--Nobody would be "tasked" to do something. The person would be assigned or directed or ordered or re- quested or asked or commanded or ordained or appointed.
--Nobody would be allowed to use the expression "twenty-four/seven" or its newest variant "twenty-four/ seven/three sixty-five." It would be at all times or around the clock or all day or every day or always or without end or any of useful alternatives.
--Particularly in television, reporters or anchors would not be allowed to describe something as happening "as we speak." "Police are investigating as we speak" is redundant; the present tense of the verb takes care of all that.
--"As well" should be consigned to the trash heap. "They sold new models, but also sold used cars as well." "Also" or "and" or something else would do without the "as well."
--Speaking of "well," that would not be allowed to be the first word in every television reporter's story: "Well, Skippy, the city…." "Well, today was to be the day…."
--Everyone would be assigned to study the objective case and nominative case. They would never again say "It made no difference to Joe and I" or "Mail it to Mary or I."
The book is "Robert's Rules of Order." A person (a family, actually) named Robert wrote the compendium of rules for the conduct of assemblies, etc. Hence, "Robert's Rules." But people who write about the rules usually call them "Roberts Rules" or worse, "Roberts' Rules." This relates also to my friends the Richardses, erudite journalists who nonetheless refer to themselves as "the Richards." Others are "the Roberts" and "the Cheevers." Why? Mostly carelessness, I think; they know better. But then, a family named Morris never uses "the Morris" for the plural, or Joneses "the Jones." Why would they get it right? Go figure.
Does all this laziness do any harm? In some cases, yes. A recipient of an invitation to visit "the Cheevers" (instead of "the Cheeverses") may forever have the impression their last name is Cheever, not Cheevers.
This doesn't even get into the maddening habit of many painters of house numbers and welcome mats of making it "The Smith's" or "The Johnson's."
What grammar sloppiness really hurts understanding? Well, for example: If someone promises to "ensure compliance" with a regulation, that has (or should have) a different meaning from "insure compliance." The first means the person will make sure compliance happens, the second means the person will provide financial backup in the case of noncompliance.
Harm is also done by misuse of words whose meanings are clear opposites, such as "average" and "median." If you promise a worker the "average" wage for the region, that would be different from the "median" wage.
A humorous sidelight to all this is the regional variation of the meaning of "next." A southerner, speaking on a Wednesday, may say "next Saturday" meaning "a week from this coming Saturday." In other regions, "next" means "the very, absolute, coming-up NEXT Saturday, three days from now," etc.
Aside from all this, it is sometimes difficult to discern a train of thought, a rational discourse, in some contemporary language. "Well, it's like we were, like, there, and I, like, did not actually like the, like, mood, y'know. So, like, I freaked, know wha'm sayn?" WHAT?
Many people, including many in the military or in communications businesses such as television, would be surprised to learn there is no country pronounced "Eye-rack." Iraq is "Ih-rack" or "Ih-rock," but not "Eye-rack."
With Iran, the long "i" sound is permitted only as a second or third pronunciation, with "Ih-rann" the preferred, or "Ih-ronn."
And then there is the world of overuse. Nowadays, everything seems to be "great." "Great food at Great prices," one restaurant trumpets in its advertisements. I have had many restaurant meals in my day, but only one or two I would call "great." I have never encountered "great" prices and am unsure what that means. The Great Wall of China is truly great, but few other walls are. Only a handful of movies could be considered "great." So, how about being precise? The food was delicious or remarkable or plentiful or tasty or scrumptious, but hardly great. The prices were reasonable or a bargain, but hardly great. A party could be festive or enjoyable or lively or even memorable, but how many are great?
Why does something have to have "an adverse effect on" something else? Why not harm, hurt, diminish, injure, or any of several worthwhile words with more precise meaning?
Why are we confusing "lie" and "lay." (I know "lie" has been a prominent part of the political discourse these past several years, but here I am talking about "lie" as in "lie down." A person "lies low," not "lays low."
Why did we allow one popular movie to help make "I shrunk the kids" accepted? "Shrank" is still a perfectly accepted and correct use for the plural. Also, "sank" and "drank." As yet, nobody is saying , "He drunk his fill."
A front-page newspaper headline summed up not only 2008, but the eight years of the presidency of George W. Bush: “Bush not worst president, say wife, Rice.”Separate Associated Press interviews with Laura Bush and Condoleezza Rice elicited the denials, but the reporter apparently did not bother to ask, “Who was worse?”
Bush and soul mate Dick Cheney made interview rounds in the waning days of their disastrous administration, trying to spin a good face on the administration one last go-round.
In this case, however, it is likely that 20 years later, the Bush administration’s ineptitude will be endorsed by historians in 2028, just as the opinions about Richard Nixon were endorsed in 1994, 2004, and, we dare say, far into the future.
Macblago, thane of Illinois:
Is this a bleep'n phone which I see before me,
The receiver in my hand? Let me extort thee.
I have funds not, and so I phone thee still.
Art thou not, bleep'N prez, sensible to my need
For secretary of health? Or art thou but
An honest man, a Chicago weirdo,
And I a bleep'n gov, left without a brain
Now, damn’d Rod, now I say—one, two, three jobs.
Tis time to bribe. Hell with em. Bleep, my Rod, bleep, a prez and
A Trib? What need we fear who taps us, when it’s you who
Goes to jail? Yet, who would’ve thought those bleep’n men would bleep’n
Have none our bleep’n graft in them? NY Times
It takes an ego as big as the moon to consider oneself a candidate for high public office such as U.S. senator or governor. A reporter who has spent a career rubbing shoulders with people of high office should be immune to such feelings, but it never ceases to amaze just how much hubris some of these people can have.The prize, which we hope will remain his for generations, goes to Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, a Democrat. His case is one of massive hubris overlaid by extreme corruption and, most surprisingly, naivete.
His case would be arrogance on a massive scale anywhere in the country, but in Illinois, he has got to be kidding. The FBI (unbleeped) affidavit summarizing Chicago Tribune the case showed he had been under investi- gation for corruption since the day he took the (ha-ha) oath of office in 2003. The U.S. attorney is from outside Illinois because a former senator with the same last name urged his nomi- nation, believing someone from Illinois unlikely to fight corruption.
His wife, Patti, is the daughter of a 32-year Chicago alderman and nobody needs to be reminded of what
that means. Blagojevich succeeded a Republican governor who is now in jail for corruption, a two former governors who were indicted after they left office; and that was all since Chicago’s Al Capone days.
Probably because of its long history of corruption problems, Illinois is unique in that it has the Better Govern- ment Association, formed as a result of the Capone-led corruption. And guess what; it often works with Illinois news outlets, including the Chicago Tribune, in its investigations. And the Tribune itself was investigating the U.S. attor- ney's investigation of Blagojevich and in contact with that office.
Blagojevich had to know he was under investigation and even said to a fundraiser (over the phone), “You
gotta be careful how you express that and assume everybody’s listening, the whole world is listening. You hear
me?” Turns out it was.
And yet, with all that behind him, Blagojevich apparently was naïve enough to believe he could shake down the Chicago Tribune and the president-elect and get away with it. As one Chicago wag said, “he doesn’t need a
lawyer; he needs a psychiatrist.”
This site did not intend to join all of the speculation about whom Barack Obama would or should choose to serve in his Cabinet, but we find one somewhat intriguing. It needs a lot of thought because it is fraught with danger, but it would be a twofer, perhaps a threefer.Largely overlooked in the heat of the presidential campaign was the extremely import- ant need to retrieve the U.S. Constitution from the Bush administration’s shredder and begin pasting it back together.
There are some who justifiably claim this is a matter so urgent and important, it should be at the top of Obama’s agenda instead of the economy or Iraq.
To bring the United States back under the aegis of the Constitution, Obama needs a dedicated attorney general already on record as one of the harshest critics of the Bush administration and its disastrous toady in the job, Alberto Gonzales, when it comes to constitutional matters.The selection we are talking about is Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa. He has been livid and unstinting in his criticism of the administration’s use of the Jus- tice Department to run roughshod on the rights not only of detainees alleged to be terrorists, but also on its own citizens in the name of fighting terrorism.
NPR As a Republican, his appointment also would serve to provide someone who could act somewhat as an ombudsman to the White House to make sure it did not try to keep all the extralegal powers Bush grabbed for himself, a grab likely to be exposed when the details of all of his secret executive orders are learned. That would be Specter’s second value as the next AG.
His third contribution would be to give up a Republican seat in the Senate and let a Democratic governor, Ed Rendell, appoint the next senator from Pennsylvania, possibly putting the Democratic majority in the Senate over the magic 60-vote line without needing turncoat Joe Lieberman to remain in the party.
That is the positive side of this nomination. The negative is that Specter is as unpredictable as earthquakes and can sometimes go off on some gawdawful quests, none more so than his vicious behavior in the Judiciary Committee’s hearings on the Clarence Thomas nomination to the Supreme Court, who himself was a pitiful selec- tion for the job. We don’t mean to be equally vicious here, but as a saving grace, that did occur before Specter’s brain cancer was discovered and treated.
The decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in a case involving sonar damages to marine animals during military training is a reminder of what the election of Barack Obama really means.Anyone looking for a change on the court during his term is likely to be highly disappointed. Obama’s election only resulted in a placeholder in the White House, not someone with an ability to change the harshly conservative tone of the court.
Chief Justice John Roberts delivered the opinion in the case that sided with the military, in which he suggests the military and its commander-in-chief should be taken at their word. Joining Roberts were Clarence Thomas, Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia and Joseph Alito.
Kennedy and Scalia are the only two of the five who are older than Thomas’s 60, Alito being 58 and Roberts a relatively young 53. The four who manage to temper the court when Kennedy swings their way are at least 70, the oldest being John Paul Stevens at 88. Ruth Bader Ginsberg is 75, Steven Breyer is 72 and David Souter 69.
If any change is going to take place on the court in the next four years, it is likely to be one of those four, whom Obama would now be able to replace.
But nothing is going to change the tone, so get used to it.
How can we lay the U.S. automaker crisis at the feet of the Republicans who were in control of the govern- ment for the past 14 years? How about this.
The Big Three, whose method of operating has been, and is likely to continue to be, one of aiming for instant gratification, were aided and abetted by the Republicans and their decades-long drive to emasculate labor unions in the United States.
That, of course, contradicts the conventional wisdom that has become a religion among the Big Three (why do we call them that any more—they’re the only three). The automakers have complained and complained the United Auto Workers and its demands on behalf of the union’s workers are what have hurt their industry.
To be sure, the UAW did overreach in the heydays of the 1950s and 60s and became so strong they also became their own worst enemies and needed to be trimmed back a bit.
But the UAW would say, and we would agree, that the Big Three were unable to compete with foreign auto- makers on U.S. soil because the foreign firms built their plants in “right-to-work” states. Whatever union that work- ers in those plants may have pales by comparison with the UAW.
How did those right-to-work states come into being? In the wake of the industrial revolution born at the end of the 19th century, labor unions were formed to redress the greedy excesses of their employers who were operating as fief to serf.
Until the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, workers and their employers thrived quite well with union rights to require workers to support the unions. Soon after the act was passed, taking away those union rights, 12 states enacted “right-to-work” laws and another 10 states have followed as Republican Party policy relentlessly defeated Demo- cratic and union efforts to repeal Taft-Hartley.
The result has been that average wages for workers in right-to-work states are 6.5 percent lower than those of their counterparts in states that have not enacted the laws. Of course, they attracted foreign automakers, and Toyota opened the first of its 13 U.S. plants in 1989. An overlay of right-to-work states today closely matches the map of what the red (GOP-voting) states before the election just completed.
As the 1970s crisis waned, Instead of looking ahead as Toyota and Honda did, U.S. automakers went for the bigger instant bucks and began pushing sales of SUVs and huge macho trucks, neither of which got anywhere near the gas mileage foreign makers continued to offer.
And now U.S. automakers are asking for help from the same federal government they joined their GOP friends in beating on so unmercifully for decades.
And welcome back, John McCain. The true McCain, the one we thought we knew in the past, emerged literally at the end of a long campaign: his concession speech.His speech was the perfect cap on a presidential cam- paign that demonstrated the United States finally has grown up. Whether racism in America was pretty much erased by the election or Obama won by a large enough margin to make it irrelevant, we have a new America.
Not only did Obama win the presidency, he either bene- fited from the country having changed for the better or his can- didacy brought about much of that new America. Virginia, the last state to hold out against court-ordered integration in the early 1960s, demonstrates the old America is now dead, or at least on is last legs.
The Obama victory was large and broad enough to have given him an almost universal mandate to govern, and not for just a well-defined few stereotyped by society.
Obama had been called a liberal by the opposition, yet there never had been any evidence that he was one. From the beginning, Obama appeared to be a centrist Democrat in the mold of Bill Clinton.
Obama’s candidacy brought the people who would be natural Democrats, but who too often voted against their own self-interest, back into the party or into it for the first time. They include blue-collar workers who tend to be in the lower-half of the middle class as well as among the low-income, but most importantly the Hispanics who seemed finally to have realized which party is more likely to represent their interests.
Obama’s victory, or conversely McCain’s loss, also is likely to change the Republican party itself. The party has too many ideological segments and needs to decide what its ideology is.
McCain was handicapped by having to appeal to and represent too many conflicting segments of his party. The Obama victory suggests the party has to jettison some of those segments, even if it has to divide into two parties and start a rebuilding effort to appeal to the majority of Americans who have not been represented of late.
And finally, let us hope the venal campaigning that marked much of the McCain/Palin campaign and of that Sen. Elizabeth Dole, R-N.C., should have the same effect it appears to have this time: massive rejection.
The candidacy of Barack Obama gave Americans the chance to return to having a highly intelligent person in the White House. He would follow in the footsteps of Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, both intellectual giants when compared with other presi- dents over the past century.Notice that all three are Democrats, the only ones elected since 1964. The rest of the presidencies during that period have been occupied by Republicans, one of them of fairly good intelligence but with a deeply flawed character—Richard Nixon.
After him came Republicans: Jerry Ford, never regarded as a man of high intelligence; Ronald Reagan, a good speech reader, but someone who otherwise spoke otherwise in clichés, a tool of the not so agile of mind; the elder George Bush, of mediocre intelligence; and, after getting eight years of probably our most intelligent presi- dent ever, we have suffered under the least intelligent one in U.S. history.
So what does all that tell you about what the Democrats offer the country and what the Republicans offer? It may say Republicans not only would not nominate a highly intelligent candidate, one could not win the nomination because he, or she, would not be dumb enough to mollycoddle the right wing of the party that, however much a minority it may be, still decides whom the party will nominate and controls the purse strings that follow.Ted Stevens and His Ironic Conundrum
For some of us, there are few things more pleasurable than watching irony play out. The example here is that Sen. Ted Stevens may not be able to vote for himself in his re-election bid Nov. 4 in Alaska, said to be a tight one even before his conviction on seven felony counts.
As a Republican, his savior may be an organization his fellow conservatives have always referred in vitriolic tones and as evil incarnate—the American Civil Liberties Union.
It seems that Alaska is one of 20 states that bar felons from voting until they have completed their sen- tences. That might present Stevens with a technicality he can squeeze through and vote. He has only just been convicted and will not be sentenced until after the new year, much less have a chance to complete his sentence.
Why would the ACLU be interested? The 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870 in the wake of freeing slaves and intended to block state efforts to keep them from being able to vote, states:
Section 1.
The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
Section 2.
The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
The 13th Amendment, ratified at the end of the Civil War, had already defined “servitude” as it applies to convicts by stating: neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” The key words are: "servitude, except as a punishment for crime.” It also gives Congress the power to enforce the amendment.
But Congress rarely has tried and the fact remains only two states, Maine and Vermont, allow felons to vote without some conditions. Two, Kentucky and Virginia, flat-out deny felons the right to vote, eight allow some con- victed of felony to vote and the rest allow only prisoners, probationers or parolees to vote.
Some estimates put the number of people denied the right to vote because of felony convictions at 5 million, and half of them are blacks. That is more than enough to affect a presidential election, let alone a state outcome.
The U.S. Supreme Court has ducked the issue. The last court to kick the issue away, in 2004 and 2005, was the same court that appointed George W. Bush as president.
The court seems to uphold disenfranchisement of felons based on a provision of the 14th Amendment, which seems to condone the denial of a vote to people guilty of “participation in rebellion or other crime.” The trouble with that view is that the 15th Amendment ratified two years later would trump the 14th, stating clearly felons cannot be denied the vote. (There also is the argument that "other crime" has to mean something at the level of rebellion, or why even mention rebellion. A similar argument was involved in the Nixon impeachment proceedings when a committee wrestled with whether "high crimes and misdemeanors" meant misdemeanors also had to be "high [or major] misdemeanors.")
The last time Congress made an attempt to use its 15th Amendment powers was in 2002, when the Senate killed a Democrat-led bill to enforce it, 31-63, with all Republicans voting against it. Joe Biden joined John McCain in voting against it. Stevens was among six senators, all Republicans, who did not cast a vote.
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Silly Season of Stats & Foreigners
As we move closer to election day, television pundits tend to reach into their grab-bag of election clichés and weigh thick with prognostications, excuses and what have you. About the worst of this highly predictable behavior is the use of statistics.
You probably already are hearing things that sound like, “No candidate with an “R” in his name has ever won the presidency without carrying Ohio,” or (insert state here).
Statistics such as this have been borrowed from the world of sportscasting, which has become so ridiculous at this, many viewers watch with the sound muted.
Well, Ohio of 2008 is not the Ohio of 2004 is not the Ohio of 2000. The pundits who keep repeating that are fogging the real point; if a candidate cannot offset Ohio’s 20 electoral votes, or Pennsylvania’s 21, with votes from other states, that candidate will lose. Surprise, the same can be said about every other state.
Polls in other countries show overwhelming support for Barack Obama against John McCain. Obama’s detractors in the United States, at least the right-wing ones, point to that as another reason to vote against him.
Their problem is they see foreigners interested in the American presi-dential race as engaging in us versus them. It isn’t.
Those who would dismiss the sentiment of foreigners are behind their own Republican Party, which recognizes the reality that we live in a global community; we cannot isolate ourselves any more. That this is so could not have been made clearer than the financial meltdown. As the United States goes, so goes the rest of the world.
So foreigners do have a vital stake in the outcome of the American presidential election. They see us as their protector, many of their governments try to operate in sync with us, and as we have seen, their entire economies are based on the health of the U.S. economy.
They have seen the United States go in an ugly direction the past 10 years, so of course they are interested in America being restored to its former status as a nation the world not only relies on, but looks up to.
They do not see McCain as offering that change, they do see Obama as offering it. He may not, saddled as he would be by straightening out the mess left by the Bush years, but they see him as more likely to do so.
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Why They Keep Campaigning
There have been a lot of statements of late that the presidential race is over and that Barack Obama has won. Not so.
That type of speculation is a result of frequent nationwide polls showing how a person would have voted on that date. The Obama lead appears to be rising, according to those polls. But those polls are weighing sentiment on a national basis and the election is not counted that way—it is counted on a state-by-state basis as the electoral college.
There are 538 electoral votes, so a candidate in a two-person race, which this is as far as the electoral college is concerned, needs 270 to secure the presidency.
Using the New York Times map, updated as of Oct. 24, a count of electoral college votes shows Obama with only 196 electoral votes among the states counted as favoring him and highly unlikely to vote otherwise, i.e., the blue states.
States with another 90 votes are counted as leaning blue. If all of them voted blue, that would give Obama 286 votes, or 16 more votes than he needs to win.
In addition to any of those nine states being capable of turning the other way by just about anything, from an international crisis or terrorist attack that would favor John McCain, or some credible scandal involving Obama—he still faces the same problem he has had since he entered the race. It is racism.
The Times map is based on state-by-state polling, and as we and others have said repeatedly, polling does a poor job of uncovering racism, in part because racists usually don't believe they are. The depth of racism in this country will only be known when it is too late, when the ballots are counted, or in the case of the plan by Republi- can supporters to challenge registrations in pro-Obama areas, not counted.
If the race is close, we can expect an outpouring of electoral college bashing once again by the losing side. It will be misplaced. If anything, that voting system is more necessary than ever. This past year has served to underscore once again how uninformed the American people have become, and so intellectually lazy they can be swayed by just about any simpleton overture. That argues mightily for the protection the electoral college offers.
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Does anyone else get the feeling Dubya would be more effective during this financial crisis if he would just shut up?Climbing out of that paragraph of mixed metaphors, we should note that other countries quit listening to him years ago and have been wondering why his constituents still do.
Back when we were still in the throes of the primaries, we wrote that racism would be the elephant in the voting booth in November when all of the racists who told pollsters they were not (most actually do not believe they are racists) actually cast their ballots in secret.
The McCain/Palin campaign’s advisers also have known that and that is the reason the two have been whipping their audiences into a fever, with Sarah Palin even failing to rebuke a man who yelled “kill him” as she repeated her Barack-Obama-pal-of-a-terrorist claim.
That campaign has now discovered it has been shaking a bag with a Tasmanian devil inside and is not sure how to deal with it. John McCain finally cautioned one of his audiences about hateful remarks, but then rebuked John Lewis, a black congressman, for pointing out in an op-ed piece the racist undertones of the campaign’s mud-slinging.
It is curious, as the financial meltdown becomes increasingly serious, that the McCain/Palin campaign has little, if anything, to say about it. We know why Palin does not—George Bush looks somewhat knowledgeable by comparison—but why not McCain?
As our Veritas reminds us, McCain once acknowledged he knew little about economics, later joined Bush and company in the graveyard whistling ding dong, the economy’s strong, and immediately after referred to the economy in crisis.
We’ll take him at his word about the deficit in his economics knowledge, but since he has been in the Senate, he has served on and even chaired for several years, the Senate committee that is all about regulations.
That perhaps, is why he has been quiet about the economy when he is on the stump—it might lead to questions about his and his party’s deregulatory past, the past that allowed the runaway greed that created today’s tumbling house of cards.
As the hate-Obama campaign begins to backfire, look for McCain to make some specific economy-repairing proposals, but be assured they will not be aimed at the little guy. They will be true-blue Republican and all about businesses and those with enough disposable income to be investors.
Teenage contestant from South Carolina in the Miss Teen USA beauty pageant last year:
Question: “Recent polls have shown a fifth of Americans can’t locate the U.S. on a world map. Why do you think this is?”
Response: “I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so, because, uh, some…people out there in our nation don’t have maps, and, uh, I believe that our education like such as South Africa and, uh, the Iraq everywhere like, such as and…I believe that they should, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., er, should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future, for our children….”
Forty-four-year-old woman from Alaska in the campaign to be vice president of the USA: Question: “What other Supreme Court decisions [other than Roe vs. Wade] do you disagree with?”
Response: “Well, let’s see. There’s, of course—in the great history of America rulings, there have been rulings, that’s never going to be absolute consensus by every American. And there are those issues, again, like Roe v. Wade where I believe are best held on a state level and addressed there. So, you know, going through the history of America, there would be, there would be others but….”
Who Let the Dogs Out?Update: Of the 66 libertarians in the House, only six switched their votes between the first bailout proposal and the second, and only two of those were Republicans, John Shadegg of Arizona and Zach Wamp of Iowa. That confirms the contention it was libertarians who got us into the mess, libertarians who kept us from getting out.
An analysis of the votes cast for the first Wall Street bailout attempt in the House shows that of 66 members who counted as members of the libertarian groups in each party voted against the bipartisan bailout agreement, 49-17. Only three of the 17 Republican libertarians voted with their leadership (for the package), while the 49 Democrats were split almost in half, 24 voting against their leadership. Yes, Ron Paul was one of them.
Some of those 66 might not identify themselves as libertarians, but they belong to the congressional groups most closely identified as libertarians—Blue Dog Coalition for the Democrats, Liberty Caucus for the Republicans.
One would expect more GOP libertarians, but then the party itself is close enough to liber-tarians on policy, there is hardly any difference.There is a disturbing undertone here for the Democrats. The Republican Party has always had its right-wing, so large any presidential candidate has to cater to its members even if he does not agree with them—a la John McCain. No surprise there.
But the Blue Dog Coalition counts 49 members this year, a fifth of the entire 235 Democratic side of the House. At least as far back as the 70s, some mem- bers were openly calling themselves “blue dogs” (from saying in the pre-Civil Rights Bill solidly Democratic South, “I’d vote for a yellow dog if was a Democrat”).In those days, though, you could count the number on your fingers and you would look for them to be primarily from Texas and voting against nearly all programs in the budget, good and bad. In the mid-90s, they formed a House Democratic caucus calling themselves a coalition and their numbers been growing ever since.
Even if they do not confess to being libertarians, they sure fit the mold.
It's Regulation, Stupid!Take this as a given, because it is as much a truism as it ever was—Democrats risk erring on the side of the average citizen, Republicans risk erring on the side of business. Now look at today’s economic mess.
One of the most glaring differences between Republicans and Democrats is their view of regulations. This difference not only is glaring, it is historic. There is barely any difference between Republicans and Liberterians on the issue—they would prefer none.
Take a look at each presidential candidate’s statements having to do with economy, energy, health care, what have you, and most of their differences boil down to how much, if ever, should the government regulate. See what John McCain says, see what Barack Obama. Now look at today’s economic mess.
Look at every administration in the White House, particularly if the president's party also controls Congress, and you will see that pattern repeated, again and again. Take a look at the past 56 years, 36 with Republicans in the White House.
Republican administrations always, without fail, reduce the emphasis on enforcing regulations and laws, sometimes to the point of simply ignoring those already in place and fighting against imposing new ones. Now look at today’s economic mess.
When Republicans controlled Congress during those 36 years, that meant a weak tendency to oversee the departments and agencies of the federal government, to hold their feet to the fire in following regulations and even the law. Even in years when Democrats held the reins in Congress during a GOP administration, oversight carried out rarely could be enforced.
Every government agency has a pair of subcommittees and committees with oversight authority over them and the power of the purse resides in the whole of Congress.
In those 20 years when a Democrat sat in the Oval Office, little more than half were years in which Democrats also controlled Congress. With or without congressional backing, Democrats end up spending much of their time and effort trying to right the ship Republicans before them tilted to the right. And that is why you rarely see Democratic administrations accomplishing as much as they did before 1968.
If you do not believe that is the reality, watch the next administration closely if Congress and the White House are under control of Democrats. Look at this fall’s election with that in mind, and remember, you also get to vote for a member of the House and a third of the states will get to vote for a member of the Senate.
McCain/Palin/Rove/Lies
Okay. We’ve had enough. We’ve been criticized for being too strident and critical, but this presidential campaign is going too far.
Both campaigns, as is the wont of national campaigns, are guilty of at least stretching the truth, but the campaign of John McCain and Sarah Palin has reached the point it raises some suspicions worth noting.
One can expect neophyte Palin to go overboard and repeat false phrases that appeal to the right-wing nuts, but McCain knows better. You might not agree with him, but McCain is not a right-winger and always has been, as can be said of another senator we have known—Joe Biden—a straight shooter. What you got was what he was.
McCain, wearing a “Navy” ball cap in rural campaign stops for two obvi- ous reasons (trust us--he is not the ball cap-wearing type), keeps repeating that Palin sold the Alaskan governor’s jet plane on E-bay, at a profit. She did neither; she tried and failed. But the phrase is a kick-ass crowd-pleaser.
Palin keeps saying she stopped the “bridge to nowhere” boondoggle, i.e., earmark, enabled by the state’s two Republican senators. It turns out she was for it before she was against it, and after it already had failed, and she kept the earmark money.
Neither incident is worth mentioning in a national campaign. Both should be dismissed as nothing more than the fodder of shouting tabloid-cable. But they are obvious examples of a campaign that is spewing many lies, in- cluding many about the views of Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
The effort to create a vice president-pick myth out of whole-cloth, attractive to the belching-bubba crowd, is straight out of the playbook of Karl Rove. We can’t prove it, but the suspicion is Rove advised the George W. Bush White House that lying always work, that if you repeat one often enough, it will be believed.
It would seem the McCain/Palin campaign is being advised by Rove. He now is a commentator on baldly conservative FOX, but one has to ask what other hat is he wearing.
Yes, the Obama/Biden camp, mostly in its commercials, is guilty of stretching the truth, as most political campaigns are wont to do. But straight-out lying is beyond the pale and illustrative of a candidate who would bring no change from the current administration.
We are talking here only of the presidential campaigns. But all political e-mails and blogs need to be ex- amined for facts. Partisans of both sides, but not connected with either campaign, are spreading unsubstantiated lies, including a well-circulated one spreading lies about Palin.
There are many on-line non-partisan services available for distilling truth from the fiction being spread. One we have championed is Snopes, another is FactCheck, and many individual newspapers provide similar services.
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Letting Our Guard Down
In the hurricane season, more threatening it seems than in recent years, we are alerted to the deep and dismal shortage of National Guard for domestic emergencies. Guardspeople are sent in too many numbers over to the futile war in Iraq. One Guardswoman was quoted as saying, "When I was in Iraq, the hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans." We all know the result of that.
The witless, ineffective, anti-federalism Bush administration fiddled while New Orleans drowned. And since, repeated domestic emergencies have put many Americans in peril and poverty, without the extent of help the National Guard would normally give. And with it all, National Guard people's families are driven to food banks and welfare by a government that has sold them short.
Many, many Guardsmen come back from Iraq with mental and emotional problems. We have heard the scandals about care for returning service people. This, too, is a result of the shortsighted, narrow-minded policies of the worst president in history.
In this election season, we are struck with the reality that whoever succeeds the worst president in history has to set about repairing his damage for many years. We should make our choice for president based on the candidate who has the policies that best promise the right course.
Irony Doesn't Get Much Better Than This
What delicious irony for the Republicans on the eve of their national convention.
They considered delaying their convention beyond its Labor Day opening because a major hurricane threatened to strike the country that day.
But wait, the convention is set for St. Paul, Minn., about as far north as one can in the United States from New Orleans where landfall was expected. That part of the country has never seen a hurricane.
About-to-be presidential nominee John McCain, not normally known for compassion and sensitivity, said it would be insensitive to hold such a gala convention while people are suffering the throes of a natural disaster. This would be a change. No one’s ever done that before so far away from the event.
Louisiana mobilized unusually quickly and with great strength in preparation for the visit of Hurricane Gustav. The entire Louisiana National Guard was mobilized—all but the 360 members of its Air National Guard deployed in Iraq. Along with its fleet of helicopters. But the local guard solved that problem by borrowing helicopters from other state national guards.
The people living in 3,000 specially provided trailer homes in the New Orleans Parish were warned they would have to be evacuated because their homes would not be safe in such a storm. The people in those trailers provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency because their homes were destroyed on about the same date three years ago.
FEMA, which won plaudits from the president just three years for its response to another New Orleans hurricane, geared up with unusual haste in the advance of Gustav. The same president was scheduled to deliver a speech at the GOP Convention on opening night.
But neither the president nor the conventioneers would be able to revel so far away in St. Paul the on Labor Day if Gustav struck far away in New Orleans on the same day.
That might be too much of a reminder at the opening of the GOP presidential candidates campaign of the two major disasters of the lame-duck president who preceded him, forever tied to the major twin failures—Hurricane Katrina and the invasion of Iraq.
Sorry Louisianans, but what delicious irony. But then, The GOP
convention schedule already was ironic. Opening on Labor Day, traditionally the
day for workers, mainly union workers whose ranks have been decimated by years of Republican
anti-labor policies.
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Don’t Be Too Obvious, John
John McCain, in a move as cynical as it is obvious, has chosen Sarah Palin, Republican governor of Alaska, as his running mate this fall.
One can only wonder whom else he would have selected had Barack Obama not chosen Joe Biden.
Obvious?
McCain/Palin Obama/Biden The Balance
White male/white female Black male/white male Minority male/white female
Experience/first term First term/experience Experience/little of it
Washington/outsider Little Wash./Washington Washington/non-Washington
Ariz./noncontiguous state From noncontig. state/Del. That foreign feeling
Ages 72 & 44 = 116 47 & 66 (11/20) = 113 Age/Youth
Celebrity looks (ex-beauty queen) Celebrity status Sycophantic youth vote
Shooter/Shootee Not hunters NRA types/posing pro-guns
Picking a female, of course, is intended to attract Hillary Clinton’s disappoint and disaffected supporters, assuming many of them actually exist. All the blogs and e-mails smell of another political dirty trick fostered by the GOP.
A female on the ticket also is intended to balance Obama’s obvious black heritage/white mixture, possibly attracting someone other than the traditional white males.
Alaska was a curious move, and probably not intended to balance the Democrats and their Hawaii-born candidate with someone from the only other noncontiguous state, both of them admitted in the 1950s.
And finally, choosing someone even younger than Obama is intended to help defray the age issue, even though the selection of Biden already had defused that issue somewhat.
The big difference is: McCain appears to have chosen a running mate purely for campaign purposes and not someone who would be much help in running the country should he win; Obama chose someone who could be a great help in running the country, and not so much in winning a campaign.
Remember the elder George Bush’s selection in 1988 when he wanted to balance his age with youthful charm? We ended up with Dan Quayle as our disastrous vice president—for one term.
Bye, Bye Baseball, Annyong-Hi Kashipshio Ladies Golf
In the same recent week, two major U.S. sports took a pair of shameful steps, shameful even for an American industry that already should be em- barrassed by highly paid "superstars" and bottom-line team owners more interested in the name on the stadium than the players who work in them.
Major League Baseball--don't say it without adding, "Inc."--has decided to denigrate one of the most valuable aspects of major sports, the referee.
The league already had brought shame on itself by tolerating steroid usage in the league and tearing down multi-million dollar stadiums and blackmailing municipalities to help replace them with multi-billion dollar venues for some of the world's highest-paid athletes.
Because some of those Hollywood-style incomes depend on endorsements, which in turn are based on sports- page statistics, baseball umpires have come under increasing attack when they make the wrong calls; wrong, that is, based on television replays.
Anyone who has ever played baseball, along with other sports that require umpires or referees, knows they are keys to the games, even when they occasionally make a bad call. As an athlete, you complain, but learn to suck it up and go with the fact the umpire is just as human as you are.
Well, major league baseball has decided to sell out to the television empire by allowing TV replays to decide if an umpire is right or wrong.
Next in the same week came the Ladies Professional Golf Association, which ruled that all participants in its tournament must be able to speak English. That apparently is a response to the dominance in the distaff side of the sport by Korean women.
What does speaking English, indeed, speaking at all, have to do with playing professional golf, either as a woman or a man? We live in a global society; let the international players in our sports speak their own language. Unless their lack of English is preventing them from being articulate spokeswomen or representatives the LPGA prefers to present to the world, we have to ask, other than being able to translate meters in to yards and centi- meters to inches, what the deuce does speaking English have anything to do with playing golf?
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Biden: Obama to Alter Earth Orbit
In his maiden speech as a candidate for vice president, Joe Biden made a couple of amazing assertions, which, if true, suggests he and Barack Obama should not be elected.
Biden said that when Obama stands on the Senate floor, he stretches his body full length to reach across the aisle to pass legislation. Anyone who has been on the Senate floor knows, that even at Obama’s height, he cannot stretch that far.
And why would he even try? In the Senate, to pass legislation actually means you help pass legislation by voting for it, and that means going into the well of the Senate and expressing your aye or nay to a clerk at a table in front of the dais.
But Biden said Obama does it another way. He said, “He made his mark literally from day 1 reaching across the aisle to pass legislation….”
As president, of course, Obama would no longer have a vote in the Senate, so he doesn’t have to behave in the silly way Biden describes.
But Biden, and this is the real news, said if elected president Obama would have the opportunity to change the orbit of the Earth. If this is to be his solution to global warming, this is scary. It isn’t clear how he would go about it, but that is a scary proposition.
Yet Biden said, “he will have such an incredible opportunity, incredible opportunity, not only to change the direction of America, but literally, literally, to change the direction of the world.”
First job for the Obama/Biden campaign advisers: convince Biden, literally, to quit using the word “literally.” If he wants to use emphasis, choose another word or repeat it in the next breath as he is wont to do.
==============<>===============
A Vice President To Push Back
Shortly before Barack Obama announced his choice for a running mate, he made a profound statement, which, if he would hold to it, could make him a great president. A great president, that is, if the electorate bothers to pay attention to real issues.
In a brief response to a reporter asking about whom he had selected, Obama said, “I want somebody who’s independent, somebody who can push against my preconceived notions and challenge me so we have a robust debate in the White House.”
With his lack of experience, Obama needs that kind of vice president more than any other candidate. He needs someone with Washington experience who will tell him plainly that what he wants cannot be done, won’t be done, shouldn’t be done, or massage what he wants into something realistic. That holds true particularly in the area of foreign affairs.
But especially in this day of rampant sycophancy, the next president needs someone who will challenge him and his ideas. A public ombudsman sitting in the corner of every policy-making office in government would be best, but that is a subject for another day.
The current administration presents the best example of what happens when an uninformed president, or those pulling his strings, is surrounded by yes men.
Nowhere is that danger more obvious than in the case of the toady that served as his White House legal council and groveled so well he was appointed attorney general.
Alberto Gonzalez was so eager to please, he aided and abetted a president who committed more crimes against the Constitution than Richard Nixon, the only president to resign in the face of certain impeachment.
The president and/or his White House merely had to say, this is what I want, and Gonzalez would eagerly do the bidding, twisting and mangling the law to justify broadly illegal and unconstitutional acts.
Say “good on you, Barack,” say “hurrah” if he actually means it, and say "thank you" from an appreciative America if he gets elected and actually carries through on the promise.
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What's Putin Up To? Cold War II?
Back in July, almost as a throw-away line in an Outside the Box item on Afghanistan, we noted the United States is the world’s sole super power, “until Vladimir Putin gets Russia back up to the old Soviet strength….”
Later in the item, we noted we defeated the U.S.S.R. not with warfare, but with money, with the U.S. ability to spend more money than the Soviets in the Cold War arms build-up. Finally, Mikhail Gorbachev, thankfully with a modicum of training as an agriculture economist before he became the Soviet Union’s last president, could see the end game, quit the Cold War and folded the Soviet Union in 1991.
Since then, the Soviet Union has contracted back into its pre-Stalin boundaries, largely areas that never spoke Russian before the expansion of the Russian Em- pire in the 1800s. That contraction allowed restoration of the sovereign nation of Georgia, which sits astride the stretch of land between the Black and Caspian Seas, just
above the oil-rich Middle East. It also established its own democratic government.
Today a pipeline vital to Russia is stretching from the Caspian Sea into Georgia, past its capital of T’bilisi and across Turkey to the Mediterranean Sea. That is a valuable outlet for Russian oil, which, along with natural gas, is the base of the new nation’s economy. Russia has become the world’s second largest exporter of oil and the largest exporter of natural gas.
Putin was a two-term president of Russia, and before he had to step down from that job as required by the Russian Constitution, he arranged to hand-pick his successor to serve as his presidential puppet and in return name him the next prime minister earlier this year. There is little doubt he will use that office to remain Russia’s leader.
So what is Putin up to in Georgia? The attraction of controlling the former Soviet portion of the pipeline seems obvious. That would take Russian troops next into Azerbaijan, across which the pipeline begins its journey from the Caspian.
Does he see Russia’s energy-based economy growing to the level the country without the burden of its Communist-era satellites, could once again compete with the United States in Cold War II? The United States is not looking any too strong itself, right now.
So weak is the United States thanks to the Iraq-invasion lunacy and its own oil-price economic woes, it is likely to have almost no diplomatic influence on the outcome of what already has been termed a war between Russia and Georgia. Watch your back, Ukraine.
Pettiness and Presidential Campaigns
Few activities outweigh the selection of the U.S. president in importance to the world, yet we engage in the process at such a juvenile level, one won- ders how we retain an iota of respect.
One can understand how the general public, which does not bother to try to understand the government process that determines our well-being, can be swayed by polls, tabloid-cable, fascination with peccadilloes, sycophancy and many other aspects of campaign silly-season born of persistent ignorance.
But what explains the decisions by those operating at the highest levels of a campaign, including the candi- date, based on pettiness, personal feelings and, amazingly, their own ignorance?
As could have been expected, the Democratic convention will include major speeches by both Bill and Hillary Clinton, the Clinton camp has forced some major elements of the party platform and Hillary has been tapped to make campaign appearances on behalf of Barack Obama.
How could those things not have occurred? Hillary Clinton won nearly half the delegates to the convention, so common sense dictates she could not be ignored. Yet, there are reports by the respected press that the Obama camp resisted all of those decisions. And they still have others they should be making, if they could get past their own pettiness.
That general public who ends up making the decision on who will be “leader of the free world” is still going to base its decision on those irrelevant factors listed above. One of the secret weapons each party has is a president, or a past president.
Anyone who has covered a presidential visit has seen the draw he always attracts, regardless of his popu- larity level or the petty scandal of the day dogging him. Just the presence of Air Force One on the tarmac of Podunk International draws oohs and aahs.
Any candidate who ignores that factor and fails to take advantage is doomed to suffer the same defeat Al Gore suffered. He ignored the draw of President Clinton and Air Force One to his peril.
John McCain’s people have shown some acumen in this regard by giving President Bush a speaking role at the convention, even if it is stuck at the beginning on a national holiday. This is a tightrope decision for McCain—he needs the presidential draw at the same time he tries to distance himself from an unpopular president.
But a tightrope though it is, McCain would be Gore-foolish if he does not have Bush and Air Force One make appearances on his behalf. And although he can no longer fly on Air Force One, Bill Clinton should be a major presence on the campaign trail with Obama.
In Clinton’s case, he still enjoys enormous popularity among the general public and happens to be a cap- tivating and enthusiastic speaker. Although he may have been too enthusiastic on behalf of his wife during the primaries, there is little Obama could lose with that enthusiasm on his behalf against McCain.
Yet the press reports indicate there is still some hangover petulance among Obama’s advisers stemming from the primaries. They need to grow up and run a presidential campaign. Democrats, indeed the world, do not need another inept Gore loss.
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More Random Musings from Veritas'Splain to me this:
--It is said
that peanut butter sticks to the roof of your mouth. But isn't that the CEILING
of your mouth?
--When was
the last time you saw a baby pigeon?
--When a street is level,
do we speak of neighbors "just up the street" or "just down the
street?"
--Why do
authorities close down a highway, but close up a business?
--What is
the need for so many euphemisms for "died" and "dead?" A
friend "passed" or "passed away." Soldiers were
"taken" or Squab anyone? they are among the "fallen." A crime victim was
"gunned down." Our beloved auntie is "deceased." Some form
of "to die" would take care of all these.
--Why do
some people, I guess mainly southerners, speak of a week from Saturday as
"next" Saturday? To them, the very next Saturday that will occur is
"this Saturday." Go figure.
Iraq: Time For a Vision of The Horizon Sunset, Ending, Finis, Adios
With the Iraq War, when is a timetable for U.S. withdrawal a schedule? When is it a "time horizon?" When a "vision?"
All these acrobatics with the English language come because it is an election year in the United States and possibly a watershed year in Iraq. The Bush White House does not want to show any inkling of agreement with Democrat Barack Obama's plan for withdrawal of U.S. combat troops. But Bush is under pressure to see an end to the war and put a renewed emphasis on the war in Afghanistan. So, the White House settled on "time horizon" as the only acceptable way to describe changing troop numbers in Iraq.
Some wag pointed out that the trouble with a horizon is, as you try to get closer, it stays the same distance away, unattainable.
Under pressure from the administration, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had his spokesman explain that, in seeming to support Obama's idea, Maliki was not subscribing to a specific timetable a la Obama, but working on a "vision" of withdrawal by the end of the year 2010.
That would not coincide exactly with Obama's plan, but it is in the ballpark. And it sounds like a timetable to me.
Republican John McCain's vision is that the U.S. commitment in Iraq is long-term and indefinite. McCain says any talk of withdrawal should be based on conditions "on the ground," which can mean anything from quelling the insurgency to restoring critical infrastructure to forming a stable coalition government.
Considering that the United States is going to have its largest embassy in the world in Baghdad, American antiwar activists suspect the Bush administration is trying to make conditions "on the ground" support a very long-term American presence in Iraq.
McCain is saying that the troop surge in Iraq, which McCain supported, has succeeded enough to give Obama the debating room to suggest a specific pullout. McCain's commitment to a long-term U.S. force struggles against the polls that show more Americans than not consider the Iraq War a morass that they want to pull out of.
---Veritas
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Ben Bernanke, the head of the Federal Reserve, has broken ranks with investors, economists and the Bush administration and stopped sweet-talking the state of the U.S. economy. Now say, "We have stagflation."
As we’ve said here before, the average American was aware long ago that economic troubles were afoot. The administration and others took the position, and still do post-Bernanke, that simply talking about a recession would lead to responses by investors and corporations that would just deepen the recession, so everybody kept their mouths shut.
Now that someone in a high place is acknowledging reality, perhaps somebody in the government will take off the Herbert Hoover hair shirt and try to do something about it before we need another FDR.
When this site was first put up last year, it laid out far ahead of the primaries the qualifications voters should seek in a president. We began with intellect, followed by, in order, experience, ability to get the job done, willing- ness to compromise, leadership, concern for the common weal and adherence to the Edmund Burke philosophy: “elect me for my judgment, not for pandering to your opinions.”
As stupid as Wesley Clark’s recent remark was, he was correct in saying that getting in a fighter plane and getting shot down is not a qualification to become president, a shot at John McCain. But neither is being a general in the field as Clark once was, and the only thing he has ever achieved.
McCain does have, however, some real qualifications that Clark does not possess, including most of the seven points enumerated above, outshining all of his Republican primary opponents. McCain also has more quali- fications on our list than Barack Obama, but as we said in that same posting, choosing the best qualified to run is just the first criterion, you then need to pay attention to policy in choosing between the two.
That is why the American voters need to blow up their TVs, stop listening to trash talk by surrogates and screaming tabloid cable and start learning how to absorb the real news of presidential campaigns.
We also ranted about the fact that after nearly 5,000 lives lost and tens of thousands more maimed, billions of wasted dollars and a country in shambles, we still do not know why the Bush administration invaded Iraq.
Most people speculate, with a great deal of evidence to support the contention, that we invaded for oil. The same people point with fear to the saber-rattling with Iran, noting it also sits on a lot of oil.
If that is so, it would appear time for Congress to try to pass a law barring any member of the government, once he or she has left that service, from benefiting directly or indirectly from decisions he or she made during those terms in office.
In the case of Bush and Cheney, that would cover just about everything and force them into retirement. Most importantly, they would not be able to return to the oil business from whence they slithered and which they are seeking to enrich further by taking the shackles off domestic exploration years into the future.
Kennedy’s Trip Unnecessary? No!
We
won't change this post beyond the headlines, so you can see how we blew it.
Normally, congressional members of the party in the White House, usually support
the president on a veto even if they voted for the original bill. The override
votes in both houses were greater than the original votes, signaling that Bush
should go home now to Crawford and leave us alone for the rest of his term.
It seemed like a good idea at the time, when Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., interrupted his recovery and treatment for a probably fatal brain tumor to fly to Washington, D.C., to cast a deciding Medicare vote.
In the long run, Kennedy and the Democrats are destined to lose on the issue, even though the vote result, 69-30 and quickly labeled “veto-proof,” makes it look like a winner for the opposing party. It looks like a winner, that is, if you don’t pay attention to how Congress works.
The issue at stake was payment for physicians who treat Medicare patients, with the parties split on where to cut reimbursements. It is a classic Republican vs. Democrat policy disagreement, whether federal money should be filtered through private industry.
As they have been doing for decades when they are in the minority, and especially as the current one-vote minority, Republicans threatened a filibuster against the bill. Filibusters are never actually held these days, but the mere threat of one is enough to block a bill from being brought up for a yes-or-not vote.
To allow that up-or-down vote to take place, at least 60 senators must vote “aye.” Kennedy could not make it to Washington a few weeks ago, three weeks after his surgery, and the “cloture” vote taken then fell one short. To avoid a repeat of that situation, he made the trip and sure enough, Kennedy gave Democrats the 60th vote they needed, nine of the votes coming from Republican senators who oppose the Bush administration on the issue.
Knowing the vote was enough to allow an up-or-down vote, nine Republicans switched their votes to aye, four of them facing re-election this year, thus the overwhelming 69-30 vote (John McCain was the lone absentee).
That lopsided total led most news outlets to label the vote “veto-proof” because a move to override a veto requires two-thirds of those present and voting in each house, 67 in the Senate if all senators vote. But was the vote veto-proof?
Veteran congressional watchers know members often vote differently when an issue is at stake than when a vote to side with the incumbent president of their party is at stake.
Bush has vowed to veto the bill despite the vote. The nine who switched their vote presumably did so because it would look like a good vote to their constituents, even though they actually oppose the measure. Many of the nine Republicans who originally voted with the majority also may have felt themselves in the same position.
The question now is whether Democrats can keep at least 16 of the 18 Republicans on their side during an override vote. Just three need to switch to support their president, and among the nine switchers, there mostly likely are more than three who will note vote against their own president on principle. And that does not include those whose arms about to be twisted by administration operatives.
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Shed No Tears For Senator No The Onion satirical newspaper's take on his retirement
We shed no tears here at the news Jesse Helms has died. We had no choice but to cover the antics of this born, raised and died racist throughout his 30 years in the Senate.
For his personal legacy, you have to go abroad to The Guardian for the best
obituary.
But Helms also used and twisted the parliamentary system of the Senate not for the good of the country, but to win with his own narrow, mean, minority view of how the country should be run, to suit the view of him and his fellow racists.
The Helms legacy lives on in the Senate today as the minority uses the system he helped bring about to block the current one-vote majority from getting anything done, then putting out press releases and talking on TV about how the Democrats don’t do anything.
Helms didn’t invent use of the filibuster as an effective tool to block legislation you don’t like but don’t have enough support to defeat by voting. But his twisted use of it led to the situation we have today.
You’ve heard about that three-fifths vote (60) the Senate needs to take up any piece of controversial legislation.
That replaced the filibuster in which a senator is recognized to speak and refuses to yield the floor, as is his right. But to keep the floor, as you’ve no doubt seen in many old films, the senator must keep talking and not sit down, or he can yield to a supporter for comment without yielding control of the floor.
The filibuster was used to great effect by Helms’s predecessors, the racists senators who fought against the Civil Rights Act and similar groundbreaking and long-overdue legislation in the 1960s.
The only way the Senate can shut off the filibuster is, after a set number of days, to file a cloture petition and after a certain amount of time, take a vote, with three-fifths of the full Senate needed to stop the filibuster.
Helms used the filibuster so much to obstruct Senate proceedings, the mere mention he would stage one would lead the Senate majority leader to suspend the issue on the floor and turn to some other matter so the body could carry on with its business of governing.
Thus, we no longer have filibusters, but the Senate must still have that three-fifths vote to override obstructionists and get on with the business at hand. And that is why a closely divided Senate such as the one we have now is unable to do much. Thanks a lot, Jesse.
Time for Trickle Up Economics
The Great Depression began during the administration of Herbert Hoover, a Republican president who threw up his hands and declared there was noth- ing the federal government could do to stop it, that it had to just run its course. As we know, his successor proved otherwise.
It is no accident that Hoover was just one of a long string of GOP presi- dents (up to and including the current one) who believed in the “trickle-down” theory of economics. Essentially, it means that if you give big tax breaks to the rich and big business, those benefits will trickle down the economic ladder, eventually reaching and benefiting the little people.
We suggest that in the current economic situation, the government begin paying attention to what we call the “trickle up” theory. We intend that term to mean the economists, government officials, stock market analysts, etc., need to begin listening to those “little people.”
More than a month ago, we said inflation and recession, the twin evils of “stagflation” had already arrived. Today, stock analysts, government and business economists and others are still arguing about whether there is inflation and whether the formal definition of the term means a recession has arrived yet.
We could say a month ago that stagflation had begun because we live among the “little people.” The “little people” know their fuel costs are rising at the same time their food costs are rising. Those two expenses may represent discretionary spending to the rich, but they are not discretionary to the LP.
The LP know that jobs are less secure during the current economic situation and they most certainly that even if they are able to keep their jobs, they are not going to receive a raise or added benefits. They see unem- ployed friends and relatives unable to acquire a decently paying job, much less one providing the health and other benefits they also need.
The government, Wall Street and others need to stop trying to decide whether two consecutive quarters of no growth and other convoluted definitions are met and begin listening to the “little people.” They know what Franklin Delano Roosevelt knew.
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Anti-Obama Clinton Voters. Are You Crazy?
(updated)
In the
wake of Hillary Clinton’s announcement she would sus- pend her campaign and
support Barack Obama all the way came a spate of bitter pronouncements by
alleged Clinton supporters they would vote for John McCain and not
Obama.
The voters who gave Clinton just short of half the delegates to the late-August Democratic Convention in Denver typically did not have a $2 million estate. They were not sexist, they did not benefit greatly from the Bush tax cut, they are beginning to suffer greatly from Newsday eight years of lax federal regulation, their health care is getting more expensive and harder to come by, it is getting harder to send their kids to college, their homes are not worth what they used to be, and their sons and daughters are more likely to be serving, and dying, in vain in Iraq while neighbors in the ritzier suburb next door send their kids to binge-drink at a fraternity or sorority somewhere.
Every
American’s future rides on decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court, the freedoms
being taken away in the guise of fighting terrorism, a woman’s right to choose
what happens inside her own body, the ability of the poor to get some help from
the government when they need it, and the nation’s over- whelming problem of
dealing with all of the ramifications of allowing widespread poverty to
continue.
All of those examples happen to be major differences between the leadership provided by Democrats and Republicans. Voters need to understand that Republicans vote for members of their party primarily to protect their money.
In
other words, any person who can identify with one of the above examples, and
thus cast a vote for Clinton, would be voting against his or her own
self-interest by voting for a Republican. Republicans have been doing this for
four decades now, but why would a Democrat, much less a Clinton
supporter?
Racists who cannot bring themselves to vote for Obama because of his race never belonged in the Democratic Party in the first place.
So what about the Clinton supporters who are not racist? What is their excuse?
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Some Random Musings from Veritas
Some news report mentioned recently that we have 150,000 troops in Iraq. Think of that for a moment. The only things we see on television are small patrols kicking down doors and such. What are 150,000 troops doing? Think of the cities in your state of that size, just to get an idea of the immensity of our military presence in devastated Iraq.
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Every drummer in America seems to have a job. I am talking about the fact nearly every television advertisement, and some of the shows, feature insistent drumming. Consider the "theme" music for CNN's newscasts: a rhytmic drumbeat with orchestral background in an increasingly frantic theme. Some rock bands may be missing their drummers.
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The Democratic Party is sure to have a debate over its proportional granting of delegates from primaries. Hillary Clinton said that if there were not the proportion system, she would have won the nomination long ago. Winner-takes-all seems a good idea for some things, like tennis matches, but across the nation for choosing pledged delegates to a convention, the proportional system seems fair. Or does it?
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Speaking of tennis, what about the shriek? Some of the best players in modern tennis--Maria Sharapova and the Williams sisters come immediately to mind--have adopted a shriek. For a while, opponents objected, but to no avail. The shrieks are of a wondrous variety: Sharapova's a high-pitched scream of seeming agony; the Williamses' full-throated roars punctuating every shot; the yell of Dementieva coming close to "Yuh-HOO." This all started, I theorize, with the little squeak of Chrissie Evert. It grew from there. But Bill Tilden did not need to shriek; Althea Gibson never roared; Ken Rosewall and Rod Laver played without yelling. What changed?
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Some cliches we can do without: Somebody said that at one point in the campaign, Clinton led "in all the important metrics." "Metrics"? My dictionary does not list "metric" as a noun. But it is a usage popular on Capitol Hill with speakers who forget there is "measure" or "measurement" or "criterion" or "element" or any number of correct words in place of "metric."
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And while we are being once again a schoolmarm, why does everything have to be "great"? A restaurant tells us on television that it has "great food at great prices." That may mean just affordable hamburgers. The amusement park promises "a great time with great bargains," which may mean just affordable fun. By me, "great" should be reserved for really historic items or events. Otherwise we have to look for the next superlative.
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Obama Should Reject McCain’s Town-Hall Offer
Barack Obama should reject John McCain’s invitation to participate in a series of town hall meetings before the conventions. This is a smart ploy on McCain’s part, intended to share the attention being showered on Obama at a time McCain is strug- gling to get some attention of his own.
Obama should say, “No thanks, John, but I’d certainly like to consider it after each of us chosen as his party’s official candidate.” That would be the smart decision for Obama to make.
Instead, Obama should understand an equally smart move on Hillary Clinton’s part that would keep the attention on the Democrats and lead to unprecedented con- vention coverage in modern times.
Democrats have never been nearly as public relations savvy as Republicans, so they might want to give a thought to a scenario that goes something like this:
Clinton acknowledges Obama has enough delegates to win the nomination at the convention. But she says she cannot concede yet—she is only suspending her campaign—because she has nearly half the delegate count herself and must be loyal to her own supporters at the convention. She uses that power to massage a party platform and to iron out other issues she believes would make the Democrats stronger going into November. At the inevitable end, she releases her delegates to make Obama’s selection unanimous.
Obama concedes this is a good course to follow and he plays out the vice presidential selection process right up to the convention, playing the news media for all the attention he can get on the issue.
Instead of giving McCain a free ride on his publicity coat-tails, Obama instead travels the country and perhaps even holds those town meetings McCain suggested, but with Clinton, not McCain. What better show of party unity would that be. It might even serve the purpose of bringing Clinton’s disappointed supporters into the Obama fold.
Just as McCain is smart enough to know that the American people are wildly sycophantic when it comes to seeing a president in person and Air Force One on the tarmac at Podunk Airport, Obama should be aware of the draw of Bill Clinton as a former president and use his presence has much as possible.
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Blow Up Your TV
OK, the time has come. For the sake of the future of American politics, the people of this country need to blow up their TVs and get some source of legitimate and relevant news.
Tabloid-cable has taken over so much of the public discourse with its in-your-face shouting back and forth that even the legitimate print media seems to believe it has to respond and report the same things.
This foolishness about Hillary Clinton mentioning a couple of politics-shaking events in June as an explanation for not quitting a presidential race this soon is just the latest in a string of gotcha moments that have cluttered tabloid-cable (is there any other kind of cable news anymore?).
A few days later the tabloid-cable character assassination squad turned its guns on Barack Obama because he said his great-uncle had helped liberate the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz, when it actually was at Buchenwald. That was an error that needed to be corrected, but it was not intentional nor devious and did not deserve to be blown out of proportion since the error did not change the point of his story.This character assassination by lifting statements out of context and misinterpreting intentions is not new. Look at Mitt Romney’s father who, as one wire service reported, misspoke by saying he was “brainwashed” by military leaders on a fact-finding trip to Vietnam when he meant he had received a “whitewash” presentation. That wire service led its George Romney story something more newsworthy. The competing wire service led with the “brainwash” statement without explanation and Romney was done for.
But that incident was memorable because it was unique for the time. Now we are getting this type of trash reporting shoved in our faces every day. Is it harmful? You bet.
Bubbas and sycophants
have dominated this exceedingly long political season since day one. In addition
to Bubbaism on tabloid cable, we had Barack Obama first gaining legitimacy
because a bunch of Iowa sycophants saw him linked with TV star Oprah
Winfrey. We have no complaints about his winning the race for the nomination, just the way he got over the first hurdle.
Candidates superior to the two eventual contestants for the Democratic nomination had to drop out before a single vote was cast in any state that came even close to reflecting the nation.
Is any of this any way to elect a president? No wonder we got the Gingrich-Bush era and its trashing of America.
If you want to see just how idiotic tabloid-cable is in its handling of the political contests, tune into the Jon Stewart show on Comedy Central. It's daily montage of the screaming meemies of tabloid-cable exposes these fools for the fools they be.
But they are allowed to keep their spot on the boob tube because fellow boobs are tuning in. Tune out and the advertisers will want someone else. Better yet, after you watch Jon Stewart, blow up your TV (with apologies to John Prine and his "Spanish Pipedream").
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The speculation about who will be John McCain's vice presidential candidate has begun. The New York Times reports that three possible candidates have been in- vited to McCain's Phoenix place Memorial Day weekend.On the Times' list were Mitt Romney, presumably there to assuage the right wing of the Republican Party, and Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, a political nobody on the national scene who presumably would be a generic sidekick unlikely to ruffle GOP fea- thers. It was the third name that interested us. As a reporter we spent many hours cov- ering Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal over the course of just over a year when he was di- rector of the National Bipartisan Commission on the Future of Medicare. Jindal's highest political achievement before that had been head his native Louisiana's health department at the age of 24. That is less surprising considering he finished high school at 16 and became a Rhodes scholar.
His genius and abilities became clear over the course of the commission's work, which was to assess the status of the Medicare system and recommend solutions to its financial problems lurking in the future. It took a genius to handle the super-egos of the commission members, a third of them members of Congress. He did so with aplomb and was able to massage a final report in 1999 that managed to balance all of the partisan tugs and pulls he faced.
Through it all, he was a personable, helpful and available leader who astounded with his grasp of the issues and encyclopedic mind, a reminder of the high intelligence of fellow Rhodes scholar Bill Clinton. It is not Jindal's fault the report, still considered the bible of Medicare, did not move to any great action by Congress and the admin- istrations that followed. Nothing will be done long-term about either Medicare or Social Security because our sys- tem of government does not encourage long-term solutions.
The selection of Jindal would be a political coup McCain badly needs. Jindal is a conservative Republican, but the stereotype ends there. He is a dark-skinned individual who surmounted politics in Louisiana, probably because he was born in 1971 in Baton Rouge of immigrants from India, which makes him less black but dark enough to make McCain's candidacy less white against a Barack Obama challenger and one likely to help carry a state that helped give Obama the Demo- cratic nomination. Jindal was not even old enough to serve as vice president two years ago, giving McCain some balance on the age issue that already dogs him and a counter to Obama's youth.Jindal also brings an expertise to a GOP presidential candidate weak in the area of health care, which undoubtedly will emerge as one of the major issues of the fall campaign. Regardless of whether he makes McCain's cut, keep an eye on this fellow.
I no longer cover any event at the White House, but if I did and were at a news conference, I would ask these questions:
"President Bush, early in your term you were asked if you had made any mistakes, and your reply was that you could not think of any.
"Are you proud, sir, of taking on a budget surplus and turning it into record deficits and record debt?
"Are you pleased that you worked out tax breaks for the rich- est among us, widening the earnings gap between poor and rich?
"Do you sleep better at night, knowing you led the nation into a war that has killed more than 4,000 Americans and countless foreigners?
"Are you content that this war has no end in sight?
"Does it please you that, in contrast to the day you took office, a large part of the world now hates America?
"Do you reflect with pride on the fact that your approval rat- ings are lower than the average serial murderer's?
"Do you smile at the fact that, under your leadership, your own political party is in tatters?
"And so, now, do you think you have made any mistakes?"
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Big Newspapers Beginning to See the Light
The Washington Post in an editorial and the New York Times in an analysis are now beginning to realize what this site, straightrecord, saw two months ago. The Post should have read this item and the Times should have read this one.
In the ensuing months since those analyses of the campaign situation, nothing has happened to change the premise behind each of them. We were able to write when we did because we realized from the outset of this cam- paign that it was going to be unique--our first long, hard slog in a nearly year-long primary battle with a large gap built in before the conventions and their complex delegate-selection systems.
On the subject of Democrats allegedly tearing themselves apart, nothing could be farther from the truth. Just keep an eye on John McCain in the weeks and months until his convention. Keep an eye on him, that is, if you can find him in print or on television anywhere. News is just what it says--something that is new or unusual. McCain's candidacy is neither, while the Democratic drama and the situation that fathered it remain news. Obviously, the lat- ter is going to get the ink.
Getting this constant attention is good for the Democrats. It is almost like the old saying, allegedly by a bimbo actress: "I don't care what you say about me as long as you spell my name right." Any publicity is good publicity, and in this situation, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have been thoroughly vetted and already have taken far more heat than McCain can dish out, regardless of whether the Republican Party comes up with another Kevin Phillips, Lee Atwater or Karl Rove.
Yes, supporters of either Clinton or Obama are going to be upset and angry if their choice does not get the nomination. But these two candidates respect each other, agree with each other 99 percent of the time and even like each other. There is little done either would campaign vigorously for the other in the fall.
As to the argument Obama supporters and Democrats who voted in the primaries would feel cheated if the superdelegates reject the fact he won the majority of the primary votes and the pledged delegates and choose Clinton, what about if the great majority of fall election voters, i.e, women, would feel cheated if their candidate is not chosen. Democrats would not like to lose either vote in November, and the women's vote is much greater by far.
As for Obama's chances of winning in the fall? Take a look at the Boston Globe's map of the primaries be- low. That blue line of six states stretching from Louisiana to North Carolina, plus the southern half of Virginia, com- prise a big chunk of Obama's much touted number of states won. He won those six states because only Demo- crats were casting the votes in a Democratic primary.
It is sad to say this in 2008, but racism still exists in this country and ra- cism still prevails in those six states, as it has since before and after the old-line Democrats switched parties in the after- math of the civil rights victories of the 1960s. Obama's chances of winning any of those states in a general election where a Republican majority will be casting votes are very slim. That is par- ticularly true if McCain gets a boost from a new Phillips, Atwater or Rove. Perhaps 2012 or 2016 will be better years for Obama to run.
Who wants to wager the superdelegates will not be considering the impact of an Obama fall campaign on that huge group of Electoral College votes?
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Just When Is Water Wasted? Almost Never
National Geographic's cable channel airs an entertaining and informa- tive show, "The Human Footprint." Its intention is to illustrate the impact hu- man consumption has on the Earth.
Unfortunately, it often is more entertaining than informative and suffers from a lack of detailed editing that has been the hallmark of the magazine. The on-camera commentator is too "gee whiz," cliche-ridden and ungrammatical. But the point the show delivers is stunning.
The show, however, states at least twice a myth that clouds, at best, and interferes with, at worst, the credibility of the extremely valuable environ- mental movement.
The myth is that we waste water by using it. The fact is, we do not.
We contaminate it and the impact of that contamination should be avoided or at least reduced, but we do not waste it globally. The waste that people cite during water shortages is purely local. If an area is suffering a drought, that does not change the fact there is ample water on Earth and always will be unless we find a way to move it into outer space.
Regardless of how it is used and abused, and whether it travels through a sewer pipe or drainage system, all water ends up eventually back in the ocean or aquifers of the Earth.
Water has followed a set cycle ever since it has existed on Earth. Mother Nature does a good job of cleans- ing the water and getting it ready for its endless cycle of evaporating without its salt content and rising in the air to be supplied back to Earth as potable rain.
Basically the same water is used over and over and over. Just be careful what you put in it. Mother Nature's abilities are not finite.
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Repeated myths such as those that often appear in blogs and in widely circulated e-mails by people with an axe to grind do harm to the causes they espouse and provide fodder to their opponents. Misstatements embedded in arguments also do harm to the intended message. And in our efforts to dumb down the language to try to communicate with the most ignorant among us, we also harm the record.
As an example of the first, many assertions we’ve already seen in the political campaign are so ridiculous, one gets the idea the person behind it must be an absolute fool, and thus his opinion is the opinion of a fool even though it might well be legitimate.
An example of misstatements that harm an argument is outlined elsewhere on this site—that globally, water can be wasted. As for dumbing down the language, for decades have required trucks to carry signs warning that what they are carrying is “flammable” because we fear the ignorant would misunderstand the correct term, “inflammable.”
Probably the most egregious error of these types comes from those who accept Darwinism. They have long hurt their cause and given sustenance to “creationists” by misstating the process of evolution.
Science books, science shows and other media that attempt to explain evolution almost universally explain evolution as a selective process, i.e., we adopt features so we can be more suitable for survival under changing conditions. Supposedly, presenting evolution as a selective process makes it easier to understand.
Those misrepresentations are illustrated by claims such as over generations an animal developed features to help it adjust to changes. But evolution is a deselective process, not a selective one, a reality that is much clearer today as we learn more about the genetics of life.
Simply put, our genes mutate as they are passed from one generation to another. If conditions change, the living thing such as a person whose genes have changed to the extent that the living thing is more suitable to its changed environment just happens to be the one who is more suited to the new conditions, survives longer, is healthier and more likely to pass on the more suitable genes to the next generation.
The living thing that has not mutated in the more suitable direction is less suited to the changes, is not as healthy and what offspring it does produce is likely to be less suitable to the new conditions. Thus, its line of generations is likely to die off or move to more suitable conditions when it is able, leaving its home to those best suited to survive in it.
It is the deselective process that constitutes evolution.
Similarly, the evolution theory is constantly harmed by believers who misstate “survival of the fittest” as the person in the best condition or shape being the one who survives. As stated above, survival in evolutionary terms depends on who is best adapted to the new conditions that confront us.
None of us will be around to prove or disprove whether global warming (and global cooling, which is occurring at the same time) is real. But if the globe becomes too hot, those closest to the polar ice caps will survive to evolve better than those in the torrid zones. The survivors will be the fittest because the deselection of evolution has omitted the others.
Cheney's New Bogey-Man On The Block
Vice President Strangelove is at it again. His apocalyptic bogey-man turned out not to be Saddam Hussein after all, so now he is turning his fear-mongering towards Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran.
The three major religions of the world --Judaism, Christianity and Islam-- derive from the same source, in that order, and not so surprisingly, with the same basic set of beliefs.
--The oldest of the three, Judaism, believes there is only one god (a fairly novel thought at the time) who will come to Earth before an ill-defined "Judgment Day."
--Then Christians came along and said the son of the god already came to Earth, about 2,000 years ago now, and his name was Jesus. But he's supposed to come again before that same wispy "Judgment Day."
--Then along came Islam, which says the son of its version of the god also will return to Earth. The Shiite branch of Islam believes that son will be the 12th son and that his pre-"Judgment Day" plans include a well-defined reign of terror.
That's it. Three divergent beliefs that draw on the same account in the same book, the Bible. Another clash of myth- ology, perhaps a later version of the clashes of Greek or Roman gods, or name your region of the world and local myth.
Ahmadinejad is as whacky a representative of Iran as our the current leadership in the United States, with Dick Cheney trying to pull the increasingly entangled strings.
Cheney fails to point out in his apocalyptic message that Ahmadinejad is mostly a loopy figurehead president of Iran and that the power there still lies in the hands of Imams we hope are more rational, but whose thoughts we cannot dis- cern because we are focused on the new bogey-man on the block. Let us hope they see their puppet as their court jester.
The Irony of Olympic Protest
A lot of competing arguments are being tossed around regarding the protests against this summer's Olympics scheduled in China.
Here is some perspective.
The spark behind the anti-Olympics protest is China's treatment of Tibet, whose people would like to regain the country's independence from China. The pro-Olympics side correctly argues the games are supposed to be about athletic competition, not poli- tics. They are mostly correct on that point.
The first Olympic games were held in stadium, now restored ruins in a valley near Olympia, the mythologi- cal home of the Greek Gods, in the remote western mountains of the Peloponessus in Greece. At the time, Athens in the main part of Greece across the isthmus, and Sparta, in the south-central portion of the Peloponessus, were constantly at war. A truce was called so the Olympic games could be held.
In that sense, the games were apolitical in that the politics of war were suspended and not in force.
Today, however, the games have less to do with athletic competition and more to do with the game of mon- ey. In the past century, games were used as propaganda fodder, with major countries trying to win the most med- als as indications of their superiority. Cities around the world want to host the games for the prestige, attention and tourism they offer, and often foolishly for the profits they may bring.
But the Olympics games are mostly about big business. The International Olympics Committee sells the television rights for millions, garners millions licensing its logos and on and on. The licensed logos is used in bil- lions of dollars of business advertising and promotions. This is huge business.
Jimmy Carter canceled U.S. participation in the games because they were set for Moscow in 1980, in the middle of the classic cold war between the U.S. and the now-defunct U.S.S.R, in response to the Soviet invasion of...where? Afghanistan.
That invasion led the United States to back the Taliban and funnel arms, under the leadership of former Rep. Charlie Wilson, into the country to help the eventually successful resistance fight the Soviets. The same Taliban later became the host of Osama bin Laden.
This time the U.S. president is the one who ordered Afghanistan in- vaded because of its ties and support to the 9/11 terrorist is George W. Bush, who is said to intend to be at the opening ceremony for the Olympics in Beijing despite the Tibet protest.
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U.S. House Takes One Small Tobacco Step For Mankind
Forty-four years after the U.S. surgeon general concluded smoking leads to lung cancer, the U.S. House finally has taken a small step to curb a product that everyone, particularly its makers, knows is addictive and cruelly lethal. The bill is weak, but at least it is something.
A year after the surgeon general's report, Congress passed a law re- quiring warnings on packages of cigarettes.
And 30 years after that executives of major cigarette companies sat in witness chairs in front of congressional committees and swore under oath that nicotine was not addictive. Later, of course, it turned out the industry's own re- search had determined smoking was addictive and could be manipulated, something the executives had known for years.
Still, an addictive drug known to lead to lung cancer and to exacerbate a raft of health problems driving up health costs for everyone was allowed not only to be produced in a popular form, but marketed, advertised and ex- ported. All that without any of the regulations controlling other addictive drugs and medicines in general.
Cigarettes, cigars and tobacco-based snuff should be banned outright by the U.S. government, but short of that, the next best thing is to place it under the same restrictions as faced by legitimate pharmaceutical firms.
But the House-approved bill does not do any of that. It merely allows the FDA to control labeling, some ad- vertising and a few other relatively minor things, but restricts the agency form banning nicotine outright, as it should. Let's move it through the Senate and dare the White House to veto it.
Ignore what Reynolds, one of the few tobacco companies to keep its traditional name and not hide under some nice-sounding corporate name such as Altria, says in its ads claiming the Food and Drug Administration too weak to regulate.
Give the FDA the authority and the muscle to back it up and move on to more-meaningful regulation in the near future.
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Kudos To Obama
As many prominent Democrats and pundits called openly for Hillary Clinton to give up for the sake of the party, Barack Obama stepped forward and urged her to stay in the race.
Obama may have been cleverly taking the high road while his surrogates jumped the gun, but even if he did, he unwittingly took the better stance for his party.
As we pointed out months ago on other pages on this site, the early primaries and the wide gap between them and the convention spell trouble for this year's unique presidential race.
Watch John McCain struggle in the coming months to get favorable attention as the media struggle to come up something, anything, to justify their coverage as they try to balance coverage with the newsy Democratic candi- dates still providing them with easier horserace fodder. We suspect his age is about to get more attention than McCain would prefer in the vacuum he is in.
And remember: stuff happens.
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Watch Out For McCain -- He Seems To Be Getting It
The Republican Party's not-yet titular nominee for the presidency, John McCain, recently delivered a foreign-policy speech. So far, It is only words, without details, but the speech sounds much like one that would be delivered by a Democrat.
As such, McCain is distancing himself not only from the Bush adminis- tration, but also from the party's right-wing arm that has hampered it for the past 13 years. If not McCain, at least his advisers appear to have schooled themselves in political history.
In 1968, Hubert Humphrey, then Lyndon Johnson's vice president, ran against Richard Nixon for his own presidency after Johnson bowed to the realities of Vietnam antiwar sentiment and chose not to run for re-election. As a loyal party member and vice president, Humphrey refused to separate himself from Johnson's Vietnam policy and lost the general election. He learned that lesson next time around in trying again for the Democratic nomina- tion, and separated himself from the war, but too late to counter the clearly antiwar stance of George McGovern. Humphrey ended up going back to the Senate and retiring there.
Up to the point he delivered his foreign-policy speech, McCain had allowed himself to be tied closely to the Bush administration's foreign policy, whatever that was and remains.
Also based on history, McCain now faces a conundrum--whether to allow Bush, from whose policies he would love to distance himself, to campaign for his election in November. Al Gore made a classic mistake by not having President Clinton campaign for him in 2000. In a race as close as Gore's against Bush, who ultimately was crowned by the U.S. Supreme Court, anything can be pointed to as the cause of the loss, or win. But Gore distanc- ing himself from Clinton was a huge mistake no candiidate ever should repeat.
matter what one thinks of the position of the person holding the office, the American public from Podunk to Pittsburgh wants to see a president in person, if for no other reason than to be able to tell their offspring they saw a president in person. It is of enormous benefit to a candidate. Will McCain repeat the Gore gaffe?
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From the Sarcasm Corner:
What Did She Say? ABC Court Reporter Misses Lead
A reporter for the ABC network said "on air" recently the U.S. Supreme Court still writes on slates, a practice that went out of usage more than a cen- tury ago. Even though other reporters and visitors to the court have witnessed court personnel writing on computers and have in their hands computer print- outs of computer-generated court writings, the reporter, formerly with the Chi- cago Tribune, said they write on slates.
Before computers came into widespread use, personnel at the high court were known to write on typewriters, even electric ones. But the ABC reporter said they write on slates today.
No longer hampered by Tribune copy editors who generally edit cliches as well as grammar, the ABC re- porter felt free to reveal: The court will be "literally writing on a blank slate." View the clip...
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When Shut Up Is Better Than Speak Up
Remember the story about the kid who called out, "The emperor has no clothes on"? He spoke with the direct truth and clarity of kids' words. Well, now in the presidential campaign, we have need of that kid.
He could have told Geraldine Ferraro, "Don't even say out loud in public your belief that Barack Obama would not be a viable candidate for president if he were white."
He could have warned Bill Clinton, "Barack Obama is no Jesse Jackson, so don't com- pare them publicly."
He could have advised Obama, "It may sometimes seem silly, but you gotta wear the little flag lapel pin."
He could have said to John McCain, "Don't ever mumble publicly that the U.S. will be in Iraq for decades."
And he could have told all of them, "When you have people warm up the crowd for your appearance, or speak in your behalf from the pulpit or the lectern, just let the candidate or the top political advisor take a glance at your words before you utter them."
The little kid could have saved all the candidates a world of grief. ---Veritas
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Rantlette:
The career fate of Adm. Fallon shows once again how the top military figures who decide to speak truth to power do so at peril to their careers. Try to tell the commander in chief he is making some wrong decisions in the Middle East? Hand in your resignation.
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Lay? Shrunk? You're Not Communicating
We get positively schoolmarmish in this site about grammar. We do that because clear communication becomes difficult when the speaker is careless with the language. Sometimes it is best to stay on the correct usage, whether it is popular or not.
It used to be that to adopt a low profile was to "lie low." Nowadays, you often hear it as "lay low," which the dictionary defines as the "informal" version of "lie low." The movie "Honey, I Shrunk The Kids" did not do proper grammar any good. What was wrong with "shrank" as the past tense? Well, some dictionaries are accepting "shrunk." (Thank goodness we have not gone -- yet -- to, "He drunk his drank," "He thunk his thoughts." "They grinded their coffee.") ---Veritas
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Rantlette:
Can you imagine how it must be to be the secretary of state nowadays? Now it's Tibet, for goshsakes.
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Blame Democrats for the Economy? Hah!
The right wing is circulating this e-mail: "A little over one year ago: 1) Consumer confidence stood at a 2 1/2 year high; 2) Regular gasoline sold for $2.19 a gallon; 3) the unemployment rate was 4.5%. Since voting in a Democratic Congress in 2006 we're seen: 1) Consumer confi- dence plummet; 2) the cost of regular gasoline soar to over $3 a gallon; 3) Un- employment is up to 5% (a 10% in- crease); 4) American households have seen $2.3 trillion in equity value evapo- rate (stock and mutual fund losses); 5) Americans have seen their home equity drop by $1.2 trillion dollars; 6) 1% of American homes are in foreclosure. America voted for change in 2006, and we got it!"
Here are the facts:
Consumer confidence: As of March 9, the index as -30. On Nov. 5, 2006, when Democrats won control of Con- gress, the index was -3, having risen from a low of -19 in August when Democrats were forecast to gain that con- trol. The fall in confidence is due to: read on.
Back on Sept. 5, 2005, the average price of regular gasoline was nearly $3.10. It dropped by almost a dollar two months later, rose back to the top the following July, dropped another dollar again in January, 2007, back to today's level in May, down to abou $2.75 in September and back up to today's level. No connection to change of control in Congress.
The unemployment rate, 4.8 percent Feb. 1 of this year, was 4.5 percent on election day, 2006, 4.7 percent in July and August in those pre-election days.
As for the rest of it, Republican administrations, abetted by GOP Congresses, have always been soft on regulating businesses and their industries. The collapse of the housing market is a direct result of that policy and now a Re- publican administration is forced to take extraordinary measures to get the situation under control.
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Hubris and High Office:
One of the main differences between being an adult and a child is the appre- ciation for the brain's version of Newton's Third Law: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The brain's version is: actions have conse- quences. So what makes people in high office be children and behave as though there are no such things as consequences? Hubris. Inexplicable New York Times hubris could be termed "blinding hubris."
Watch every presidential administration up close and one can see this hubris at work in spades. Sometimes it cripples entire administrations such as Jimmy Carter's. Sometimes it affects only the people involved, as in Bill Clinton's administration. Sometimes it harms and cripples an entire nation, as in the Richard Nixon and George W. Bush administrations. And who is more suited for the "arrogance" tag than Dick Cheney?
From the condo president who becomes a martinet to local and state officeholders to the federal level, seemingly intelligent, powerful people seem to get an attack of hubris when at another level they would plainly see ahead to the consequences of the their actions.
But no. Hubris causes people to believe they never will be caught and will get away with it. In Eliot Spitzer's case, it had to be blinding hubris because his reputation was his prosecutor image of nabbing those whose excess hubris led them to break a law. Also in Spitzer's case, blinding hubris led to the ultimate political sin -- hypocrisy.