, thoughtless and a good illustration of why the Democrats will have a hard time enlisting the 99%ers into their party. The Tea Party fled immediately into the arms of the Republicans because they were Republicans to start with and because the Tea Party wanted funding from Wall Street. Now the Democrats hope for a similar boost from the 99%ers, but they won't get it unless they figure out why the 99ers are in revolt. So far they haven't.

The county Democrats plan to reduce benefits for county employees (a Republican concept involving punishing the poor for the sins of the rich) and to increase the age of retirement (guaranteed to reduce employment slots for young people). The elected Democrats are not getting the message--they listen to corporate campaign donors, not to ordinary people.

The basic problem is that there are 7 billion people on the planet and not enough jobs to go around. The Democratic Party response is to make the lucky folks who have jobs keep them longer, shutting out newcomers. That's senseless.

We live in an age where technology ends more jobs than it creates (see RACE AGAINST THE MACHINE by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee). That is our future, except that it's going to get worse. Robots are more profitable than human workers. Our current economic system depends on everyone working to earn money so we can purchase products etc. And the system is failing because many cannot find work. An estimated 2 billion people on this planet go to bed hungry each night.

There are quick temporary fixes for the relatively rich Western World. We could cut the work week to 35 hours and have instant full employment. We could make the retirement age 55 and have full employment. But our ideology--when times get tough, America punishes the poor--forbids these answers. Our political class doesn't get it (or doesn't want to). Almost no one in power is listening. Finding humane answers is left the powerless.

Ratting Out Cain

2011-11-02T08:39:00.000-07:00

I've never liked the name "Cain." I don't know why--maybe it was something I read.

In any case, as you know, two women have accused the saucy Herman Cain, once head of Godfather's Pizza, of sexual harassment while he led the lobbyists of the National Restaurant Association. One of the women, we learned, was paid $35,000 to remain silent about the matter.

When asked about all this, Cain said, "I know not." And so forth.

Anyway, my interest here is in who ratted Cain out. The demented gasbags of Fox are blaming Democrats, but that's silly. If the Democrats had had this information, they would have waited until Cain got the Republican nomination and then used his sexual crudities against him in the general election. That's intro to politics stuff.

We are left with two possibilities. Someone patriotic in the NRA might have blown the whistle on the crusty Cain, not necessarily a woman he groped. It might have been anyone who knew Cain--we've all faced this horrible moment: the day you read in the newspaper that the kid who sat in front of you in 8th grade Spanish and ate his own boogers has been named to the Supreme Court. Or, even more likely, one of the other Republican candidates, fighting for the teabagger vote, decided to get rid of a rival: Newt or Rick or Michelle or "Crotch" Perry. Awful people, really. Rats. But here's the thing--the teabaggers consider sexual harassment a myth, holding that women are there to be squeezed by any passing man and, beside, women like it. These are good Christians. Cain is their hero.

99%

2011-10-31T09:05:00.000-07:00

I've managed to join Occupy Santa Rosa only twice to date (I've been in Canada), and I have no idea how all of this will turn out. The movement is somewhat reminiscent of the 1960s marches on Washington against war, which I joined (having served in the army). Today's marchers strike me as better informed than usual.

The last New Deal President was LBJ, who floundered into deep war waters and went under. From that point on the formerly New Deal party has been the wishy-washy corporate party intent on softening the regulations that stave off financial bubbles and recessions (Carter) and then on ending regulations (Clinton). The Republicans responded to this race to the right by turning over their party to wingnut radicals and idiot values punishers. And here we are today.

George Lakoff sees the Occupy movement as moral--rather than political--in nature. That is, the Occupiers want the country to change its priorities and work together for the common good. This isn't a matter of one issue or 100 issues. A world view is central. The Republicans offer a view that is pure Wall Street greed backed by Christian bigotry. The Democrats currently mill about in circles. What the country needs is a party that focuses on ordinary people and what they need to live useful and enjoyable lives right now. Right now is all we will ever have.

Occupy Everyplace

2011-10-19T21:28:00.000-07:00

Naomi Klein has written that now people can see that the system is deeply unjust and careening out of control. "Unfettered greed has trashed the global economy. And it is trashing the natural world as well. We are overfishing our oceans, polluting our water with fracking and deepwater drilling, turning to the dirtiest forms of energy on the planet, like the Alberta tar sands. And the atmosphere cannot absorb the amount of carbon we are putting into it, creating dangerous warming. The new normal is serial disasters: economic and ecological."

True enough. The New Deal ended with LBJ. Jimmy Carter, a good guy in some ways, was the first of the Southern Democrats to govern as a Liberal Republican. Clinton was worse. The race to the right with the Republican party was on. To stay to the right of the Democrats, the Republicans had, over time, to become idiotic. And now we have President Obama who, for some reason, has made himself irrelevant. The story in Great Britain is similar but worse. Three parties in Great Britain contest to be the farthest right, and the results resemble ours: a trashed economy, a growing class of people who understand they haven't had the ghost of a chance, and an environment that is deteriorating rapidly.

Look at the row of chuckleheads contesting for the Republican Presidential Nomination. Rick Santorum is running in opposition to sex--look at this dope's bitter mouth, which expresses his self hatred. Herman Cain is a gasbag delighted by his plan to double the taxes of the poor. Slick Mitt Romney wants to ban most forms of birth control or maybe not. Michele Bachmann stares flatly out, blind to the world. Ron Paul is a painfully homely crank who follows the teachings of a troll. Rick Perry boasts of the skidmarks in his underpants. Newt Gingrich is busy selling his books. In fact, that is what most of these "candidates" are doing, getting rich on a book tour.

People are starting to revolt. If we are determined enough, a party might form around Occupy Wall Street or the Democrats might begin to push the kinds of legislation we need.

Most of us have little to lose.

***

I'm off on vacation for ten days.

Zini's

2011-10-06T09:11:00.000-07:00

Zini's Diner in Cloverdale, next to Ace Hardware, has been rated as the best diner in Sonoma County. Susan and I finally went and ate the pan-friend chicken with real mashed potatoes ($10). It was like home if your mom was a good cook. Fine house-made apple pie. Friendly atmosphere and zero ambiance.

Rich Man's Disease

2011-09-23T08:10:00.000-07:00

Now that the class warfare season has begun, with the Rich attacking the Poor, debaters and bloggers should be careful how we employ certain terms, one of which is "the rich man's disease." This concept, the philosopher Wittgenstein might point out, has several quite unrelated meanings or uses. It's easy to confuse or conflate them.

In one context "rich man's disease" is a reference to sexual addiction, a malady found only among the wealthy. It has never been diagnosed in the poor, who are merely lewd or sluttish.

In a second context "rich man's disease" is kleptomania, a treatable disorder. Again this emotional problem doesn't develop among the poor, who merely steal things and go to prison.

A third type of disorder--and a considerable handicap--attacks rich Christians, who are nearly all born with a reading comprehension deficit. For example, they read the Bible without comprehending key passages like "Sooner shall a camel (or rope in some translations) pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man enter heaven." To date there is no known cure for this disease and no attempt to find a cure.

In discussions with the rich, we should at all times remain polite and supportive, keeping in mind that we might be addressing someone burdened with diseases unavailable to the likes of us and someone certain to go to Hell if the Good Book has any truth in it.

Can Obama Win?

2011-09-13T09:50:00.000-07:00

The cable and network analysts of our Presidential horse race are a waste of time, unless you find them entertaining, and I do. If you want to predict who will win the popular vote in the next election consider the following.

1. The campaigns by the Democratic and the Republican candidates will cancel one another out. Also the campaigns will be followed only by voters who are already committed. Republican and Democratic voters cancel each other out. Everyone else will find the campaigns an annoyance and pay them little attention.

2. The election will be, like all Presidential elections, a referendum by the voters on the party in power in the White House. Should that party remain in power in the White House because it's doing okay or not?

3. The criteria used by our pragmatic, uninformed, independent voters in judging the White House will be varied and subjective. The election will not be decided by one or two factors like the economy or foreign policy or who is likable.
_____________________________________
Most of the above comes from THE KEYS TO THE PRESIDENCY by Allan Lightman and Ken DeCell, who have worked out a list of 13 factors that enable them to predict the popular vote in Presidential contests. Their system has worked for the last 33 Presidential elections. No other predicting system comes close to that record.

Note that the 13 keys predict the popular vote and not the outcome, which has been stolen several times by Republicans (Hayes/Tilden and Bush/Gore come to mind).

This method does not use polls, because polls are, as many have learned, unverifiable and unreliable.
____________________________________

The Thirteen Keys

There is no way to weight these keys and apparently no need to do so. The operating rule is that if five or fewer of the following keys are false, the incumbent party wins the popular vote. To date this method has been accurate in every case.

True or false is determined by general voter perception, not by right or left ideology.
________________________________________

1. The White House incumbent party gained seats in the last House election. (False)

2. There is no serious contest for the incumbent party's nomination. (True)

3. The incumbent party candidate is the sitting President. (True)

4. There is no significant third-party candidate. (T/F)

5. The economy is not in recession. (T/F)

6. Real per-capita economic growth is positive. (T/F)

7. The incumbent has made major changes in national policy. (T/F)

8. There is no sustained social unrest. (T/F)

9. There is no major incumbent party scandal. (T/F)

10. There has been no major failure in foreign or military affairs. (T/F)

11. The administration has achieved a major success in foreign or military affairs. (T/F)

12. The incumbent candidate is charismatic or a national hero. (T/F)

13. The challenging party candidate is not charismatic or a national hero. (T/F)

Veronica's Secret

2011-09-04T09:07:00.000-07:00

Veronica's Secret, whatever it was, turned out to be the best kept secret of the 2oth Century. To this day no one has revealed the secret, but it's not because of lack of research. When I received the Veronica's Secret catalog in the mail, I studied each page closely, hoping to find clues, and so did many other scholars. Somewhere in those photographs of busty young women in their underwear lay the answer. . . .

I believe it is now clear that at least one person has figured the secret out, and that is Sarah Palin, who, each day, looks more like a Veronica's Secret model, only older and with a gigantic gong (old football term for a player's head). Palin is as welcome among male political reporters, including liberals, as a Veronica's Secret catalog. In fact, nearly all men in politics gravitate to her, except for Michele Bachmann's husband.

We'd better start counting on this new Veronica's Secret factor playing big in future American politics. By 2016 we are likely to see one of Fox News' row of indistinguishable blond ladies leading the Republican ticket (and keeping the secret, of course).

The Gaddafi Loyalists

2011-09-02T09:00:00.000-07:00

As a leftist--a pragmatic one--I've had no problem deciding which side to support in the Arab spring. When ordinary people go into the street to overthrow a brutal dictator with tanks, I hope they succeed. I find it sad that a few people on the Left support the tyrants, but then some people are daft.

I'm not talking about pacifists. They oppose violence and war as a matter of principle, and I respect that. I'm talking about flat-out support for tyrants like Gaddafi.

Two of the leading Gaddafi loyalists are people I long admired--and I was wrong to do so. Cynthia McKinney has celebrated the vicious 40-year reign of Gaddafi in many venues in the Middle East, including Libyan television. Celebrating Gaddafi seems to have become her new profession. Hugo Chavez is on the net with a video I've watched in which he claims that the fall of Tripoli's Green square happened not in Libya but in Qatar, where it was staged with actors.

McKinney and Chavez are, of course, trapped in ideologies that make it impossible for the United States to be on the right side of an issue even by accident.

Pap the Teabagger

2011-08-30T09:12:00.000-07:00

In a column last week in The Financial Times, Gary Silverman pointed out that Huckleberry Finn's father, Pap, sounded like a member of the Tea Party. (Thanks to Tom Belton for calling this to my attention.)

Pap is an unabashed racist and "whenever his liquor began to work, he most always went for the government." Pap is fearful, afraid the government will take away his meager belongings. When a free black man appears in his town, Pap flies into a rage. This black man is a professor from a midwestern state, has a mixed race background, dresses well and "could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything." Pap wants the man sold into slavery.

Living back before the Civil War, Pap would not have been a Republican, but times have changed. Frightened racists are today the backbone of the Tea Party, and that makes them central in Republican primaries. The Tea Party, unfortunately, is as American as apple pie.

THE HELP reviewed

2011-08-23T10:48:00.000-07:00

The most popular movie in the USA is "THE HELP." At first glance this film about race and women's relationships might seem to be an odd pick for number one, but it packed our little theater on a Monday night. The movie was compelling and entertaining, and I recommend it with reservations.

THE HELP is a key American story, one that we enjoy again and again, working out (I think) feelings about ourselves and our history. We insist on this story in the same way that children may insist on hearing repeatedly a tale about how a duckling gets lost and then gets found. It's a safe way to deal with something uncomfortable and make sure it ends well every time.

This is the generic story (found in THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS, HUCK FINN, AVATAR, THE BLIND SIDE, etc.) A member of the dominant culture comes to value those in the dominated culture and helps them, and rewarding friendships develop. The story's protagonist, of course, is the helper from the dominant culture (the culture that buys the most movie tickets).

Black intellectuals have criticized THE HELP--which sets out to show fictional black servants telling their own stories--as being unrepresentative of reality. I have to say this: the blacks strike me as being more real than the whites in the movie. The whites are mostly cartoon figures. I would not want to see this movie with a Tea Party audience.

I wonder what black viewers without doctorates think of the film. I suspect they enjoy it, as I did.

For me what kept THE HELP from being first rate was its sentimentality. That's often what separates the rest from the best. Everything gets slightly softened. The movie is comfortably moving, unlike life. That adds to popularity. The black intellectuals have a point, but this glimpse into how people treat one another--I've seen Latina house cleaners treated badly in Healdsburg--has value. And the movie kept the audience interested.

Juan Cole on Qaddafi

2011-08-22T12:25:00.000-07:00

My guess is that the great majority of American voters remain unacquainted with the segment of the American Internet Left that once again mourns the overthrow of a mass murderer, this time the dictator of Libya for 40 years. I write of the tyrant Qaddafi (whose name has been spelled at least nine ways).

These mourners are, to borrow a descriptive term from Juan Cole, daft.

Let's look at what Cole had to say about the claim that the Libyan war was about oil. "That is daft. Libya was already integrated into the international oil markets, and had done billions of deals with BP, ENI, etc., etc. None of those companies would have wanted to endanger their contracts by getting rid of the ruler who had signed them. . . . Moreover, taking Libyan oil off the market through a NATO military intervention could have been foreseen to put up oil prices, which no Western elected leader would have wanted to see, especially Barack Obama, with the danger that a spike in energy prices could prolong the economic doldrums. An economic argument for imperialism is fine if it makes sense, but this one does not, and there is no good evidence for it . . . and is therefore just a conspiracy theory."

But why do most of us on the Left oppose dictatorships to begin with? It's not as if what we call Western Democracies are responsive to their citizens. If they were, the United States would have a single payer health care system. Western Democracies are obviously oligarchies run for the benefit of the rich--but the rest of us do have, on occasion, some small impact on decisions. Built into our governance systems is a bit of flexibility not found in the rigidity of dictatorships. We can and do change--to a degree--with the times. That's better than nothing. It's better than a dictatorship.

At least some of American mourners of Qaddafi suffer from Obama Derangement Syndrome. They blame the war on Obama, giving little credit to the ordinary citizens of Libya, armed with handguns and axes, who attacked the dictator's tanks. Qaddafi's fall is Obama's fault, they totally believe, and so is everything else.

Obama Derangement Syndrome

2011-08-17T18:22:00.000-07:00

The Republicans are having a hard time deciding which butthead to run for President. They have Mitt, an artificial man something like Nixon but without Nixon's gravitas. No one likes him. They have Michele, a primitive religious nutter who stares into the wrong camera with confused, half mad eyes. And now they have Rick Perry, my favorite because when he was a new legislator in Texas he wore tight pants--his nickname was "Crotch." You gotta love "Crotch Perry for President!"

Meanwhile the Democrats try to cope with the Obama Derangement Syndrome (ODS). Those suffering from ODS believe that Obama was born in Kenya (the Right) or that Obama is a Republican (the Left). Right and Left ODSers agree on one thing: that Obama is a Fascist. There is no known cure for this malady, and it's a bummer, man.

PROF. WISDOM

2011-08-13T19:28:00.000-07:00

About 50 years ago I came across a pamphlet written by Prof. Wisdom, the master of an unnamed discipline. In the pamphlet Prof. Wisdom argued that the Irish had descended from Neanderthals. Well, my grandmother came over on the boat from Ireland, and I enjoyed the pamphlet and showed around through the years on the assumption that it was false. It wasn't. It turns out the the Irish (and the rest of Europe) carry between 1% and 4% Neanderthal DNA. The only people lacking this DNA are Africans. And that is one of the things that make us different from the non-human apes.

Playing Hard to Get

2011-08-09T07:03:00.000-07:00

Some progressives argue that we can move President Obama and the Democratic Party by playing hard to get. That's a strategy I've seen work in the past. Doris Day used to do it to Rock Hudson. And it was amazingly successful, even in cases where Rock Hudson was gay.

Yes, today we're living in the age of Paris Hilton and hard-to-get wasn't the motto of (even) Elizabeth Taylor, but if the strategy worked in romantic comedies in the 1950s, why won't it work in American politics in 2012?

I have to admit that playing hard to get never worked for me or for anyone I know, but there's always a first time.

The Obama Mystery

2011-08-02T09:16:00.000-07:00

We used to argue about G. W. Bush--was he shrewd in a vicious way or merely a stupid burned-out dry drunk or perhaps something else entirely? I never found a convincing answer that explained his murderous behavior, other than the obvious fact that he lacked decent parents. (I know I treat the Bush family badly, but so did Mother Nature.)

Now we wonder about Obama. What makes him tick? He's been accused of being racist, Republican, Kenyan, detesticulated, dumb, etc. None of that rings true. But Obama does remind me of Eisenhower, another President whose approach to solving a problem was to seek the middle. We all have lifelong strategies for coping--Obama's is to seek the middle between black and white. Under pressure he reverts to his basic problem-solving strategy.

If you're old enough, you can remember Eisenhower, a Republican, accepting in a half-hearted way the changes of the New Deal. During WW II, Ike's job was to keep a balance between the opposing strategies of Montgomery and Bradley. Ike mediated from the middle. Later he kept us out of wars but sent in the CIA assassins, much as Obama sends in drones. When Joseph McCarthy attacked Ike's beloved army and his mentor, George Marshall, Ike fumed in private but kept out of the conflict, letting others cope with it.

I expect history to find Eisenhower, as President, above average--the modern average being a half-demented ignoramus. Obama is also above average, but doomed to negotiate the middle with the Wall Street Oligarchy who, in turn, have to negotiate with radical right teabaggers too stupid to feed themselves soup.

What a great system of governance we have.

Long Train to Nowhere

2011-07-26T20:22:00.000-07:00

No doubt you have seen one of those long trains, the ones with two or three engines in front and one in back (no caboose these days). You look down the track, and the train rumbles on, hundreds of cars, out of sight. You might ask yourself how many workers are on board.

The correct answer is: one.

Everyone else has been replaced by automation. If that one engineer falls off the train, no one will be on board. Or if the engineer takes out a bottle of whiskey and drinks straight shots, a drunk will be aboard. Or if the engineer grows lonely for a human voice and calls his wife, one inattentive dreamer will be on board. Automation will take care of safety, except when it doesn't.

We're headed for a time when there will be one person working at the General Motors plant, flipping an on/off switch. Meanwhile the unemployment rate for Blacks is about 20%.

Maybe we should start to talk about this.

The South Secedes Again

2011-07-25T16:36:00.000-07:00

The first time the South seceded from the United States, two of my great-grandfathers fought as privates to free the slaves. Make no mistake about what and who caused the war. Most of the rich people of the South had most of their money tied up in valuable slaves. That was their capital. They seceded to protect their investment.

Slavery was, as General Grant noted, as bad a cause as anyone ever supported.

In a way we are still fighting the Civil War today; The Tea Party, someone said on television, represents secession. The Tea Party is united around an issue that reminds me of the South in 1860: escape from the federal government. This escape takes many forms: hating people of color and immigrants and viewing women as inferiors (the government offers them some protection); home schooling rather than school district education; crippling all government by cutting its income; ending social security and Medicare; threatening to secede; arming vigilante militias; claiming the government is not legitimate; claiming to represent the original founding fathers (a tactic copied from the South in 1860); freeing itself from a belief in history and in science, including economics, climate studies, biology, geology (the earth is 6,000 years old)--in short, freedom from facts. The object of all this is to prop up a jumbled ideology that is unrelated to reality as our species understands it. Like slavery, Tea Partyism can not be defended rationally.

The good news is that Tea Party represents a minority of voters. The bad news is that we are still fighting for the sanity of a nation.

It's rumored that Rick Perry, a governor of a once Confederate State, who has threatened to secede, may run for the Republican presidential nomination. The Tea Party loves him. I hope he wins the nomination--that should make the situation clear to the majority of Americans, including the 400 families that form our oligarchy. They supported and used the Tea Party in the past, but things got out of hand. Monopoly Capitalism vs. Radical Right Populism--it might make a good monster movie.

Triangulation

2011-07-06T09:58:00.000-07:00

The suicidal Republican party apparently plans to run on a faintly disguised pledge to end Medicare in 2012. That platform, which attracts only sociopaths, is a guaranteed loser, depending on what the Democrats do in response. The voters love Medicare.

At the moment the triangulating Democrats seem to be pushing the following idea: if elected they will cut Medicare but not as badly as the Republicans hope to do.

Dude, that is not what the voters want to hear. They want outrage and a simple position: Hands Off Medicare. (Let's hope the Democratic Leadership struggles up from its knees and learns to stand erect.)

The 600 Pound Gorilla

2011-07-03T08:58:00.000-07:00

The other day I heard a history professor talking about what had caused the Civil War. At the start of the war, he said, the Southern orators spoke of nothing but the need to protect slavery (slaves were the most valuable property owned in the United States, worth more money than the railroads and manufacturing plants combined). Ten years after the war, the Southern orators began to claim that the war had been started because of many important factors, of which slavery was only one. The war had been fought over states' rights, for example (the right to own slaves) and Northern financial dominance and so on.

You see, the South is no longer quite as certain as it once was that slavery is humane and uplifting and sanctioned by Jesus Christ. So the claim is that the Civil War was fought for many reasons.

The historian drew an analogy. Suppose you went to see King Kong for the first time. Someone later asked you what the movie was about. "A gigantic ape," you replied. Ten years later someone else asks you the same question. "King Kong?" you reply. "It's about many things. The movie is filled with interesting characters."

A Liberal Plot

2011-07-02T18:33:00.000-07:00

We pay a heavy price when we elect fools to public office. I remember reading, about ten years ago, that scientists had determined that Sonoma County was undergoing climate change--it was getting hotter at a rate faster than average for the nation as a whole. It occurred to me that this might not be good for premium wine grapes. Much of the economy of Healdsburg depends on fine wine grapes. When I tried to discuss this with the City Hall Old Boys at the time--mostly Republicans--they told me to ignore science. "Climate change is a liberal anti-business myth," they insisted.

Today the main headline in the Press Corporate Democrat is "WARMING CALLED MAJOR THREAT TO GRAPES." All you really need to read is the first sentence: "Global warming could leave half of Napa Valley's famed vineyards unsuitable to grow premium grapes by 2040," according to a Stanford study.

For some vintners, that sort of news is best met by denial. There is one problem with denying the plans of Mother Nature, however: what Mother Nature wants will happen. The consent of vintners and goofy Republican ideologists is not required.

I don't doubt that smarter vintners are working on ways to mitigate the growing heat, and I expect public universities like Davis to find ways to help unless we close them down to save money. All is not lost. But what fools we be.

Our Candidate for President

2011-06-23T07:27:00.000-07:00

It's no secret that progressives in general are disappointed with President Obama and that the Facebook Left tends to be outraged. This is not because Obama has accomplished nothing. He gambled his presidency on opening the door to universal health care. He integrated gays into the military. He ended our combat mission in our most pointless and stupid war (Iraq). The problem is that Obama is by temperament a thoughtful centrist who operates in slow motion. That's not what progressives voted for. He's not FDR, Truman, JFK or LBJ.

The Republicans apparently will nominate a daffy liar or an empty suit who caters to the Tea Party. That makes Obama our candidate for President in 2012.

John Huntsman Announces for President

2011-06-22T08:04:00.000-07:00

My name is John Huntsman, and I am running for President. I should start by admitting that I was, like so many, not as perfectly presentable as I am today. As a young person I was a rebel. I dropped out of college to sing with a polka band. I wore denim pants and drank carbonated water. I let my eyebrows grow untrimmed. Once I rode my bicycle on the wrong side of the road, and I learned the importance of values by flouting them and facing the consequences. Is anyone listening?

Congressman Weiner

2011-06-08T09:37:00.000-07:00

In the long line of political figures who mispronounce their own names, Hamilton Jordan (which he pronounced "Jerdin") used to be my favorite, but now Anthony Weiner, a congressman planning to run for mayor of New York, has pushed Jerdin into second place. Congressman Weiner first became famous as an aggressive defender of progressive ideas. Then he became even more famous for sharing photographic information about the bulge in his underpants and lying about having done this with the fervor of wolverine. Today he has few defenders because people fear the next Weiner surprise.

So far Weiner is guilty of tweeting some suggestive photographs of himself (not a crime) and then lying about it (not a crime). But many people believe his behavior is creepy and find his hard-nosed lying offensive. To date, no real sex has been uncovered, just minor exhibitionism. As a comic said, "Never has anyone lost so much in return for so little."

Should Weiner resign? I don't care. As our entitled political leaders go, he's probably average.

The truth is that men have all sorts of fantastic sexual notions, some of which are physically impossible--but most men don't act out the stupid ones. They grasp the difference between fantasy and reality. They hope no one can read their minds. Weiner lost his grip on the difference and did it in public--anything you put on the internet is public.

Apparently many political leaders cannot get it through their gongs that (1) no matter where they go, someone will be filming them with cell phone, (2) that if they tweet an underpants shot, it will end up on TV, and (3) that if they go on the Colbert show, they will look ridiculous.

--Gary Goss

Iran's Bomb

2011-06-03T17:21:00.000-07:00

There is a new American National Intelligence Estimate on Iran. Our own government experts state that there is no convincing evidence that Iran is building a weapon. None. Nada. Nothing.

We are boycotting Iran to stop a program that doesn't exist (as far as we know). And we have spies reporting to us from all over Iran. You can read about this. See Seymour Hersh, in the June 6 New Yorker, where he discusses the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran.

When you spot someone talking on television about when Iran will get the bomb, remember that, as far as our government intelligence agencies are concerned, there is nothing to back up the claim that Iran even has a program in mind. The talking heads are slicing pure baloney.

Two Nonidentical Parties

2011-05-27T19:36:00.000-07:00

In case you missed it, yesterday the House of Representatives fell a few votes short of ending the war in Afghanistan. Democrats voted against the war by a margin of 178 to 8. The Republicans voted for the war 207 to 26.

Kathy Hochul

2011-05-25T19:33:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday a Democrat, Kathy Hochul, took New York's 26th congressional district for the first time in memory when Republican and Independent voters revolted against the Republican Ryan plan to end Medicaid. This proved the most significant congressional upset in the last 50 years. The issue--the survival of Medicaid--is tied to the survival of social security and the entire safety net that makes this country livable. By attacking the safety net, the Republicorp has shot itself in both knees.

Wanting to read more facts about this matter, I went out on Wednesday morning to buy an absurdly overpriced copy of the Press Democrat. I read it cover to cover and found not a word on the special election or on Kathy Hochul. As far as the newspaper was concerned, nothing had happened in New York. Nothing. While other media outlets filled with the import of this voter revolt, the Press Democrat stared into the distance with the fixity of a drunken Southern widow, out of it but still genteel, working on a drawl.

Palestine and Israel

2011-05-20T09:04:00.000-07:00

Two unrelated thoughts. . . .

1. President Obama ventured into the 3,000 year war between Israel and the Palestinians this week, suggesting that peace talks should begin with a discussion of the 1967 borders (with land concessions from both sides) and that the Palestinians not take this to the United Nations (why not?). He tried to give something to both sides and took a tiny half-step in the Palestinian direction. As a consequence he is under attack by both sides with the Republicans promoting comments somewhere to the right of Benjamin Netanyahu.

The conflict remains, for now, intractable. Hamas, elected by the Palestinians, is still devoted to the complete destruction of Israel, while Israel. with its elected leaders, is still devoted to a humiliating apartheid repression of the Palestinians. But adults don't give up on peace. Obama deserves credit for attempting to move things along. In the end peace can come only from the Palestinians and Israelis, and my unorthodox view, approved of by few, is that this is one more war the United States should withdraw from.

2. Dan Walters, a conservative columnist for the Sacramento Bee, not often a favorite of mine, has published a piece on California's two-tiered economy. When he pointed out that Asian women in California have a life expectancy of 18 years more than Black males, it reinforced the truth that the rich live longer than the poor. If you value life, that's something to keep in mind. The two-tiered economy is not new, of course. The New Yorker recently noted that in 1887 the top one percent of Americans owned fifty-one per cent of the nation's wealth. That's worse than today, and it was the ideal Wall Street Republican nation, composed of the Rich and the wage slaves. Who needs a middle class?

Manifest Destiny

2011-05-15T08:38:00.000-07:00

I hope we don't forget that the first time the United States took Monterey, California, from the Latinos occurred on October 18, 1842. The frigate UNITED STATES, led by Thomas Jones, arrived off Monterey. Commodore Jones, under the mistaken impression that Mexico and the United States were at war, came ashore and announced that he was taking possession of the port in the name of his government. The stunned locals, under the guns of several American ships, signed the document that Jones produced. What followed was an unpleasant ceremony in which the Mexican flag was pulled down and replaced by the stars and stripes.

You might wonder why the name Jones is not as famous as the names of Fremont, Kearny, Sloat and Stockton. Here's the problem. The day after Jones captured Monterey, news arrived that Mexico and the United States were not at war. Jones took down the American flag and sailed away. The next try for California would come four years later when Fremont's forces, the famous Bear Flag volunteers, conquered the undefended town of Sonoma and arrested Mariano Vallejo, after he had fed them a delicious supper.

The Shores of Tripoli

2011-05-10T21:21:00.000-07:00

The oldest military monument in the United States is the Tripoli Monument, now on site at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. It's there to remind us of the First Barbary War (1801-5), our original foreign war, fought under President Thomas Jefferson. Arab pirates along the Barbary Coast, seeking ransom and tribute, had been attacking our merchant ships and holding them for ransom. The USS Enterprise helped put an end to all that.

Piracy was, after all, a government sponsored business, and after some sharp battles, a business arrangement (treaty) was signed in 1805.

More recently Osama Bin Laden, mass-murderer, founder and leader of al-Qaida, was shot to death by American Navy Seals in his hideout in Pakistan. The Seals had been instructed to take Osama prisoner if he managed to surrender, and a team of experts had been assembled to question him. As it turned out, the Seals killed Bin Laden, leaving roughly 11% of Americans to mourn his passing. As someone asked recently, "Who are these people?"

I am not one of the 11%, mostly because Bin Laden was intent on murdering me. I understand how self-centered that sounds, but there you have it. I feel safer with Osama buried at sea.

It's not unusual, in a war, for one side to target the other side's leader (check out the fate of Admiral Yamamoto in World War Two). As Osama has discovered, wars are hell, and he should not have started one.

an assassin dies

2011-05-04T08:40:00.000-07:00

I'm opposed to the death penalty and not for sentimental reasons. We all die. Good people die. I just don't want the state holding people down and killing them because it sets a bad example for the other psychopaths.

Like most people I was glad to see Osama bin Laden dead. In my view Osama was a descendent of the Hashshashin , the Nizari branch of the Ismā'īlī Shia founded by the Persian Hassan aṣ-Ṣabbaḥ during the Middle Ages. They were active in the castle of Masyaf in Syria, which is where they came to our attention. The group murdered members of the Muslim Abbasid, Seljuq, and Christian religions for political and religious reasons. This was where we got the term "assassin." Osama was an assassin killed while resisting arrest. Well done.

Prince Weds Middlebrow

2011-04-30T11:05:00.000-07:00

I hear Prince got married to a woman named Middlebrow--I had thought Prince was gay, which shows how much I know. Also I thought he was an African-American, but he's a white dude with buck teeth and a pinched face. Ms. Kate Middlebrow looks good, and somewhere in her ancestry there were people who worked with their hands. That seems to be true for many of us. I tried watching her biography on TV but, man, was it dull.

Dumbing Down of Republicans

2011-04-27T08:18:00.000-07:00

Today Donald Trump, a human road apple, is a leading contender for the Republican nomination for President. Trump's issue has been President Obama's "missing" long form birth certificate (now made public after the President's special request). This must be the dumbest political issue of my lifetime.

I've been thinking about how things got so bad.

Until 2010 the Republican Party existed as a conduit to pass laws that would transfer money from poor people to rich people. It took smart Ivy League lawyers to pull off this fraud. As recently as George W. Bush that was still the party's core function. But Republicans could not run on theft from the poor as an issue.

To win elections, the Republicans had to mislead voters, and, in theory, the less informed the voters were, the better the Republicans would do. We're familiar with how they went about dumbing down voters: Fox News, a stress on racism, laws to hamper registration of young voters, defunding public schools, etc. The problem with this 30 year campaign is that it turned into a slippery slope. The Republican party ended up way too dumb. Now it has produced the Tea Party (right wing populists), who run Republican policy. Wall Street is appalled--the Teabaggers are on a path to destroy the American government and the world economy, because they know nothing. They don't listen to the corporate oligarchy that manages America.

The Wall Street Republicans have a problem.

An example of current stupidity is the attempt to appeal the California court decision against Proposition 8 (forbidding gay marriage) on the grounds that the judge who made it was gay. Here is the reasoning. The judge was gay. The issue was gay rights. Therefore, the judge was biased.

This is an interesting new standard without legal precedent. Let's see how if might work.

If the Prop 8 judge had been straight, that would also have been a bias. Only a bisexual judge would have been fair.

In cases involving racism,unbiased multiracial judges would be required. In cases about the rights of women, only transgendered judges could render evenhanded verdicts. Cases involving religion would be tried by agnostics. And so on.

I doubt if this will catch on.

____________________________

What the Republicans did was follow Wall Street Karl Rove's strategy, which was to maximize the stupid vote. The stupid soon took over the Republican primaries, to Rove's dismay, defeated Wall Street incumbents and elected raving loonies to public office.

What does this illustrate? The law of unintended consequences.

Gary Goss

The Loony Bin: Ayn Rand

2011-04-21T15:16:00.000-07:00

A y n R a n d (rhymes with Cain Band) was a Russian with a terrible first name and a wandering eye who became known for developing a teenager's "philosophy" called objectivism. She moved to the United States in 1926 and eventually wrote (quite badly) THE FOUNTAINHEAD and ATLAS SHRUGGED.

Rand is popular at the moment in some rightwing circles and (I am guessing) among advocates of open marriage who horse around with each other Back East.

All you really need to know about Rand's beliefs is that she advocated egoism and unrestricted capitalism, making her a favorite author among CEOs of major corporations, disastrous economists, and happy libertarians, who read her (correctly) as a ruthless rightwing anarchist seeking absolute freedom at the expense of the less fortunate.

In recent years we have seen her ugly beliefs being applied to living flesh by lamebrains like Alan Greenspan, Ron Paul, Rand Paul and Corporate Republicans in general. In Rand they claim to find a justification to tax the poor and subsidize the super rich. They ignore her atheism. She's again the rage. Meanwhile, I wish she were dead.

Actually she is dead.

Ayn Rand was a dim-witted self-centered cougar, but I doubt if she wanted us to tax the poor and subsized the rich. I can't say for certain. She was long ago dismissed by experts in fiction and by experts in philosophy. Life is too short to spend weeks of it studying the trash she generated. She's not part of an education.

In the human comedy we all enjoy, we can take a certain pleasure in watching, once again, how easily deluded we are. My suggestion is that we name all our cats "Rand" and then get back to living together. (Could that be the reality Rand of Russia missed: that humans live together?)

Gary Goss

The Devolution of Republican Leaders

2011-04-17T11:07:00.000-07:00

I remember when many of us thought President Eisenhower was of barely normal intelligence, because he seemed inarticulate. That was wrong, of course--Eisenhower had been smart enough to cope with Hitler, Roosevelt and Churchill. He was inarticulate in public because (my theory) he was hiding a sharp personality behind a grinning boyish charm, even at age 70. That much self-censorship would make most people trip on their tongues.

Next we thought that Gerald Ford was stupid. In fact, we said, Nixon had named Ford as his Vice President because nobody would ever remove Nixon from office if the alternative was a thickheaded dunce who had played football without a helmet. President Ford was the first man of whom it was said that he couldn't walk and chew gum at the same time. Chevy Chase achieved fame by playing Ford on Saturday Night Live as a fool who repeatedly fell over furniture and landed on his ass. Compared to some recent political leaders, though, Ford now looks like the dean of graduate studies.

George W. Bush is commonly thought to be the most stupid President in American history, although not the most stupid major candidate, who remains Dan Quayle. I once saw Quayle in person. He had a single mixed expression, fear of punishment combined with puzzlement. It was the look of a man who could not spell his own name and had been beaten on top of his gong for it. Example: when he addressed the United Negro College Fund, whose slogan is "A mind is a terrible thing to waste," Quayle said, "You take the UNCF model that what a waste it is to lose one's mind or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is."

But Quayle is a paradigm of informed wisdom compared the what the Tea Party has coughed up on the lawn in the last two years. Now we are down to slobs set on ending contraception on the grounds that having sex once every nine months more than meets their copulatory needs. They wave Confederate flags, stare with hogs' hungry eyes, and tell you slavery wasn't so bad. After 2010 they rode into Washington, two to a mule, on saddles made of recycled toxic waste, determined to destroy the federal government, sack the world economy, and reverse events that had once taken place at Appomattox Courthouse. They live in an alternate universe composed of twaddle.

It's enough to make you wonder why democracy failed in Athens, replaced by an oligarchy of wealthy families, unless that sounds familiar.

Celebrating Slavery

2011-04-14T08:17:00.000-07:00

I noticed recently that the White Republican South has launched a five year official celebration of the Civil War, which they started about 150 years ago. This is roughly the equivalent of Germany hosting a five year celebration of the Holocaust.

Like many others, I tend to let dim the horror that was slavery, when four million people were held in conditions that allowed torture, murder and rape. The viciousness of this crime against humanity stains American history--or it would if we talked about it. For the most part the North is silent, part of the bargain we made when we brought the South back into the union, a major mistake. (Consider what our government would look like today without the South.)

About 40% of our people believe that the South went to war to preserve states' rights, which is almost a half-truth. The South fought to preserve one right, the right to extend slavery into the new states, where the tide was running against them. To build an army, the South initiated the country's first draft, a one-year term for poor farmers that was soon extended to last the duration of the war.

Two of my great-grandfathers, I can say, fought as privates to free the slaves. I doubt if they would have been pleased to see a five year celebration of those who fought for what General Grant called the worst cause known to history.

No doubt the most celebrated rebel will be General Robert E. Lee, a noble-looking slaver, considered at the start of the Civil War to be among the South's ten best military leaders. No one then thought him the best. That honor went to Albert Sidney Johnston, killed at Shiloh. Jefferson Davis called his death "the turning point of the war." It now seems likely that, like Stonewall Jackson, Johnston was shot by one of his own draftees, perhaps by accident.

In any case, Robert E. Lee went on to defeat about eight Union generals, each of them fourth-rate. Lee had no opposition. As a general Lee was active, imaginative, rash and headstrong. When he finally met a second-rate general, Meade, at Gettysburg, Lee got crushed. Once Grant got hold of Lee--Grant won every battle he ever fought--the noble slaver was beaten like a rented mule.

We're going to hear a lot of rubbish about the great Bobby Lee in the next five years. I'm gritting my teeth.

Dewey Defeats Truman !

2011-04-09T17:22:00.000-07:00

As you may have read, a Republican county clerk, Kathy Nickolaus, in Wisconsin found, in the aftermath of Justice David Prosser's reelection defeat, an additional 14,000 votes, which reversed the loss and gave her former boss for 13 years a resounding victory.

By late afternoon, Nickolaus had also taken authorities to Jimmy Hoffa's body, missing since July 30, 1975. Hoffa, who had once led the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, was found buried under the football stadium in Green Bay. She next found Judge Crater, missing since August 6, 1930, living in a suburb of Madison.

By midnight, with the help of Karl Rove, Ms. Nickolaus had located the missing section of Franz Schubert's Unfinished Symphony, the Lost Ark (containing the stones on which the Ten Commandments had been written and Aaron's rod and a petrified jar of manna), and enough loose votes to elect Thomas E. Dewey President of the United States in 1948.

She went to bed satisfied. We congratulate Ms. Nickolaus on her remarkable day.

Oahu

2011-04-07T07:55:00.000-07:00

I hear complaints that President Obama doesn't bargain like a hard man from Chicago. That's right. He isn't from Chicago. He bargains like a man from Oahu.

Healdsburg Owls

2011-04-06T18:16:00.000-07:00

Baseball fans may be aware that a Giants fan made the mistake of attending opening day at Dodgers Stadium, where a group of Dodger fans beat him down in the parking lot. He is now in a coma with brain damage.

For some years I worked on Long Island, and I recall well the last time I went to a Mets game. My wife and I took our two little girls, fans of the club, and once we were seated I realized that we had taken them to what amounted to an outdoor saloon filled with drunken louts. When they weren't pouring beer into their mouths, they were shouting obscenities. The Mets lost.

After the game, we got onto the train with the other fans, and again we were surrounded by obnoxious drunks, including one in particular, a guy wearing glasses, who spent the trip cursing loudly (being manly, no doubt) and making racist remarks--he attributed the Mets loss to the one Black player on the team, Mookie Wilson, (who had played very well). Our car was parked at the first stop, and as I got off, I had to pass the loudmouth, so I rammed my shoulder into him. To my great pleasure, his glasses popped off and fell into the crack between the train and the platform, where they could not be retrieved. We could hear him grieving as we walked away.

Meanwhile, many years later, some friends took me to a minor league game, where the crowd was small, friendly, relaxed and totally enjoyed a losing game under a soft evening sky. I am now hooked on minor league ball. I mention this because Healdsburg has an unknown minor league team that will be playing this summer. You might want to google the Healdsburg Owls.

Political Jokes

2011-03-31T08:28:00.000-07:00

Newt Gingrich, according to Bill Maher, was so confused by events in Libya that he made a pass at his own wife. Maher also noted that Michele Bachmann is running for President seeking the support of those who find Sarah Palin too literate.

I'll throw in the suspicion that Sarah Palin, recently visitor to Israel, took a harpoon to the Wailing Wall.

The worst joke came yesterday when Eric Kantor, second in command of the Republican House of Representatives, announced that they planned to pass their vicious budget a second time, which would make it the law of the land. And he wasn't joking. Apparently Kantor doesn't know that a budget has to pass both houses of congress and be signed by the President.

Juan Cole

2011-03-28T14:11:00.000-07:00

It happens at times that you run into issues so sticky that no matter what position you hold, you end up with dirty hands. The United Nations' intervention in Libya, led by NATO, is an instance of this phenomenon. If you support the intervention, you will be in part responsible for the casualties that come in any military battle, including the deaths and maimings of the poor sods who were coerced or drafted into Gaddafi's forces. If you reject or remain neutral about the intervention, you will share the blame for what might be the deaths of the tens of thousands of ordinary Arabs Gaddafi has promised to kill.

The intervention is well under way, of course, so the question has become, says Juan Cole, can the American Left walk and chew gum at the same time? The Left is opposed to interventions and opposed to potential genocides; does it oppose interventions in potential genocides?

The World, by and large, has spoken. Even nations openly reluctant to intervene (Russia, China, Germany) got out of the way once Gaddafi said he intended to kill many workers and middle class Arabs in Libya. Juan Cole has spoken: he won't turn his back on the working class and middle class people fighting for their lives in the streets of Libya. That's good enough for me.

Two Rules for Genocides

2011-03-25T08:33:00.000-07:00

As a card-carrying member of the American Far Left, which is unique among Far Lefts in the world, I have been looking for insights into how to react to the United Nations intervention in Libya. This is a confusing matter, but I believe I have figured out the underlying rules for correct responses.

Rule One: The United States and the United Nations should never intervene in a genocide if the country involved has oil reserves. That would cost us our personal moral integrity. We might gain the world and save millions of lives, but we would lose our souls. (See Libya, for example.) What really matters here is not the Libyans but our rejection of situational ethics.

Rule Two: We should not intervene in a non-oil genocide unless we intervene in all genocides--I estimate that at any time in human history, there have been roughly ten genocides going on. To intervene in one genocide while ignoring the other nine would be logically inconsistent. (See Bosnia, for example.) Also, this rule is retroactive in the sense that if we failed to intervene in earlier genocides (the Trojan War, the fall of Jericho, the Persian Wars, the Holocaust) we would be wrong to intervene today.

Nation Building in Libya

2011-03-21T05:03:00.000-07:00

The claim that the West lacks intelligence on Libya is false. From as far back as the fifth century BCE, Europe has kept close tabs on the tribes of Libya. I translate from the Father of History, Herodotus, below.

1. "Beginning on the side of Egypt, the first Libyans are the Adyrmachidae. When they catch any lice on their persons, they bite them and then throw them away." (This is in contrast, apparently, with tribes that keep their dead lice.) "The Adyrmachidae extend from the borders of Egypt to the harbor called Port Plynus."

2. "Next to the Adyrmachidae are the Gilligammae and then the Asbystae, who ape the manners of the Cyrenaeans, having no manners of their own."

3. "Westward dwell the Auschisae and then the Nasamonians, a numerous people. Each man among them has several wives. At the first wedding of a Nasamonian, it is customary for the bride to have congress with each of the guests; in return she receives cheap presents."

4. "The land of the Nasamonians borders on that of the Psylli people, who, when their springs dried up, went to war with the South Wind, which rose up and buried them under heaps of sand. Now the Garamantians live there--they have no weapons of war and cannot defend themselves." (But two pages later Herodotus writes: "The Garamantians have four horse chariots in which they chase the cave-dwelling Ethiopians, who of all nations are the swiftest of foot. Their language sounds like the screeching of bats." Please note that I did not make up the name of the Psylli people.)

5. "Near them dwell the Ginanes, whose women wear on their legs anklets of leather, one for each lover. She who has the most leather is the best esteemed and not a skank."

6. "A promontory jutting into the sea is inhabited by the Lotus-eaters, who live entirely on the fruits of the lotus tree, even turning it into a kind of zinfandel."

7. "The westernmost tribe is the Auseans. These people do not marry or live in families but roam promiscuously like cattle. When the children are nearly grown, they are brought before the assembled tribe and assigned to the adults they most closely resemble."

It will be no small task to unite these tribes (in their current manifestations) in a modern system like that of the USA, governed primarily by 400 billionaires. Libya has only one billionaire.

We might begin by encouraging Libya to enact a social security system, which will give their political leadership something to attack and tear down while Italy and France burn Libyan oil.

Ann Coulter, One Toke Over The Line

2011-03-18T12:18:00.000-07:00

I picked up this amazing story from Cynthia Boaz's Facebook page. It seems that Ann Coulter has been arguing that radiation is "good for you."

In a column called "A Glowing Report On Radiation," Coulter wrote that many scientists have been studying the effects of radiation and have found that, as she put it, "at some level--much higher than the minimums set by the U.S. government--radiation is good for you," and actually reduces the risk of cancer.

She repeated this assertion to a skeptical Bill O'Reilly, who told her that, even if there was scientific discussion going on about the effects of radiation, it was the media's job to be "responsible" and "err on the side of caution" about radiation. "You have to report the worst-case scenario," he said, adding that there is a clear scientific consensus that "some radiation will kill you."

Coulter said she disagreed, and said that the scientific consensus has changed, but that the media are not reporting it.

MICHELE BACHMANN AND POSTSTRUCTURALIST NON-THOUGHT

2011-03-14T10:53:00.000-07:00

My children started college near the end of the poststructuralist boom that had swept aside rational thought in some elite English departments. I paid tuition, good money, to support air bending English professors who were teaching my offspring that "there are no facts."

Actually the existence of the word "fact" is a fact.

My children easily survived this miseducation, as so many do, by ignoring it in favor of things they found more interesting.

Congressninny Michele Bachmann, on the other hand, remains a true deconstructing poststructualist. Yesterday she made a speech in which she placed the battles of Concord and Lexington and the "shot heard around the world" in Vermont, although most believe that they occurred in Massachusetts. Of course if there are no facts, then where the Revolutionary War began is a matter of opinion. I personally think the war started north of Napa, inside a winery, and I am entitled to my opinion. I feel certain I am right. That's all that matters.

Tsunami of Stupidity Hits Washington

2011-03-12T09:38:00.000-08:00

A Republican plan passed by the House of Representatives will cut $126 million dollars from the agency that warned Hawaii and the West Coast about the tsunami coming from Japan (at about 500 mph). This cut will cause rolling closures of the agency's offices.

The Presidential Arabian Menagerie

2011-03-10T07:54:00.000-08:00

As someone who visited the naval base at Guantanamo about 55 years ago, I can comment on the new Presidential Menagerie being constructed there (my sources include Wickipedia and Jon Stewart).

Menageries have been with us for some time. The oldest known zoological collection was found during excavations at Hierakonpolis, Egypt, in 2009, of a 3500 B.C. menagerie. The exotic animals included hippos, hartebeest, elephants, baboons and wildcats. Other well-known collectors of animals included King Solomon of the Kingdom of Israel and Judah, Kings Semirami and Ashurbanipal of Assyria, and King Nebuchadrezzar of Babylonia.

The new Arabian Menagerie will follow what has become a standard practice of approximating a natural environment--Gitmo is surrounded by a desert. Following the tenets of the American Zoo Association, the Presidential Menagerie has stopped the practice of having Arabs perform tricks for visitors.

Some may object to the idea of Arabs displayed in cages, but that is not an innovation. In September 1906, William Hornaday, director of the Bronx Zoo in New York—with the agreement of Madison Grant, head of the New York Zoological Society—had Ota Benga, a Congolese pygmy, displayed in a cage with the chimpanzees, then with an orangutan named Dohong and a parrot. The exhibit was intended as an example of the "missing link" between the orangutan and white man. The public reportedly rushed to see it.

Persons were also displayed in cages during the 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition, and as late as 1958 in a "Congolese village" display at Expo '58 in Brussels.

Some Arab rights people have objected on the grounds that Arabs should be afforded the same consideration as human beings (see the Magna Carta). Gary Francione has argued that Arabs need only one right: the right not to be property. Despite the different approaches, advocates broadly agree that Arabs should be viewed as non-human persons and members of the moral community and should not be used as food, clothing, research subjects, or entertainment.

Critics of the rights movement argue that Arabs are unable to enter into a social contract or make moral choices, and for that reason cannot be regarded as possessors of rights. A parallel argument is that there is nothing inherently wrong with using Arabs as resources so long there is no unnecessary suffering, a view advocated by the Arab welfare organizations.

A Note to Birthers

2011-03-09T09:40:00.000-08:00

Last night Jon Stewart pointed out that no one denies that the President's parents were married in Hawaii or that his mother was three months pregnant at the time. If you hold that a fetus is a person, our future President was in the United States at the time.

Writer's Cramp

2011-03-03T11:25:00.000-08:00

Good luck to the mismanaged Press (Corporate) Democrat, our county newspaper, which has increased its price by 50% while cutting 1.5 inches off the width of its little page. The paper's columnists are learning extreme brevity. I suspect that many old readers (and the newspaper readers tend to be old) won't pay 75 cents for this truncated collection of tiny tidbits, while the young people get their news off the 'net.

President Chavez and Realpolitik

2011-03-02T09:22:00.000-08:00

One of a small number of heroes I've had in a long life is Albert Camus, an imperfect man who stood with the humane Left. He had what Hemingway once called a good "bullshit detector." While the rest of the French Left followed Stalin, Camus rejected him, although it cost him many friendships, including that of Sartre.

The United States has accurately been condemned again and again for its foreign policy of realpolitik, adhered to by both recent Republicans and Democrats. This amoral approach--support for friendly tyrants against their own people, on the grounds that stability is good for business--deserves the anger of anyone who cares about the lives of ordinary people.

Another man I once admired was Hugo Chavez. In recent days, President Chavez of Venezuela has thrown his support to Muammar Gaddafi, the tyrant of Libya, who is engaged in killing his own rebelling citizens. "He has been a friend for a long time," Chavez wrote. In short, no matter how Gaddafi behaves, he is an ally of Venezuela, and Chavez will cut him the same kind of slack that American Presidents cut Israel. That's realpolitik at its worst.

Slaves and Masters

2011-02-28T11:02:00.000-08:00

After some thought I have come up with an explanation for why people cannot hear a Black President when he talks. It's based on history. For many years Black people misled much of the nation by pretending that they were happy to be obedient slaves in the fields and bedrooms of the South. Whippings and murders were--they seemed to agree--the price of learning civilized ways. To placate the masters, Blacks pretended they couldn't read or think or dunk a basketball.

Historical falsity of such magnitude lingers. It explains why so many white people today don't hear President Obama when he says he was born in Hawaii. Their deafness is based on 200 years of inauthentic connections between peoples.

Moral: It always pays to be honest with other people, unless it gets you whipped or killed.

Black-Deaf Problem

2011-02-27T07:48:00.000-08:00

I realized this morning how hard it is to hear what people with dark skins say. Days after President Obama had come out in support of union bargaining rights, I was watching a group of union supporters demonstrate in Wisconsin; many carried signs that read: "Obama, Which Side Are You On?"

I was reminded of Obama's Presidential campaign, in which he said many times that he intended to ramp up the war in Afghanistan. A year later many on the Left felt betrayed when he ramped up the war in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, at Tea Party rallies, people carry signs proclaiming that Obama is a Moslem (he's said weekly that he is a Christian) and a foreigner (Obama has proved that he was born in Hawaii).

Skin tone induces deafness in certain citizens of the Left and Right. This disease is, from what I can tell, incurable. At best it might be quarantined until it dies out.

--Gary Goss

Gadhafi

2011-02-22T09:01:00.000-08:00

I would like to be celebrating the spirit of liberation evident in Libya (and in the Wisconsin demonstrations, for that matter), but I fear for the lives of ordinary people. Dictator Moammar Gadhafi is doing his best to murder the citizens of his country. As I write this the outcome is unclear; Gadhafi may be losing control of the eastern part of his nation. Meanwhile he has imported well-paid mercenaries to machinegun protesters armed with metal pipes.

Closer to home, the Tea Party governor of Wisconsin continues the Republican attempt to destroy the financial base of the Democratic Party. The plan is to make it illegal to negotiate with unions. Bust the unions, and there will be no large entities left to oppose the Corporate State (keep in mind that the Republican Supreme Court recently freed corporations to spend as much as they want in election campaigns).

This is a national push, state by state, to defund the Democrats and turn our country into a one-party nation totally dominated by the greed of multi-national corporations.

I am old enough to remember FDR (barely). These times strike me as astounding in some ways. We've fallen so far. But if you push people hard enough, push them to desperation, they will take to the streets with metal pipes in their hands. Fear of that kind of response helped usher in the New Deal.

An Attack on Women

2011-02-20T11:41:00.001-08:00

The Republican Party has declared war on American women. Consider the following. The Republicans are attempting to redefine rape (in order to make the cases against men harder to prosecute). They also intend to change the legal term "victim of rape" to "accuser of rape." In South Dakota they hope to make it legal to kill a doctor who provides abortions. Republicans in congress want to make it legal for a hospital to let a woman die rather than perform a life-saving abortion. And so on. More of the same is in the works.

Why any woman would vote Republican is beyond me, but I guess some women like the Taliban.

Power to the People

2011-02-11T10:40:00.000-08:00

The ordinary people of Egypt have thrown out the Dictator Mubarak--which seems astonishing. Hundreds lost their lives in this push, but the demonstrators remained peaceful. I admire their courage. And we should all note a rare event in American history; our President, after a day or two, sided with the Egyptian people and against a tyrant who had supported American policies for 30 years. Another American first for Obama.

On a local scale you might have missed what the Press Democrat reported at a hearing before the Public Utilities Commission, where a 43% rate hike for Larkfield was under discussion. Mike McGuire, our county supervisor, spoke to the commission, noting that the utility's parent corporation had earned "$227 million in profit in the first nine months of last year." McGuire said, "Larkfield residents are helping better the bottom line of fat cat investors, while our seniors are struggling to survive." He went on to characterize aspects of the corporation's arguments as "hogwash" and "a lie."

Blunt truth can be refreshing.

Lara's Theme

2011-02-09T14:32:00.000-08:00

One of the current problems Egypt faces is finding a new President, now that Hosni Mubarak's son, Hosni W. Mubarak, has bowed out. Egypt will need a special figure to unite a country new to democracy.

Americans are in an excellent position to advise on this choice, having been voters in a democracy for hundreds of years. We hold the experience needed and the wisdom. My suggestion is that Egyptians elect a charismatic fellow of proven charm who has the ability to read a speech compellingly. In this country no sort of person has better fit that bill--I speak in historical terms--than a former actor old enough to be approaching dementia. That is why I am nominating Omar Sharif.

Who else in Egypt is 78 years old, speaks seven languages, was a leading expert in contract bridge and had an affair with Barbra Steisand?

Risky Shade

2011-02-03T11:14:00.000-08:00

In FINDING THE WORTH WHILE IN CALIFORNIA by Charles Francis Saunders, first published in 1916, the author included a warning for visitors to Northern California.

"The difference between sunshine and shadow is also very noticeable, and experienced people after exercising do not sit down in the shade but in the sun; or if it must be shade, they throw something over their shoulders. 'There is always a nasty little breeze in this climate to make trouble,' I once heard a tourist complain. She had caught cold from ignorance of the risk she took in sitting on a shady bench to watch a tennis game after walking in the pleasant winter sunshine."

On a more positive note, the author praises the drive from Calistoga through Knights Valley to Healdsburg, a town "picturesque with hop-yards and hop-drying houses."

Blaming Obama

2011-02-01T10:11:00.001-08:00

I've been following the analyses of the situation in Egypt, and I have concluded that President Obama is to blame. The protests in the streets have occurred because Obama once made a speech in Cairo extolling democracy. That's Obama's fault. If the protests win, radical Islamists will come to power. I blame Obama. If the protests lose, it will be because Obama failed to support democracy. If the dictator Mubarak turns the situation into a bloodbath, it will be because Obama armed him and failed to restrain him. If Mubarak gets driven out, Obama will be the President who lost Egypt.

We can conclude with certainty that whatever happens to either side, President Obama will be to blame, unless he isn't.

THE GREEN MUSIC CENTER

2011-01-30T18:46:00.000-08:00

Today my wife and I listened to some excellent Brahms in the still-incompleted Green Music Center on the Sonoma State University campus. The calming odor of new wood didn't hurt a bit. The sound (where we sat) was distinct and terrific. The place struck us as quite small when compared to Luther Burbank, but it will be a great building for music.

Six Topics for a Tea Party Discussion

2011-01-21T07:26:00.000-08:00

1. Is John McCain a stump?

2. Why do we prefer women with huge spiteful faces?

3. Would World War Two have been improved "by one more gun"?

4. Why do smart people pick on us?

5. In which ways are black women most like Nazis?

6. Should South Carolina secede?

Killa from Wasilla

2011-01-19T06:36:00.000-08:00

The following is a true story. I can vouch for it.

A UCLA graduate I know named Tom Icywalker died recently and found himself standing in front of St. Peter, asking to be admitted to heaven. St. Peter thumbed through the Book of Life to determine if Icewalker was eligible. Icywalker just stood there shuffling his feet like a deck with two cards.

"Icywalker," the saint finally said, "I find nothing in your life that might get you into heaven, not even one good deed. Have I missed something?"

"Yes," Tom replied. "Once, while on a trip to Wasilla, I met Sarah Palin. She was clubbing baby seals to death for fun."

"What did you do?"

"I rebuked her."

"What did you say?"

"I called her a five-gallon buckethead--have you seen the size of her melon?"

St. Peter leafed through the Book of Life again. "That's excellent," he said, "but I can't find a mention of the incident here. Help me out. When did it happen?"

"About a minute ago."

Minority Report

2011-01-12T14:33:00.000-08:00

Some may have seen a Tom Cruise science fiction movie of a few years back called MINORITY REPORT. In this film Cruise was part of a special police force that can see into the future and detect upcoming crimes. That way they are able arrest the perps before the crimes take place. But then certain problems develop. . . .

The Giffords assassination attempt (and murders) has raised the question of why the lunatic killer wasn't in clapped into detention before the awful events took place. Along the way the killer displayed symptoms of mental illness in public school, in a community college, and nearly everywhere else. In Arizona, of course, he almost fit in. No one put him away. "He hadn't committed a crime yet," is the explanation.

In fact, people who are a danger to themselves or others can be detained under certain circumstances. One such instance looms in full public view. The federal government is holding prisoners at Gitmo who have committed no provable crime, are not awaiting trial, and who (apparently) will never be released, on the grounds that if let go they might commit a crime in the future.

The future has arrived. Tom Cruise for President!

---Gary Goss

U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords

2011-01-10T09:47:00.000-08:00

I had a note from one of my daughters, who attended college with Gaby Giffords. This makes the assassination attempt and murders in Arizona seem closer to home.

I'd like to make a few points. (1) If leaders demonize politicians, they will become the chosen targets of armed lunatics. (2) The lunatics will be carrying crowd-killing weapons undreamed of by our Founding Fathers, whose rifles had room for only one slug. (3) The Democrats reject the violent Left; the Republicans have incorporated the violent Right, which now holds Republican seats in Congress. (4) It's a good idea not to live in Arizona.

What are we becoming?

Delegating Responsibility to Obama

2011-01-04T11:17:00.000-08:00

Let us suppose that we, like Abraham, hand over responsibility for decisions to God. That is a decision we make. If I delegate responsibility, then I am responsible for what my Leader does. I am responsible for the outcome.

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In a representative democracy we use the same process. We vote and delegate responsibility to elected officials to conduct our foreign policy, protect the nation, shape the economy, deny health care to the dying, etc. Sometimes, like Abraham, we are asked to sacrifice our children, perhaps by sending them to die in a useless war. Like Abraham, we obey.

I am not responsible for George W. Bush, because I voted against him, he stole his election, and I would never delegate responsibility to a stunted frat-boy. I am, however, responsible for the actions of President Obama, because I supported him. The outcomes have been mixed so far. Consider the war in Afghanistan--Obama told us repeatedly during his campaign that he intended to enlarge the war. I can't claim that he fooled me.

Some of my friends avoided responsibility by not voting or by voting for third-party candidates. You can't delegate national decision-making to third party candidates, because they never get elected. This sort of non-delegation, however, has occasionally led to the election of George W. Bush to high office. Non-delegation also has outcomes.

Rethinking Civil Unions

2010-12-30T17:54:00.000-08:00

Some of you may have noticed that statistics from France show that nearly half the civil unions performed there involve straight couples. In other words, civil unions are not just for gays and lesbians. I have no idea what the statistics are for our ruder nation, but I can say this: my grandmother, my mother, my wife and my daughter formed pacts with their partners at city hall. That's four generations in a row.

Perhaps that was because none of us had money. My family has been here since the Revolution without making it out of the working class.

I should mention that certain of my family's "registered partnerships," as some call them, were more civil than others. My grandmother, who had numerous informal male friends, would often redden her cheeks with blush and visit people she'd grown fond of in the afternoons, but she was civil. She always had supper on the table when her second husband arrived home after a hard day of vulcanizing tires. He'd earned a timely meal.

Civil Unions were officially invented for gays in Denmark in 1989, but they have always existed--we used to call them "common law marriages." The definitions of civil unions differ from one jurisdiction to the next, and so does the nomenclature. My favorite term is "civil solidarity pact." Straights are allowed to sign up for these pacts in places like Quebec and Uruguay. Young people do this, I read, where it's easy to end a civil union and complicated to get a divorce.

I'm not a lawyer, but I believe that gays have the Constitutional right to marry each other. That's what many want, and it is both a practical matter and a matter of respect. For the 16% of straight Californians who are not religious, though, I suggest considering civil solidarity pacts--get married by a judge at city hall. It costs little, goes fast, then you eat Chinese and go to a Cohn Brothers' movie.

Extorting Teachers

2010-12-25T12:50:00.000-08:00

I read two reports today. The first was about how depraved gangs in Ciudad Juarez have been extorting teachers and schools, demanding that they give up their Christmas bonuses or the gangs will attack the teachers, the schools or the children. Some attacks have taken place.

The second report was closer to home. One section of the Democratic Party has joined the Republicorp in attacking teachers' unions, on the grounds that union busting will lead to better schools. I doubt if I can express how pathetic this plan is.

Back in the twentieth century a huge amount of compelling research in many different countries went into studies of how young people learn effectively. None of it demonstrated that punishing teachers or their unions would raise the success rates. What we are seeing in American public systems--and this includes the Obama administration--is a scapegoating of faculty members, blaming them for problems brought on by system-enforced concepts refuted by science a hundred years ago. Often the teachers know better, but they held captives to a stupid rule book, ignorant parents, overcrowding, and a mania for testing and punishment. Private schools and charter schools, on the other hand, range from excellent to weirdly eccentric with approaches so intellectually ridiculous no expert would give them a second glance.

All I can say to parents today is (1) try to be born wealthy so you can afford one of the few excellent schools or (2) take heart from the fact that most of a child's learning takes place out of school; pay close attention to your child's interests and cultivate learning that the child will love.

--Gary Goss

Muck

2010-12-22T05:34:00.000-08:00

Samuel Johnson's A JOURNEY TO THE WESTERN ISLANDS OF SCOTLAND is my source for the story of Muck. In 1773 Johnson and James Boswell toured northern Scotland, investigating the habits of the Highland Scots. One thing Johnson discovered was that local leaders of the Scottish clans were often named for the particular islands or areas they ruled. If you were the chief ruler of Mull, for example, you would be known as Mull. That was fine with the exception of the leader of Muck. He did not care for his place name and made an attempt to change it to Monk, but that failed to catch on. Finally a compromise was struck, and he became know as Isle of Muck, which some think a small improvement.

This problem came to mind the past few weeks as I participated in several discussions of the meanings of the terms liberal, hippie, progressive and radical. A variety of people could not agree on what these words signified or what to call themselves.

My own view solidified in 1969. In those days a liberal was a Democrat who supported the Vietnam War. A radical was Marxist or socialist or anarchist or pacifist. A progressive was a wider term that included radicals and others who opposed the war. A hippie was a lightweight dude who dropped acid and listened to Pink Floyd. If you called a serious leftist a hippie, he or she would be deeply hurt.

That history is now forgotten. I run into people who insist that a liberal is to the left of a progressive and that both of them are hippies. Like Isle of Muck I remain unsatisfied--I'd rather be a radical.

Free At Last

2010-12-21T05:19:00.000-08:00

"Don't Ask, Don't Tell" was well intended at its inception, although never a good idea. It's wrong to require people to pretend to be what they are not--something politicians seldom grasp, because they pretend for a living. To make things worse, military bigots immediately altered the law to mean "I will catch you if I can." Thousands of gays and lesbians who did not "tell" were hunted down and discharged.

Repeal of this law is a major gain in civil rights. It moves us into the twentieth century and gives America hope of entering the current century. We have cast off the shame of legal second class citizenship. And we can thank two sources: the fighting spirit of people who refused to accept the status quo and the strategy of Obama, Pelosi and Reid, which was often condemned but worked out exactly as the President had planned.

--Gary Goss

Ice Man

2010-12-13T05:44:00.000-08:00

Mark Twain used to tell the true story of a mail carrier in Death Valley, a public servant who couldn't take the heat. As summer approached, he considered his problem at length and eventually designed and built an overcoat made of sponges. To this coat he affixed a bladder of water and a handpump, which he planned to use to keep the sponge coat wet. On the first really hot day, he put on his new coat, loaded the mail into his wagon and set out on his route, only to be found shortly after noon, beside the road, frozen to death with an icicle hanging from his nose.

I thought of this tale yesterday while listening to a panel of talking heads who claimed that President Obama's recent gratuitous attacks on his liberal political base were actually part of a shrewd plan to win over more conservative independent voters in the 2012 election. I doubt that. Obama is unlikely to be found by the side of the road, but no conjecture is too dumb for the Talking Heads of TV.

A MEANINGFUL LIFE

2010-12-07T11:21:00.000-08:00

To be meaningful, philosopher Susan Wolf once wrote, a life must be actively engaged in worthy projects. Her summary came to mind recently as I read the Los Angeles Times' obituary of Stu Pidasle (not his real name). The obituary was an eighteen paragraph tribute to the meaningless life of an aggressive political hack.

If you are lucky, you never encountered Stu Pidasle or his missing brain pan, but Senator Diane Feinstein called him the "indefatigable wise man of Californian politics." Al Gore claimed Pidasle "was also a great champion of progressive political causes." Feinstein and Gore were mistaken. Pidasle was actually a fairly stupid donut depository who lived to serve, in a thuggish way, the anti-progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Also he looked like a sock puppet filled with cottage cheese.

Two anecdotes from the 1960s might convey what a pleasure it was to know a Stu Pidasle. At one point a friend of mine planned to attend a state Democratic convention where he would be supporting the Henry Waxman & John Burton caucus (so to speak) rather than the Pidasle & Jesse Unruh caucus. My friend asked me and my brother to stick around during the convention to protect him against physical threats. Sure enough, about half way through, Pidasle and several of his tough guys cornered us in a hallway. These dudes were mean by political standards but not by street standards, so my brother and I told them to get lost, and they ran away down the hall with tears in their eyes, Pidasle in first place.

A year or so after that, I was helping in a Democratic primary contest, supporting a brilliant attorney who went on to a fine career on the California Supreme Court. We lost narrowly to the incumbent, a stumbling alcoholic who seldom voted, supported, of course, by the Stu Pidasle faction of our party. Anyway, one afternoon during the campaign I drove over to hear what the inebriated incumbent had to say at a public meeting. Pidasle was in the crowded hall, the only person who knew me. I paid him no attention and gradually began to doze off. About halfway through, I woke and decided to leave.

I had driven my ancient car about three miles on the freeway when the heat gauge suddenly registered extreme pain. I pulled off the freeway and into a service station where the attendant replaced the hose on my water pump and handed me the old hose, which he noted had been cut open from stem to stern with a pocket knife. "You could have been killed," he said.

I drove back to the meeting place. The space where I had parked before was still open, so I parked there again. Then I checked the car parked behind me. Through the window I spotted the registration and the name Pidasle. I took a sturdy coke bottle out of my trunk and used it to redesign Mr. Stu Pidasle's brake lights.

I'm Gary Goss, and I approve this funeral.

Who's Buried in Grant's Tomb?

2010-11-29T16:37:00.000-08:00

Two of America's most famous school child's questions are "What color is a white horse?" and "Who's buried in Grant's tomb?" I can answer the second.

Those of us who live in the northern part of Sonoma County daily pass by a road named Shiloh. Or we live on Grant Street, and it's time to learn why.

Many, who took history in high school, know that Grant graduated from West Point near the bottom of his class, fought in the war against Mexico (where we had the highest casualty rate per soldier in American history), served in the army in Sonoma County for a while and then resigned in disgrace because of drunkenness, failed in civilian life, and reentered the Union Army at the start of the Civil War, also known, in some places, as the War of Northern Aggression against Proud Illiterate Christians Defending Slavery (or something like that). During the war, the drunken but stubbornly heartless Grant achieved a measure of undeserved success by sending vast hordes of looting Union troops on stupid frontal assaults against tiny numbers of brilliant Confederate dudes, who would have prevailed if they had not fragged their best general, Stonewall Jackson, now a central name in gay rights history.

Most of the above is false, of course, a set of rumors first started in the North (by generals who wanted Grant's rank and by war correspondents who did their writing in the rear while running away with the other deserters) and later taken up by apologists for the South and its totally defeated army.

Part of the price by which Southern men were reconciled to the loss of access to slave women was a national glorification of Robert E. Lee and a denigration of Grant and the Union victories. Never mind that Grant's battles became the core study in military academies around the world (and unfortunately inspired the German army).

Robert E. Lee was, of course, one of several unusually able generals who fought for the South. At the start of the war, the best generals the country went with the South, one reason the South won so many early victories. They were the same generals that Grant defeated--Grant never lost a battle in his career or took a backward step. Of Grant, Lee later wrote: "I have carefully searched the military records of both ancient and modern history, and have never found Grant's superior as a general."

Grant was not a drunk, left the army because of low pay, and made a middle class living for his family in civilian life before the war. While the Union Army was slightly larger than the Confederate Army, in many of Grant's early battles, both sides had the same number of troops or Grant led the smaller force.

Among all the generals on the Union side, Grant was the only one who led successful offenses. His trademark in an attack was speed and the unexpected. For example, he mounted the first amphibious attack in modern warfare, coordinating the army and navy. His contribution was not simply tactics. Grant's strategy, the three pronged attack that included Shermon's' crushing march to the sea, cornered Lee and ended the awful fighting.

In a sense the decisive engagement of the Civil War came in 1862 at the battle of Shiloh where, for the first time in the conflict, two equal armies with two good generals met head on. Confederate General Albert Sydney Johnston's goal was to annihilate the Union Army, and he was a great general, but Grant destroyed the forces of Johnston (killed in battle) and Beauregard. After the battle, Grant noted that the South had fought hard and retreated in order. He understood what that meant: the war would be long and difficult. The South would have to be invaded and beaten on its own territory. Grant spent the next year trying to convince his superiors of the need to fight.

The South could have won. They were conducting a defensive battle around their own homes. They had interior railroads and rivers on which to move highly motivated troops rapidly from place to place. The North had to invade long distances and fight on unfamiliar ground, a logistical nightmare. But Grant was good at logistics. He was especially good at drawing relief maps of what lay ahead. He planned. His army moved food and ammunition.

Grant had to win fast. Democracies don't like long wars, and Lincoln seemed on the verge of being defeated for reelection. Grant did win, of course, at Appomattox Courthouse, where he granted generous terms to the South when Lee surrendered (Grant was not really an "unconditional surrender" man).

At the time the North was grateful. Grant was elected President twice, but he proved a political novice misled by Washington's corrupt elite. He did get some things right, though. He enforced the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, granting former slaves the right to vote, and he prodded congress into inventing the Justice Department to continue this work. "It is to Grant that we owe the institutionalization of universal suffrage and racial equality that we take for granted today," wrote John Mosier, historian. (For more on Grant, see Mosier's book with a foreword by General Wesley Clark, who ranks Grant first among America's military men.)

Reading about Grant has made me fonder of him. As a young husband, Grant planned to live out his life as a civilian in California, which he loved. He had not wanted an army career. His father had made him enter West Point for the free education. Grant's own goal was to become a math professor--he excelled at math--and he had a job lined up when the war with Mexico broke out. In his memoir Grant called that war "unholy," and he explained how the Americans had started it by advancing unprovoked into Mexico until finally the Mexican Army had to fight, at which point President Polk declared the country under attack. The motive for the war was to add Texas and other slave territories to the block of Southern states. As Grant saw it, the Mexican War was the start of the Civil War. In fact, Grant wrote that the Civil War was our punishment for what we had done to Mexico.

Grant's final act, completed at the behest of Mark Twain as Grant sat dying from cancer, was to write a memoir, the only Presidential memoir absorbed into the canon of American literature. Grant died within a week of finishing the book and providing an income for his wife.

That's who is buried in Grant's Tomb.

How the West Was Won

2010-11-23T07:23:00.000-08:00

Stephen Gale, who chairs the Sonoma County Democratic Central Committee, sent the following summary of the campaign that rolled back the deadly Republican plague of 2010. In short, the Democrats swept California because they were organized. I will add this much. The Democratic National Committee let Howard Dean's brilliant 50 state organization of 2008 shrivel in terms of money and staff. Too bad.

Below is an edited version of what Stephen Gale presented:

__________________________________________

Some of you have asked about the Coordinated Campaign that the California Democratic Party waged this year that produced such unprecedented results

The CDP's Coordinated Campaign was executed through the local parties in all 58 Counties and included coordinated action with Organizing for America, many of our allies in Labor and individual candidate campaigns. The basic structure described below is likely to be replicated -- with signficant improvements and changes obviously necessary in a Presidential election year -- for the 2012 coordinated campaign.

2010 ELECTION RECAP -- CALIFORNIA'S BLUE WAVE

Laying the groundwork for victory in 2010

Finance

Chairman Burton reduced party operating expenses by 25%
Reserved all funds in necessary accounts (Federal, Levin, etc.) in order that they be available for GOTV in 2010
Raising ~ $100,000 from monthly small donor donations using DEM2010 (The Sonoma County Central Committee was the 1st Central Committee in California to achieve 100% participation.)

Communications

Hired the party's first in-house bilingual Communications Director
Increased communications and online organizing, including social media
Launched a redesigned party website with expanded content & innovative organizational tools for activists (www.cadem.org)

Field/Political Action

Conducted 12 2-day trainings around the state, primarily in "red counties"
Provided MOE for free to every county in the state (A state-of-the-art organizing and voter database system that will remain available free to all local parties.)
Hosted a variety of activist trainings at all CDP E-Board meetings & the State Convention
Hired a Grassroots Coordinator to help activists with program & candidate "farm team" assistance
Conducted an extensive voter registration program in the AD5/CD3 overlap area

2010 Campaign Timeline

August 84 Democratic campaign offices open in locations throughout the state

(SCDP HQ in Santa Rosa was included in this total count by the CDP)

Sept 1 Vote2010 website launched for Coordinated Campaign activities & online

phonebanking

Sept 15 1.3 million bilingual Democratic slate doorhangers delivered around the

state targeting occasional Democratic voters holding a Vote-by-Mail ballot (This doorhanger was designed by County Chairs & designed to maximize space for local candidates on the doorhanger. The doorhanger could also be mailed as a Slate Card in counties that could not afford to print their own Slate Card.)

Oct 4-28 Vote-by-Mail ballot chase begins with volunteers walking & phoning

Oct 4 Promote & Protect the Vote Hotline activited (877-321-VOTE)

Oct 4 500,000 Robocalls made from Robert Redford reminding Democrats to Vote-by-Mail

Oct 7 80,000 paid calls begin to occasional Democratic voters who Vote-by-Mail

Oct 7 Paid walk program starts with teams of 14 in LA and the Bay Area through Nov 2. (No paid walks took place in the North Bay)

Oct 9 Statewide Day of Action with Jerry Brown outreaching to over 70,000

occasional Democratic voters

Oct 10 800,000 Democratic slate cards mailed to occasional VBM Democrats

Oct 12 600,000 Democratic slate cards mailed to high propensity VBM Democrats

Oct 13 Additional 300,000 paid calls start to occasional VBM Democrats

Oct 13-23 4.8 million "No on 26" mailers sent to occasional VBM & poll Democrats

Oct 15 Clinton Rally at UCLA with massive mobile phonebank

Oct 17 Clinton Rally at SJSU with massive mobile phonebank

Oct 20 2 million Democratic slate doorhangers delivered around the state to support walk programs for GOTV

Oct 22 230,000 letters from President Obama mailed to occasional VBM

Democrats

Oct 22 "Friend Out the Vote" & online ads begin on fB and as a fB application

Oct 26 600,000 letters from President Obama mailed to Democratic poll voters

Oct 28 900,000 Democratic Slate cards mailed to occasional poll voters

Oct 28 300,000 Democratic Slate cards mailed to high propensity VBM Democrats

who had not yet voted

Oct 29 640,000 "No on 23" mailers featuring President Obama sent to occasional poll voting Democrats

Oct 30 - Nov 2 Promote & Protect the Vote team of lawyers & volunteers staff phone banks for GOTV

Nov 1 Robocalls for Democratic candidates in Red Districts: Jim Reed for

Congress, Chris Parker for Board of Equalization & Beth Krom for Congress

Nov 1-2 91,000 paid calls in key areas for statewide ticket & polling place location

Nov 1-2 1.3 millions Robocalls made to late VBM voters & poll voters featuring

California Progressional Firefighters President Lou Paulson

Nov 2 30,000 paid Spanish language GOTV calls for Jim Costa for Congress

Nov 2 2010 General Election -- A Clean Sweep for Constitutional Offices

CDP Assistance with Key California Races

State Legislative Races (No targeted races in the North Bay)

119 mailpieces in targeted races sent to nearly 6 million voters
two TV ads

Congressional Races (No targeted races in the North Bay)

27 mailpieces in targeted races sent to over 1 million voters
numerous TV spots
field support

Issue Advocacy

10 mailpieces micro-targeted statewide sent to over 15 million Californians focusing on the proposals & positions of Meg Whitman

Jerry Brown for Governor

Nearly $4 million in CDP contributions

Total campaign budget for the CDP's efforts was something greater than $5 million

LOOKING FORWARD TO 2012

During the next year, the SCDP will be working to ensure that we are able to open a Unity Campaign HQ (similar to our HQ during the 2008 election) soon after the Presidential Primary in 2012. We will be focusing on building our infrastructure so that details -- from phone scripts supporting the re-election of President Obama to logistics for local candidate support -- are worked out well before we open our doors.

The Party of Loss

2010-11-19T06:58:00.000-08:00

In the December HARPER'S, Corey Robin has republished an article on a phenomenon common to conservative politics from its inception. The conservative movement has relied on Tea Party populism, with its immoderation and adventurism, going back to the days of Edmund Burke.

My family illustrates the difference between two kinds of populism. My working class Irish mother's populism was a populism of hope. She reached adulthood at the start of the first Great Depression, and she had, to start with, nothing, not even a high school diploma. With nothing to lose, she had no more sense of loss than FDR. Instead she had hope. She was no victim. Her goal was to live day to day and put her children through college. She had no negative feelings about Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Jews, Gays, hookers or men.

My father came from a border state "Scotch-Irish" family that had been in America since the Revolution without making its way out of the working class; and he was the other sort of populist, the angry man who had suffered, as Corey Robin points out, a terrible loss. He was a victim, a white man who had lost his birthright, lost his place in the world as a member of a master race.

I have resisted, as too simple, the idea that the Teabaggers are racists with a grievance, and of course that is too simple. There is a strong component of populists in the tea party who have either suffered small financial losses or fear that they will soon suffer small financial losses. The Teabaggers tend to be old. They fear the end of Social Security (so, in their unproductive way, they vote Republican and demand a balanced budget). But what seems to drive the Tea Party most goes back to before the Civil War, when the Southern elite managed to convince the Southern white populist to fight for slavery, more or less on the grounds that every white person belonged to a class that was superior to black slaves.

My father did not believe that Blacks, Asians or Latinos were inferior--he was afraid that they weren't. He fought in a losing turf war, as he saw it, and his sense of loss turned his politics on its head. He moved from being an early supporter of FDR to being a committed follower of the NRA. Of course, he did not endorse racism, any more than Glenn Beck openly endorses racism today. Instead we see men and women practicing racism-once-removed by talking about closing the southern border and cutting entitlement programs. Euphemistic racism has become as American as apple pie.

My father, an admirable man in many ways, did not live to see a dark-skinned family in the White House, but that would have been for him a kind of ultimate end of his own special status. He would have joined with other angry "victims" and supported the populist party of emotional loss.

In the Heart of the Heartland

2010-11-12T11:09:00.000-08:00

I suppose everyone knows that many of the Republicorp members of Congress believe that climate change (see the science of geophysics) is a fabrication invented by liberals as part of a plot to take control of the world. They also hold that the planet is 10,000 years old (so much for geology). They deny natural selection (cross off biology). They believe that a snake once talked and that a virgin once gave birth. These beliefs are common in the Heartland.

Many Heartlanders probably subscribe to related beliefs: that the blood of a black chicken will cure shingles; that the root of rhubarb worn on a string around your neck will prevent stomach aches; that cutting your hair in the dark of the moon will make you go bald; that burying a chicken head under a full moon will cure warts; etc.

Wittgenstein once said that if he met someone who claimed that he did not believe in science, Wittgenstein would not know how to continue the conversation. That's where we are today. It has become clear that a sizable number of us in the heart of our heartland reject science while, at the same time, using science to make weapons of war. We share this contradiction with certain jihadists.

The shock some of us feel, I think, comes from the realization that so many of our elected representatives reject geophysics, geology, biology, modern medicine, facts in general, and rational thought. These are the people with whom President Obama is attempting to converse. It is his job to represent them (and everyone else in the country), but how--unlike Wittgenstein--will it be possible for Obama to continue the conversation?

Geophysics

2010-11-09T21:03:00.000-08:00

On Facebook, from time to time, I run into some fellow who pontificates about climate change, taking the position that climate change is just a theory supported by some scientists and denied by others. This thoughtless approach is often presented as a kind of lecture on uncertainty that may include a list of cases where the science of one era changes in a later era. For example, Newton's theory of gravity was superseded by Einstein's theory of gravity (actually I have yet to run across one of these skeptics who knew that Einstein had a theory of gravity).

Perhaps the best answer to this sort of pronouncement is to point towards the American Geophysical Union, the country's largest association of climate scientists. It recently announced that 700 of its members have agreed to talk to hostile audiences and defend the consensus view that climate change is happening and that in part it is the result of human activity. They are preparing a handbook on the human causes of climate change for use in secondary schools.

There is no way to answer another sort of skeptic, the paranoid who claims that climate change theory is a leftist plot. About 50 of the new Republican members of congress support this view, joining with older members like Congressman Darrel Issa of California. These walking meat tubes are now in a position to speed up climate change, which they will do, acting out their delusions. Anyone--like Ralph Nader-- who argues that it doesn't matter which party controls congress might want--for the sake of a planet humans find habitable--to reconsider.

News from the Republicorp

2010-11-04T10:39:00.000-07:00

Until recently John Boehner (R-Ohio) was known mainly for combining two jobs, congressman and lobbyist. He's the dude who famously passed out tobacco lobby checks to fellow crooks on the floor of the House of Representatives. In the words of the song, he needed someone to help him scrape the mucous off his brain. Boehner is also famous for weeping in front of microphones (someone asked recently what would have happened if Nancy Pelosi had addressed the nation with tears streaming down her face). So Boehner is a red-faced booby, but what he's not is a Teabagger. Boehner is in politics--like any career Republicorp--for the hundreds of millions of dollars he can make in Wall Street payoffs.

The clash between the Republicorp millionaires and the Ayn Randian loonies of Teabaggertown has already begun.

I had noticed years ago that the Press Democrat's three or four person editorial board was pro-environment only as long as it did not interfere with corporate profits. The PD is a corporation, and its editorial board will defend business profits even if doing so makes the planet uninhabitable. That is their job. That is what the editors do for a living. The most recent example is their destruction of Pam Torliatt (using a Rovian fake "sanctuary" issue) and their Santa Rosa coup in electing profit-over-environment business puppets to the city council.

The PD's method is to join the Republicorp in secretly backing corporate Democrats to defeat genuine Democrats.

I canceled my subscription.